The Judge of Nations

A Sermon by Rev. Mark R. Thomson

Harundale Presbyterian Church

March 14, 2004

3^rd Sunday in Lent

Scripture: Luke 13:1-9

Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our strength and our Redeemer.^{^[1]} Amen.

ack in February I had the opportunity and honor to participate in a service honoring the Rev. Dr. George Docherty. I'll wager very few of you know the importance of this man to our American history. George had succeeded a more famous minister you may have heard of, The Rev. Peter Marshall who ministered at the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington D.C. until he died suddenly in 1949. New York Avenue was already famous for being the church that Lincoln attended, and Lincoln's original pew still sits in its majestic sanctuary.

After twenty-six years of ministry at the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington D.C., this native of Scotland with thick Scottish brogue retired to the small village of Alexandria, Pennsylvania near the place where his second wife Sue was raised and where she became a 4^th grade teacher.

When I served in parish ministry in Pennsylvania, Sue read an article in the local paper about this new minister nearby who played the bagpipes, and she called me up and wondered if I would play them for her school class. It was then that I met George and got to know this very interesting Scotsman who marched with Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, Alabama, and changed how we say the Pledge of Allegiance.

On February 7^th, 1954, fifty years ago, George preached a sermon referred to as "The Under God" sermon. With President Eisenhower sitting in the Lincoln Pew, George Docherty lamented that our pledge could be the pledge of any nation's flag. He argued that no matter what our citizens may believe, whether it be atheist, Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu, Christian...or any other religion, our founding fathers believed that it was the Creator who endowed us all with inaliable rights including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This is part of what made our nation unique. George thought that our pledge should read, "One nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."

Eisenhower is reported to have told George after the sermon, "I think you are on to something". The machinery of Congress took the sermon and turned it into a bill which passed amending our pledge to include the words, "under God", and the rest is history.

At the fiftieth anniversary celebration, a group of protestors gathered outside the church in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania where George, now 92, and his wife worship. Most were atheists who felt "under God" should be stricken from the pledge. The debate is simmering in this country of whether our pledge crosses the line between separation of church and state.

George argues that the pledge is not a pledge to God but to a flag, so an atheist can say it without violating his belief. To say that we are a nation "under God" is to state a historical fact: our founders in declaring our independence invoked the Creator as justification for the rights we now enjoy:

"We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness."^{^[2]}

No atheist can deny this historical fact, even if they do not believe in that Creator.

Without a Creator, who is to say that "all [people] are created equal?" We are still trying to live up to all that this powerful little phrase written over 200 years ago means. Ironic that what atheists reject is the very thing that gives them the right to reject it.

To say we are "under" God, does not specify whose God either: Jew, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, can all be presented under such a broad banner.

But George also so a deeper meaning in saying we were One Nation, Under God. George’s ministry was at the epicenter of our nation’s political machine during a time of great social upheaval: The Korean War, The Vietnam War, and Civil Rights were all major events through which George would steer his flock, “under God”. To be "under God" for George meant to be a nation under God's judgment. This is an aspect that we too easily forget.

n the Parable of the Fig tree, God is the owner of the vineyard in which a fig tree has been planted. The fig tree symbolizes Israel. Not many of us have eaten a lot of figs, but fig trees have fruit on them ten months out of a year. They are only barren two months in April and May. They were regarded as the most fruitful trees.

Metaphorically, God has given this fig tree three years to bear fruit. If by three years, a fig tree hasn't begun to bear fruit, it probably will not. One should expect fruit by this time, its been long enough. Without fruit, the fig tree is a waste of space and it sucks resources from the ground and those things around it without producing anything useful. Its best to get rid of it and replace it with something that will bear fruit.

The vinedresser, who is Christ, asks for mercy on the tree and offers to work with it to see if in one more season it can be made to bear fruit. But if it will not, judgment has been made and it will be replaced.

In Jesus day, this parable was heard as an indictment on the nation of Israel. Jesus calls the nation to repentance.

A follower had asked Jesus' thoughts about a group of Galileans who were slaughtered by Roman soldiers while they offered their sacrifices. Given the Jewish historian Josephus' comment that "the Galileans are inured to war from their infancy, and have been always very numerous"^{^[3]}, we get the idea that the Galileans being referred to were probably rebels who the Roman's viewed as terrorists and dealt with them as the Romans always did. So maybe the cause of Israel's problems was all the rebels. No, says Jesus, they are no worse sinners. Everyone needs to repent, not just the rebels.

