On Being a Christian Citizen

Revelation 21:10, 22-27; 22:1-5

 

A Sermon Preached by Peter Ilgenfritz

July 4, 2004

University Congregational United Church of Christ

Seattle, Washington\

 

For those of you who were around way back then, where were you 28 years ago today? 

 

It was July 4, 1976 and I was marching down the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington D.C. in a parade celebrating our nation’s 200th birthday.  I was a fife player in the Lynnfield, Massachusetts militia.  Every little town in New England had a local militia group in 1975-76 that dressed up like minutemen from 1775-1776.  If you asked me that day, if I loved my country, I would have said, “Of course I do!”  And I did.  I believed what had been taught me by my parents and grandparents and teachers, that our nation stood for high ideals that many of my relatives since the time of the Revolutionary War had fought to defend.  I would have told you “I love America” and I was proud to be walking down Pennsylvania Avenue playing Yankee Doodle.

 

Where were you last year on July 4?

 

Last year, I was in a monastery in Canada.  It was a little over two months since the start of the Iraq war, a war I believed was immoral and one that I could not in any way support.  I was deeply despairing about the direction our country had gone in.  I couldn’t imagine proudly singing “America the Beautiful” and “The Star Spangled Banner”.  So last July 4th I escaped to our neighbor to the north. 

 

What happened?  What happened to that love of country I once knew?  

 

I saw Michael Moore’s movie, “Fahrenheit 911” the other night.  His movie reminded me that how we respond, how we take part in our political life matters and matters deeply.  And yet after seeing movies like this and “Control Room” it is so easy to feel despairing and want to give up, for the system that needs changing runs deep.  With the 9-11 commission report, a war still raging in Iraq, an economy in decline, political leaders again lying to us – it is easy to withdraw in despair.  I understand that.  And I understand how it is just as easy to get really mad and lash out and behave in ways that our faith calls us not to.   To forget that we are called to love our so-called “enemy” and pray for those we experience persecuting us.   (See Matthew 5:43-48)

 

How are we to respond?  What in the world does it mean to be a Christian citizen today? 

 

We come in many ways to that question today:

Some of you have served and sacrificed for our country.

Some of us are serving today and are in harm’s way.  Young people like our member and child of this church, Bradford Hashimoto. 

And some of us feel this country is headed in a terribly wrong direction.

 

But despite our differences, there is one common vision that draws us and unites us all.  It is the vision of John in Revelation of the New Jerusalem coming down out of heaven to earth. 

 

It is a vision that says the action is here.  Right here. 

Heaven and earth meet not way out there somewhere but right here. 

There is no hope to escape to some other place, our neighbor to the north or so heaven out there in the bye and bye.  No.  This is it.  And it is here in this world and  time that God’s world will come into being. 

 

In this city there is no temple, no division between what is sacred and secular.

In this city there is no sun or moon.  There is nothing to be afraid of.  God’s light will be the only light we need.

In this city there are no nations, no enemies, no separation between God and God’s people.

And the gates of the city are always open - the new city is an open, inclusive place of citizenship and well-being for all.

Nothing unclean is in it, no lies or falsehood.  Such ways have no place in this city. 

 

And yet, on this July 4th I am struck that in this idyllic place, the nations still need to be healed. 

Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life bright as a crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city.  On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.  (Revelation 22:1-2)

 

Despite all that has been healed and restored, the nations still need to be healed. 

 

This vision of the New Jerusalem is a vision that has shaped deeply who we understand ourselves to be as a country. 

 

Our Congregational forebear, Governor John Winthrop, of the Massachusetts Bay Colony wrote, “consider that wee shall be as a citty upon a hill, the eies of all people upon us.”  America was founded on a set of ideals, and one becomes “an American” by converting to those propositions in what Ralph Waldo Emerson called a “religious experience”.  The key principles of that ideology are in part taken right from Revelation – liberty, equality, individualism, populism, and limited government. 

 

Americans have seen themselves as a chosen people laboring in God’s vineyard to create a new, perfect society.  These values are our true religion American secular religion.  And though we may differ vigorously on everything from God to football, none will question the validity or universality of these ideals. 

 

But these are ideals that have been replaced by another ideal.  No longer are we a nation standing for the high ideals that some of us have sacrificed for.  No.  Instead we have become a nation obsessed with another ideal - the expansion and maintenance of power. 

