Sermons

“Discipleship & Democracy”

Matthew 8:5-10, 13; Psalm 123 – Rev. Rebecca Littlejohn

Vista La Mesa Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), La Mesa, California – November 16, 2014

Holy God, bless the speaking and the hearing of these words that our minds might be free, our hearts humble and our souls courageous. We pray it in the name of Jesus, Amen.

When is the last time you let someone tell you what to do and exactly how to do it? This morning? Last week? Thirty years ago? The fact of the matter is that most of us don’t like being told what to do. Whether it’s a parent trying to tell us what career path to follow, or an adult child who is convinced that you shouldn’t be living alone anymore, or just a spouse who has that secret, special knowledge about the only correct way to load the dishwasher, we don’t usually appreciate attempts to control our lives and our actions. We may secretly realize, within our own minds, that sometimes we make stupid choices, but if someone else points that out, we often become irrationally attached to those decisions. They may be stupid, but they’re ours! It’s a free country, after all, so I can do whatever I want, thank you very much.

What does it mean, then, in the context of a free country – a relatively representative democracy with no system of nobility and supposed equality of all people – to declare that Jesus is Lord? Do we even know what that word means? In our scriptures today, there was a lot of talk about masters and slaves, and orders being given and followed, and people pleading with kings for mercy. But the truth is that most of those images are pretty far removed from our experiences in America in 2014. We may feel like peasants sometimes, when we try to balance our checkbooks, but we’re not. Feudalism is dead. Most of the monarchies that still exist have parliaments to rein them in. Slavery, while not dead, is well-hidden and not practiced in polite society[1], and doesn’t impact most of us directly. We believe in the preciousness of the individual now, that each person should be able to determine their own destiny, that no person should own or control another.

And yet, somehow, we Christians get together and declare that Jesus is Lord, as if we have any idea what that means, on a societal or a personal level. In reality, we have so much personal freedom, it’s kind of hard to wrap our minds around claiming Jesus as Lord. We hear Jesus pray, “Not my will, but thine be done,” and it sounds nice until we realize someone might be suggesting we pray it too.

Now don’t get me wrong – I think democracy is a wonderful invention. Self-determination, autonomy, freedom, these are all marvelous things. I would even argue that the Incarnation itself helped us come to recognize the essential worth of every human being. But living in free systems like this does tend to make us less open to letting someone else’s will override our own. When someone tries to tell us what to do, often our reaction is something along the lines of, “You’re not the boss of me!” Even if we have a boss, that person rarely controls every aspect of our lives, and at least in theory, we have the option of changing jobs.

There are a lot of contradictory images in our faith. We talk about our freedom in Christ, while simultaneously confessing Jesus as Lord. How can we be both free and bound to a sovereign at the same time? Our scriptures are full of metaphors of servanthood and commandments, yet we know the gospel to be a source of abundant living and grace. Christian faith has been behind many of the movements in history to bring greater freedom and dignity to various groups of people. Confessing Jesus as Lord has helped us break away from systems that would have one person live as master over others.

Perhaps it would help to consider why the early disciples used the word “Lord” for Jesus in the first place. What can feel archaic to us was actually dangerous revolutionary in its day. “Lord” was a word that was supposed to be reserved for Caesar, the emperor. To use the title for someone else was basically treason against the Roman empire.   It’s when we try to modernize this phenomenon that we realize how far removed we are from the context of those first disciples. Calling Jesus “president” is simply not at all the same. A president is elected. A president serves for a limited term. A president has Congress and judges and the public to deal with. A president is a leader within a democratic system, with built-in checks and balances.

Roman emperors had none of those limitations. The early disciples were living in an occupied colony, and most of them weren’t even considered citizens. Even when we take the supposedly most powerful position we can come up with in our modern experience and try to substitute it in, we still don’t get an adequate notion of the subservience required of people living under the Roman empire. I think this affects our capacity to hand our will over to God. The truth is that we don’t really believe we should hand our will over to anyone.

And yet, if we go deeper, if we are honest about our lives, we begin to recognize that there are forces that control us more than we’d like. Greed, insecurity, selfishness, fear, pride, anger, hopelessness – could these things be just as powerful as emperors? And what would it mean to replace their effects with Jesus’ love? Whether we’re challenging systems outside ourselves or the effects of sin within our own souls, when we confess Jesus as Lord, we are replacing something. As the early disciples were declaring themselves free of the Roman empire, when we claim the name of Christ, we are proclaiming that we will not be subject to consumerism, cynicism, materialism, market values, greed, fear, tribalism, or anything else in all creation. Jesus will be our lord, and that means we will no longer let the forces of this world set our agenda. We will not measure ourselves or anyone else by the size of our bank accounts. We will not let differences be a barrier to relationship. We will not withhold help from those who are in need because the world says they are undeserving.

While our political systems may be far removed from the regime the early Christians lived under, the truth is that the forces that shape our lives are not that different. They share similar values; they would both have us believe that might makes right, that looking out for #1 is our best bet, that the rich deserve their riches and the poor deserve their poverty. Whether empire or whatever you want to call what we’re living under now, these systems are not designed to encourage us to share, or to get to know people different from ourselves, or to question why some have too much and others not enough.

Jesus, on the other hand, occupies the role of Lord in a radically different way. He leads not with power, but with love. His hand is not iron-clad but gentle. His aim is to bring abundant life for all, not to drain us of all we have in order to enrich himself. Everything about him is different – his goals, his methods, his approach, his invitation, and even his choice of livestock. This is not a king riding in on a white steed, but a Messiah atop a donkey. If we’re going to declare him Lord, everything is going to get turned upside down.

Proclaiming Jesus as Lord is just as revolutionary today as it was 2000 years ago. And living it is just as hard, if not harder because of our fanatical devotion to individual liberty. We cannot live as disciples of Jesus and assume that doing so will come naturally. Most of what Jesus teaches us is counter to the messages we get most other places 24 hours a day. If we are going to claim Jesus as Lord, we have to spend time with him, discovering and learning and re-learning how he calls us to live. Once we’ve got a handle on knowing what to do, we have to spend more time with him, so that we’re spiritually equipped to actually live that way. Discipleship takes courage and wisdom and spiritual strength. We have to spend so much time within God’s vision for the world that it becomes the way we see the world as well.

If we – citizens within a representative democracy that we are – if we are going to be convinced to proclaim someone as Lord, we have to be convinced that in giving up our own will, we will be gaining freedom from something else that has been oppressing us. We tend not to see the ways the systems of our world control us until we spend enough time contemplating God’s alternative vision that our perspective shifts. Empire can take on more than one form. To proclaim Jesus as Lord means we are declaring our faithfulness to the truth that love is stronger than death, so there is no need to fear any more. If we can live as though we truly believe that, we will be truly free. Alleluia and Amen.

[1] For more information on modern-day slavery, check out www.polarisproject.org.