St. Gregory’s Church Woodstock
Sunday, 18 January 2009, Christ the King
Matthew T. Leaycraft
Today we stand on the brink of something new. The past few months have brought sweeping changes among us which we have felt together as a nation and in personal ways we have probably not yet fully realized. An economy that a few short months ago seemed an unstoppable engine of prosperity, at least for some, we now see was largely an illusion. One day Bernie Madoff is a beloved father figure, the man you trust with your life savings, the next day he’s under house arrest and you don’t know how you will support yourself at age 80.
A political reality which for too long pitted us one against the other while war and the subversion of power seemed an unending nightmare beyond our control, all at once has vanished. On Election Day everything changed. No matter what side of the political fence you may stand, there was joy that day as all the divisions and hates seemed to evaporate in the borning of a sense of hope we had nearly forgotten to believe in. It’s all a bit too much to take in, a bit bewildering.
Enmeshed in assumed realities that now have proved to be illusory and transitory, we stand on the brink of what we hope will be a new era with a new president. It seems like a moment when we might think a little bit about the nature of reality and what constitutes freedom, our own freedom, the freedom of others, and our collective freedom. What may freedom mean in the deeper sense? What might it mean to be truly free? And, what might the road to freedom really look like?
In 1956 Martin Luther King penned an imaginary letter from the Apostle Paul to American Christians. He wrote in the persona of Paul:
I am impelled to write you concerning the responsibilities laid upon you to live as Christians in the midst of an unchristian world. That is what I had to do. That is what every Christian has to do. But I understand that there are many Christians in America who give their ultimate allegiance to man-made systems and customs. They are afraid to be different. Their great concern is to be accepted socially. They live by some such principle as this: “everybody is doing it, so it must be alright.” For so many of you Morality is merely group consensus. In your modern sociological lingo, the mores are accepted as the right ways. You have unconsciously come to believe that right is discovered by taking a sort of Gallup poll of the majority opinion. How many are giving their ultimate allegiance in this way?
But American Christians I must say to you as I said to the Roman Christians years ago, “Be not conformed to this world, but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.” Or, as I said to the Phillipian Christians, “Ye are a colony of heaven.” This means that although you live in the colony of time, your ultimate allegiance is to the empire of eternity. You have a dual citizenry. You live both in time and eternity; both in heaven and earth. The Christian owes his ultimate allegiance to God.
King goes on to raise up the fundamental injustices of capitalism, the arrogance of the churches each asserting ownership of absolute truth, and the fundamental spiritual blasphemy of segregation. King’s keen intelligence, profound eloquence, and fearless leadership changed a nation in ways that seem miraculous as we look forward to the inauguration of the first African-American President in the coming week. How are we to account for this kind of power, a message resonating through time, a glorious unfolding, a liberation of both the oppressed and the oppressor? Others have spoken truth to power but few have opened the world to a new reality, a greater freedom, a liberation from blindness that until we found it, we didn’t know, had always been our heart’s deep desire.
It’s interesting, isn’t it; King doesn’t begin with a demand for justice or an assertion that one idea oppose another or one person or group claim righteousness against another thereby demonized and defining that other as unrighteous. This has nothing to do with power and everything to do with insight. His is not a call for license at anyone or anything’s expense. Instead, he presents freedom in terms of responsibilities which he describes as, “responsibilities laid upon you to live as Christians.” And then he says something curious, “this is what I had to do” and “what every Christian has to do,” He tells us it is incumbent on us as people of faith to see beyond all the received assumptions which bind us to untruth. We are hemmed in on all sides by ideas and understandings we have passively received. In the 1950’s American patriotism was at an all time high. America could do no wrong; it was the best, the noblest, nation on earth. At the same time the majority of patriotic citizens turned a blind eye to economic and social injustice of our own brand of Apartheid.