Jesus throws it back at them and tells the story of some Jewish workers killed in a tragic accident while working on what was probably a Roman construction project. Here we have a group of Roman collaborators - Jews working for their people's occupier. Perhaps Jewish collaborators are Israel's problem. No, says Jesus, they are no worse sinners. Everyone needs to repent, not just collaborators.

The Galilean rebels who were killed by the Romans nor the Roman collaborators killed working on a Roman construction project are where Israel will find blame for its problems.

I think a similar parallel today is all the political hype about homosexual marriage. "What about those homosexuals? They're ruining the country." President Bush spoke via video conference to the National Association of Evangelicals at its annual convention in Colorado Springs this past week promising to support an Amendment to the Constitution to deal with this situation. Thirty million Evangelicals said, "Amen", we'll vote for you.

I think Jesus would respond, "You think those homosexual's are worse sinners? No, everyone needs to repent."

We could easily get ourselves wrapped around this political axle and get distracted from asking and wrestling with much harder more important questions.

salm 9:16 - 20 says:

The Lord has made himself known,

he has executed judgment;

the wicked are snared in the work of their own hands.

The wicked shall depart to Sheol,

all the nations that forget God.

For the needy shall not always be forgotten,

and the hope of the poor shall not perish for ever.

Arise, O Lord!

Let not man prevail;

let the nations be judged before thee!

Put them in fear, O Lord!

Let the nations know that they are but men!

The prophet Isaiah declared:

He shall judge between the nations, and shall decide for many peoples; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.^{^[4]}

What wonderful vision!

If we are a nation "under God", then we are a nation under God's Judgment. God comes to us as to the fig tree and asks, "Where is your fruit?"

his Lenten season I want to challenge you to think about our nation and the direction it is going. What fruit will God find hanging from the branches of this nation?

The Gospel is inherently political because it calls into judgment all power structures that would try and rival God.

There are many hard questions we should be asking ourselves and wrestling with if we believe we are a nation "under God".

There seem to be two competing images of God that even divide the Church on how to approach these questions. One side sees God as using America as an instrument to combat evil and that we have a divine calling to use our “might” for “right”.

The other side sees God as the God of the poor and the oppressed and wonders if we are becoming the oppressor. It’s almost an Old Testmanent - New Testament split. The God of Joshua verses the Beatitudes. But both are in Scripture, and as Christians we always interpret the Old Testament in light of our relationship with Christ.

How is our growing realization that we are the lone super power affecting us?

Do we feel the burden of Jesus' call in the Gospel of Luke where he says,

"Every one to whom much is given, of him will much be required."^{^[5]}

Is "might" for "right" really our prerogative? We have been more willing to use force now that the Soviet threat is gone. War has become easy for us. Our technology has made war more like a video game than the brutal loss of life that it is. Have we forgotten that?

I think it is very dangerous to assign any divine calling to war in the light of Christ who taught peace and love. If God thought war was the best way to fix the world, Jesus would have been the warrior Messiah a lot of people were expecting. The heavenly host would have come down into Gethsemane and rescued him. He would have led a revolt to destroy the Romans and return the throne to the descendants of David. But he didn’t! At that teaches us something. War is a last resort, not a way to cleanse the world of evil.

History has shown that crusades to destroy those we label as evil are evil in and of themselves. God does not destroy in order to save. God loves.

Certainly we live in difficult and dangerous times. There is evil in the world. 9/11 made that painfully clear. A world once fractured ideologically into two major camps: those for communism and those against, is now a world fractured into multiple civilizations each trying to figure out who they are and what their place is in this world.

Samuel Huntingdon in his book "The Clash of Civilizations" notes that we are now a world divided not along ideological boundaries, but the major civilizations divide along religious lines: The Christian West, The Orthodox Russian and Slavic Nations, the Confucian Asians, the Hindu Indians, the Muslim Middle East and African nations.

Can we really simply divide the world into Good and Evil? Good and Evil are religious categories, not political ones. It’s easier to lump the world into simple categories of good and evil, but its very dangerous. That's what our fundamentalist Muslim enemies have done - they are good and we are evil. It’s too simplistic, and by us doing it, we play right into their game plan.

