Living as Christians in a Divided World
Bishop Mark’s wonderful treatment of the difficult passage from 1 Peter 2:13-25 in last week’s Sunday homily stuck with me this week as we all continue to seek God’s will for us, as we navigate the storms of life together. First, Peter is clearly advocating for Christians to lead lives that are counterintuitive to us, focusing on themes like obedience to Empires, honoring one another, and even submission to slave masters. Why is this? Two reasons are worth mentioning today as the Church faces numerous challenges in light of recent events. The first is that the world has its eyes on Christians, looking to Christ-followers to either slip up, or live lives consistent with Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. The second is connected to the first. Do Christians actually believe all that Scripture says about God, and that human beings are incapable of truly setting things right in the world without God’s intervention? Christians must, in the words of the Prayer Book, confess “not only with our lips, but in our lives,” that Jesus Christ is Lord.
The question I have struggled with of late is how we, in the Church-at-large and at Christ Church Anglican, can do this in a context as divisive and potentially explosive as our own age. A pitiful and dangerous blame game has already started both around the world and in our nation surrounding the many things that currently ail us. I do not feel the need to go into great detail here about those, but countless notable examples exist. Perhaps the blaming is being done in the name of justice, though I am certainly skeptical of that. It seems that what is really going on is that the inability of the powers of our world to deliver human beings from the problems that will always plague us are fully on display in ways we are not accustomed to, and so those powers attempt to shift the blame elsewhere.
This wisdom and power of the empires of this world thrive on division. During the life of Christ, the rulers of this age would ask him to answer divisive questions in order to split, contain, and conquer his movement. The questions were always posed without nuance or any appreciation for the complications of life. “Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” (John 9:3) “Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar, or not?” (Mark 12:14) These lines of questions are expressions of the nature of power in the current age when Christ’s kingship is present, but not fully realized. They take their own forms in our own time, as political parties give overly-simplistic and contradictory narratives to make sense of the world and shout, “pick one!”
With the critical eyes of the world on us, I would like to make two suggestions for navigating the turbulence of this time at Christ Church Anglican. First, that we would reject the logic of power that Christ continually undermined during his time on this earth. “Who sinned,” is answered by “who cares? Watch what God is capable of doing to His glory.” “Should you pay taxes?” “Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s.” We lack the ability of the incarnate God-man, Jesus Christ, to know the hearts and intentions of people, but we are certainly capable of recognizing such false alternatives as false, and naming them as such. What Jesus’ own rejection of the logic of power enabled him to do was to minister to the individuals whose misfortunate was used to prove a point or stage a confrontation. May the same be true of us.
The second suggestion begins with recognizing that there are times in the Synoptic Gospels when Jesus uses the same zero-sum logic that his opponents use. In Matthew 12:30, Jesus issues this famous statement, “whoever is not with me is against me” (parallel scenes can be found in Luke 9:50 and Mark 9:40). Does this scene contradict all that we have been saying? On the contrary, it provides greater clarity to the call Christians must answer in a contentious world. These words of division all come from Christ in the context of casting out demonic forces that are oppressing people. In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus heals a blind man and is then accused of being in league with demons himself. His response to this accusation provides the context for the “whoever is not with me is against me” teaching. All this is to say, there is one instance where what I call the “logic of power” is appropriate in the life of Christians, in relation to the demonic, the powers and principalities of this world, for whom there is no possibility of reconciliation with God or with us. These forces must simply be cast out and destroyed.
Through God’s work on our behalf, reconciliation is always a possibility for human beings, even, sometimes especially, for the most wicked and hard-hearted among us. When God’s people are united through, not only easy times but the hardest of times, it is a witness to the reconciling work and power of our God in and through Jesus Christ our Lord. So we remember in a divided age that our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the powers and principalities of this world (Ephesians 6:12).
Having just finished The Screwtape Letters again, I am reminded of the section where Screwtape, a senior devil, instructs Wormwood, his devil-in-training, on using the crisis of the Second World War to meet the Devil’s goal for their “patient.” Screwtape’s suggestion to Wormwood is that he try to make the patient either “an extreme patriot or an extreme pacifist.” For “all extremes, except extreme devotion to the Enemy (God), are to be encouraged.” How do we live in a divisive age? As always, prayerfully, trusting God, and loving one another.
Yours in Christ,
Fr. Matt