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The Subversive Christian
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| 11/25/2007 |
The readings for this Sunday sermon are found here.
High on the east façade of Christ Church hangs an intricately carved image—a cartouche it’s called—of King George II, who members of Christ Church referred to as “His Majesty” in 1740 when the building was completed. He’s not wearing a crown, but a wreath of laurel, and he’s dressed in a toga. He’s meant to look like a Roman Caesar. I guess, “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s” had a different spin back in 1740.
It’s delicious that this church became the chapel of the Revolution, where the theology that no earthly king could usurp the place of God as our King was hammered out, and while up the street on July 4th, 1776, as the Continental Congress finished the Declaration of Independence, the Vestry here struck King George’s name from the Book of Common Prayer.
They were subversive in no longer being submissive to the King of England.
Most Christians rarely consider themselves subversive, nor do they see themselves as submissive. These two words often deal with how we interface with power and authority. Do you more readily submit to another’s power over you, or do you subvert that power?
Today, a day we refer to in our churchly language as “Christ the King Sunday” we proclaim Christian life is about submitting to the authority of God as revealed in Jesus Christ. But this submission is also a subversive act, for to submit to Christ as the one with dominion in our life is to subvert whatever earthly powers claim the same dominion over our life.
So, if indeed a Christian is to be a subversive, it is the nature of our subversion that makes us so unique. We are to subvert earthly authority, while submitting to it. Our subversion is to be non-violent. The change we will affect over the earthly dominions will come from our witnessing to Christ as King in our life.
In the gospel this day, we read of Jesus being crucified. Jesus has submitted himself to the authority of the state, as administered by Pontius Pilate, and has allowed himself to be crucified, the most inhuman, and degrading from of execution known in history. But Jesus submitting to crucifixion became the single greatest act of subversion in human history. The image of Jesus on the cross I do not see as a symbol of sacrifice or weakness, but of radical, non-violent subversion.
Listen carefully to these words from today’s reading of Paul to the Colossians:
“May you be made strong with all the strength that comes from God’s glorious power. . . .”
In other words, do not seek to be powerful in the ways of the world. This is not true power, but temporal power. There is no power in possessions, in weapons and mighty armies. Seek the power that comes from God, the power that comes in perfect service, living in the radical ethic of love.
Paul continues, “May you be prepared to endure everything with patience, while joyfully giving thanks to the Father, who has enabled you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the light. . . .”
In other words, the political powers of this earthly world will object to the subversive nature of your political faith, and you may suffer for it. But, worry not, for. . . .
“God has rescued us” Paul assures the Colossians, “from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.”
So, Christ’s redemptive love from the cross has actually transferred us from the kingdom of darkness to God’s kingdom. Paul calls it a rescue, but, a rescue from what? We might say, “God has rescued us from ourselves, our sinful nature,” but this isn’t what Paul means here. He tells us in the poem that follows: “Christ is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in Christ all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers-- all things have been created through him and for him.”
Paul is saying that all earthly authority, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers, are under the ultimate authority of God. They represent the kingdoms of this world—not just political, but economic and military. For Paul, under the oppressive empire of the Roman Caesar, all of that power is the power of darkness, from which we have been “transferred” into a different kingdom through our faith, Christ’s very own kingdom, the Kingdom of God.”
As we are no longer citizens of an earthly kingdom, but a heavenly kingdom, we submit to the authority of the heavenly kingdom, and subvert the authority of the earthly kingdoms.
What is hard for our activist selves is that we are still to obey earthly authority. How do we then subvert? Not through violence but through nonviolence. I think through “yeastiness.”
Christian subversion is like leaven in the flour. We work in the lump. As the late great John Robinson said, “The pervasive influence of Christianity is not promised to the strength of a self contained ecclesiastical organization, but to leaven and salt mixed and dissolved in the lump of the world’s life. Movements and groups there must be, clusters of action and sanctity and thinking, and these must be structured. But basically the attractive power of love and hope, integrity and justice, and these are the signs of the Kingdom at work.”
May we be that kind of yeast, that kind of subversive power. We seek to subvert the kingdoms, thrones and principalities of this world through our Christian love, not our own desires for power and control.
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