The City of Man and the City of God

20 Pentecost – Proper 22             October 2, 2005

(Isaiah 5:1-7; Psalm 80; Philippians 3:14-21; Matthew 21:33-43)

There are two kinds of people in this world, those who think that there are two kinds of people in the world and those that don’t.  I tend to be of the second type most of the time because I think everyone is unique.  I don’t really think we can categorize people, or pigeon hole people, or even compare people very much at all, except as a reflection of our own prejudices.

I make an exception today because I’ve been thinking a lot about St. Augustine who wrote the book The City of God, comparing the City of God with the City of Man, those who saw salvation from a spiritual perspective with those who saw salvation from a worldly perspective.

The City which Augustine had in mind was Rome, and I’ve been thinking a lot about Rome lately too.  There’s an HBO series on the history of Rome from the time of Julius Caesar, when Rome moved from being a republic – although probably a fairly corrupt one – to being an Empire, where power, first used to combat the corruption, corrupted itself, became an end in itself, and brought the City down.

I was in New York City last Sunday and the Sunday before and had a sense of the power, the vitality, and the temptations that probably inevitably come along with it in that urban imperial environment.  But I think our country as a whole, at this time in its history, rather than just any one city, is very much like Rome.

We are very powerful.  We are very advanced.  Like Rome inheriting from Greece, we have inherited from Europe a long history and deep cultural values, and, like Rome, in relation to Greece again, we’ve put a more materialistic, more commercial, more globalized spin on it all.  We send our legions far to pave the roads and bring our way of life to those less blessed than we are, and they don’t seem to appreciate it very much.

 I worry sometimes that we may be crucifying God out there somewhere and won’t even know about it for 300 years.

But I worry more about the effect of participating in and benefiting from this imperial enterprise on you and me, on our children and grandchildren. 

The City of Man becomes its own center.  It exists for itself.  Seeing only its own interests, security and prosperity become its primary purposes in life.  Its vast enterprises become an end, rather than a means to some other end.  The citizens of the City of Man are called to play their part in all this, fulfill their role, perform their function.  The gangs in East Salinas ask, “where are you from?”.  The City of Man asks “What do you do?”, “What’s your job?”, “What’s your purpose?”.  It’s as if just being you isn’t good enough.  You have to fit in.  You have a role to play.  Those who can’t function very well or can’t play along or who don’t have a role get assigned one:  “Disabled Person”, “Mentally Ill Person”, “Criminal” or “Prisoner”.

We buy into this dehumanized and dehumanizing system (which for that very reason probably shouldn’t be called the City of Man)….We buy into it all because of pleasure and fear.  That’s what motivates us to give up our soul, to give up our truth, to give up our life.

We have it so easy in this City of ours, as the Romans did in their time, but much better.

If Jesus came to America today and said to sell all you have and give it to the poor and follow me, he’d probably get two hippies from upstate New York and a fundamentalist from Montana, but probably nobody else.  We’re so addicted to all our stuff…me too, I know, me too.

But it’s not just the pleasure that keeps us all hooked.  It’s not just the comfort, and the security and the fun, but the fear of its loss even more.

In order for pleasure to motivate it has to keep escalating, like any addiction.  The Romans did that with their bread and circuses that keep everybody happy, at least for a while.  We have I-Pods and Monday Night Football on wide screens in hi-definition.  But there’s never “enough”.  We’ll always want more of riches and pleasure.  To make the pursuit of riches and pleasure really work to manipulate people you have to be able to see the poor as well.  You have to be able to imagine losing it all.  So, alternating with Monday Night Football, we have the CNN Situation Room bringing us news of the latest disaster.  Hurricanes and wars, and made up stories of pillage and rape.

I have a friend who’s an electrical engineering professor at Oklahoma State who used to teach at the Naval Post Graduate School who told me the last time he was in Monterey about some research his wife was doing on fear and memory.  Apparently the state of fear is about 10 times stronger for laying down memory imprints than just normal consciousness….Powerful…. very powerful….Fear and Sex.  There are conscious and unconscious “principalities and powers”, as the Bible would call them, that are trying to keep you functioning in a supportive role for the continuing aggrandizement of the City of Man.

But you have the Gospel.

You know there’s a better way.

All the stuff and all the experiences are nice, but they’re not that important….Not ultimately.  You can’t take it with you.  But, when you think about where you’re going, you know there’s nothing to fear.

You are saved in the love of God from the beginning of time and that salvation was confirmed in the life, death and resurrection or our Lord Jesus Christ.  We don’t really ‘need’ any more than that, and given that, what’s there to be afraid of?

You never know if you have enough faith – I never know if I have enough faith – but I had an interesting experience this past couple of weeks.  When we were in New York, Molly and I visited her sister in Woodstock, which was really pretty and nice and nearly autumn-like and welcome after the intensity of the City.  But the visit was complicated by the illness of Molly’s sister’s husband’s mother.  She’d had, or maybe hadn’t had, cancer for 10 years, and had recently been in and out of Sloan Kettering Hospital.  She’d had, or maybe hadn’t had, fluid on her lungs.  She was finding it hard breathing, and her whole family was in an uproar, and she was terribly afraid.  How could there be a God who would design a world with such suffering?  I think she’s gone home.  She may go to hospice.  I don’t know how she really is.

But at the same time, my own mother had just died, two weeks ago today.  And I don’t mean to judge another family’s faith, and I know that the situations are in many ways quite different, and as I said you can’t compare people, but both my sister and I have had a deep sense of okay-ness about my mom’s death, as it was coming and when it happened.  We’re sad, we’re aware of the loss.  But we can accept that this was a part, an unalterable part, of what constituted the boundary of my mother’s life, life itself is never lost.

Pleasure passes.  Fear is a lie.  Don’t be fooled.  There comes times in which you need a grounding more solid than any human enterprise can offer.  St. Augustine saw that with the barbarian invasions.  I think that the call to Christians today, if we are living in a New Rome, isn’t to join some insurrection or battle and protest (although that’s sometimes called for when the prophet spirit moves us.)   But mostly we just need to not buy into it all, the temptation and the fear.  Don’t let other people tell you who you are or what you’re about.  You are exactly as God made you and you can hear that call – and you can hear it even better if you shut out the City’s noise for a while.  Gandhi advocated non-cooperation as the most powerfully subversive force in confronting those who would dominate us, and he got that from Jesus.

Of course that’s just phase one.  That’s just the beginning

Once the City of Man starts to be disassembled through the assertion of our unique individuality, that individuality needs to subvert itself, and move on toward assembling true community, move on to begin building the City of God.

I came of age in the 60’s when people “tuned in, turned on, and dropped out.”  But for a lot of them it ended there, and “drop out” became another job description of the City of Man.

We’re called, as the Church, to share our lives, to realize that our lives include each other, include all others.  Our lives are not to be taken over by others, to become cogs in the gears of social progress, but neither are they to be isolated, separated, and defended in their individuality.

Each life is a piece of the mosaic of God, a thread in the tapestry, a branch on the vine, a citizen of the golden city of the heavenly Jerusalem, now and forever. That City is a City of joy and a City of love and a City of peace.  That’s not a hedonistic joy, or an self-centered love, or a passive peace, but an expansive joy and a uniting love and a powerful peace, against which the transitory forces of addictive pleasure and worldly fear can never stand.

So we press on.   Like Saint Paul we press on.  We press on through the temptation.  We press on through the fear.  We press on toward the goal.  We press on for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.

Thanks be to God.