Isaiah reminds us that God is a lot different from us:

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.^{^[6]}

Do we agree the use of preemptive use of force, attacking before we've been attacked, as a way to solve our security problems? There are still too many questions about our justification to invade Iraq. Just because we have a very big hammer doesn't mean all problems are nails.

We've taken a "go it alone" stance. We seem impatient with diplomacy.

Of course we are! We have the biggest stick on the playground and its much easier to effect change with a stick.

But at what cost?

What do we become in the process?

And will we like what we see in the mirror?

It will eventually backfire on us if we use our power too liberally and do not show restraint and wise use of force.

I remember someone telling me that if you want a child to stop crying, you can't hit him, because that only makes him cry more.

There are times to use force and times when other measures would get better results.

see a nation feeling very vulnerable and afraid, trying to make sense of a very complicated world. We're like a wounded Tiger: very powerful, and potentially dangerous because we are hurt, confused, and afraid we are going to get hurt again.

The notion that we can ever make ourselves or this nation completely invulnerable is an illusion that we are being sold. Certainly we must defend ourselves. Certainly we must bring terrorists to Justice. But we will never be completely invulnerable and there will always be evil in the world. But watch how many political adds try to play on our fears.

The only way we could be completely invulnerable is to conquer the rest of the world.

What would God think of that?

We would become like the Roman Empire,

and they killed Christ.

n his "History of the Peloponnesian War", the Greek writer Thucydides records an interesting dialogue between the Athenians and the people of Melos. The Peloponnesian War was a 24 year war between Athens and Sparta four hundred years before Christ. Melos was a tiny island nation who wished to remain neutral in the conflict.

The Athenians sail their mighty battle fleet to the shores of Melos and offer an ultimatum: become our slaves or be destroyed. The people of Melos appeal to the Athenians; they wish to remain free and neutral and seek just and fair treatment from the Athenians in return for their promised neutrality.

The Athenians however, knowing their superior strength respond,

...the standard of justice depends on the equality of power to compel and that in fact the strong do what they have the power to do and the weak accept what they have to accept.^{^[7]}

Basically, the strong can do whatever they want.

It’s intoxicating, especially when you have the power.

Is that how God sees Power?

Is that the way Christ used his Power?

When the angel announces to Mary that she will give birth to the Messiah, she cries out in song:

...for he who is mighty has done great things for me, and holy is his name. And his mercy is on those who fear him from generation to generation. He has shown strength with his arm, he has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts, he has put down the mighty from their thrones, and exalted those of low degree; he has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent empty away.^{^[8]}

Do we hear the warning?

he Parable of the Fig tree is a powerful image of God judging the fruit that a nation produces. If we are truly a nation, "under God", then in Christ there is mercy. But there is ultimately judgment if the tree fails to bear fruit.

We are standing at a crossroads in our nation's history. We are a good people. But we are now coming to terms with our status as a lone super power and wrestling with how that power can be used. And we are not just a little bit more powerful than everyone else. We are orders of magnitude more powerful than anyone else. That power also frightens a lot of other people in the world.

Will we go the way of the Empires of History, relying on force and war as our only means of chasing the illusionary vision of security? Or will we redefine how power can be used to serve the common good, and not just our own interests?

The question should not be whether Is God on our side, but rather, Are we on God's side? Not, "God Bless America", but "America Bless God".

Paul tells us in Galatians that "...the fruit of the Spirit is

love,

joy,

peace,

patience,

kindness,

goodness,

faithfulness,

gentleness,

self-control;

against such there is no law."^{^[9]}

If we can avoid the perils of history perhaps God will return to our tree and see life sustaining fruit glistening from its branches.

The Church is the voice that can remind our nation that being “under God” means we are under God’s judgment for what we do. We need to exercise our voice.

To him who loves us

and has freed us from our sins by his blood

and made us a kingdom, priests to his God and Father,

to him be glory and dominion for ever and ever.

Amen.^{^[10]}

^{^[3]} Josephus, The Wars of the Jews, pg 1509 in The Sage Digital Library

^{^[7]} Thucydides. History of the Peloponnesian War. Book V Paragraph 89. Penguin Classics. Penguin Books. Pg. 402.