 

Less than two weeks after September 11, a new doctrine of preemption was fleshed out in the annual National Security Strategy of the United Sates, a document every President is required to submit to Congress.  The President said that the United States will “not hesitate to act alone” and if necessary, will defend itself by acting preemptively.  Just in case there might be someone who had not gotten the message, the document closed by emphasizing that “our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military buildup in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States.”  In other words, we’re on top, we deserve to be there, and we intend to stay there. 

 

And we will keep that absolute security through overwhelming military superiority.  It reflects the sense Americans have of being exceptional and apart from the rest of humankind, a special, chosen people who can achieve immunity because they deserve immunity.  A downside of the ideals upon which our nation was founded.[1]

 

One commentator noted, “I love this country….Contrary to what many Europeans think, the problem with American power is not that it is American.  The problem is simply the power.  It would be dangerous even for an archangel to wield so much power…even democracy brings it own temptations when it exists in a hyper power.”[2] 

 

A longtime State Department official put it this way, “the United Sates is a City on a Hill, but it is increasingly fogged in….We need a war on arrogance as well as a war on terror.”[3] 

 

And Clyde Prestowitz, in his book, Rogue Nation, comments, “the Declaration of Independence was about liberty and the pursuit of happiness, not the pursuit of power, and the Constitution was about controlling and limiting power.  America was not designed to be an empire.”[4] 

 

The turning of our nation back to the ideals upon which it was founded will be a long process.  It is rather striking that with all the transformation of the world that Revelation heralds, the nations still need to be healed.  And that healing may take a long time. 

 

In a time when it is so easy to be discouraged and run away, we must keep persevering.  When we despair at the claims by one nation that suggest that the will and power of God is its prerogative and right, it is more important than ever that we return each week to worship where in worship and celebrating the sacraments of baptism and communion we can be reminded of our true calling as God’s people.

 

In times such as these, we must take the long view and recognize that change may well not come in our life times but we must not lose hope.  We are wise to return to the words of Protestant theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr,

 

“Nothing worth doing can be achieved in a lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope.

 

Nothing that is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith.

 

Nothing that we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love.”[5]

 

Some day, I want to march down Pennsylvania Avenue again, proud of my country.  But on a day like this, I will settle for going to sit and pray in that little bit of Washington D.C. in downtown Seattle, the Federal Building plaza.  There I will go and grieve for the country I have lost and pray for a nation of high ideals to one day be restored:

 

An America that stresses its tolerance rather than its might;

An America that celebrates its tradition of open inquiry rather than its way of life;

An America that asks for God’s blessing on all the world’s people and not just its own.

That would be an America the world desperately wants. 

That would again be an America that is a city on a hill. 

 

Here in worship we make that prayer our own as we celebrate the sacrament of baptism, and remember and ask God’s blessing on us all, Americans and people of every nation, for we are all beloved children of God.

 

Here at the communion table we celebrate the way of life God longs for – a table of plenty where there is food and place for all.

 

Come, let us be the people God calls us to be, a people who drink deeply of the river of the water of life.  Let us pray for the turning of the world, and that we might find our place and prayer in that turning.  So may it be.  Amen. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



 

 

 

 


[1] See Clyde Prestowitz, Rogue Nation:  American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions, p.23.  Prestowitz goes on to say, “The dramatic new doctrine of supremacy and preemptive attack not only reversed years of American national security policy it also struck at the heart of the Treaty of Westphalia, which has underpinned the modern international system of nation states for more than three hundred years.  Signed in 1648 to end the Thirty Years War, this agreement acknowledged, as a fundamental principle of international relations, the sanctity of national sovereignty and noninterference by one state in the internal affairs of another. Bush’s doctrine also seemed both to contravene the Charter of the United Nations, which outlaws the “threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state,” and to contradict the conclusions of the Nuremburg trials that treated “preemptive war” as a war crime. 

 

[2] See Prestowitz, p. 272.  Quoted is Oxford Professor Timothy Garton Ash in the New York Times.

[3] See Prestowitz, p.49.   Quoted is State Department official and former ambassador to Saudi Arabia Chas Freeman. 

[4] See Prestowitz, p. 283.

[5] See Elisabeth Sifton, The Serenity Prayer:  Faith and Politics in Times of Peace and War, p. 349