Martin Luther King asked his audience to see with new eyes. The Christian responsibility he championed was not solely an intellectual exercise of logic in order to identify some social ill and then promote its remedy. Though that might be the outcome he desired, he asked for something more. He asked for a shift in perception engaging the mind, heart, soul, and spirit in which the responsibility of freedom is born in allegiance. It seems counter intuitive, the idea of freedom and allegiance united. After all, isn’t freedom the very opposite of loyalty which by its very nature must in some way be confining? But it is one thing to owe allegiance to our assumed beliefs imbedded in the finite and something else entirely when we give our allegiance to God. It is in this turning to God that we enter an arena whereby we can be, “not conformed to this world,” but be “transformed by the renewing of your mind.” In drawing near God we can begin to see ourselves and the world from a different perspective.
The passage from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians we heard a few minutes ago is, in the most fundamental way, a similar call to freedom. But, the message is sometimes hard for us to hear because it sounds like he’s talking about sin and blame and judgment. We don’t want to go there. And besides, he’s talking about sex and we definitely don’t want to go there. And so our tendency is to dismiss the whole thing. Well, we say, Paul had his own hang-ups. He’s not Jesus after all, just another person like us with his own acculturated prejudices and blind spots. In our more enlightened and tolerant world we needn’t be confined by rules and absolutes imposed on ourselves, or worse, upon others.
Paul is indeed preaching to a specific group of people and has on his mind a specific spiritual issue facing his Corinthian flock. At this distance it’s somewhat difficult to know exactly what was going on, but whatever it was, the problem is not so much in the acts themselves, as in the blind attachment to custom, habit, and unexamined assumptions that so often rule our thoughts, actions, and behavior. His call is to freedom. He tells us, “I will not be dominated by anything.” How often do we act without knowing why, our minds, hearts, and spirits crippled and bound in ways we hardly know yet surely sense. Paul saw a blind attachment ingrained in the social and moral standard among these people that had to do with sex and prostitution. He saw it as a barrier, an allegiance to an assumed truth and so a barrier to God. For some of us the symptom manifests in alcohol or drugs. But it can be other things that bind us, fear, anger, inner conflict, even the need for love, the list is endless and it is part and parcel of who we are. We are defined without knowing it: prisoners of our own selves.
If we can peel back these things even just a little bit there is an invitation to freedom. Martin Luther King called us to examine our prejudices and spiritual darkness. Paul asks that we not allow our physicality to have dominion over us. This is the role of the prophetic voice, to call us to consciousness, to see the truth as it is, not as we assume it to be, want it to be, or need it to be. When it comes to our own internal work it all becomes a little more tricky, actually, a lot more tricky, but the invitation is always there, always the same. Sometimes awareness of who we really are comes like a thunderbolt. Other times in small ways, little by little.
Paul wants the Corinthians to know who they really are. They are not defined by their desires, their personhood. He tells them this not so much to say that they sin, but to help them understand the source and being of their true identity. He exhorts them to remember first, last and always “the Holy Spirit is within you, which you have from God.” He tells them, “you are not your own,” rather you are God’s. It is the allegiance to this reality to which we are all called: the spirit within, the Holy Spirit, God with us and within us. It’s odd and somewhat paradoxical. The shift in allegiance forms a circular path. As we see the outward with more clarity we are released in freedom to give our allegiance to the inner reality. And the more we move inward the more our perspective shifts and gradually we see the outward in still more new ways. The cycle goes on over again an all the whole we draw closer to God and deeper in love.
Paul and King ask us to give up the illusion that somehow truth lies outside ourselves on some distant shore we can never quite reach. They deny that freedom is the unhindered exercise of our self definition but is instead allegiance with God. They ask us to join with the Psalmist in saying:
Even before a word is on my tongue,
O Lord, you know it completely
You hem me in, behind and before,
And lay your hand upon me.
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me
It is this shift to God that cracks open a new world, a new reality. It is the call to this understanding that has propelled Martin Luther King’s message through the decades opening us up to freedom from our fears and prejudices. It is the spiritual truth that we are God’s own that leads us to see the truth of who we are and not who we think we are. As we all stand poised at this historic moment may God grant us the freedom to be his own so we may make the world anew.
Amen.