Sermon from February 19, 2006
The first time Carole and I visited Colonial Williamsburg, we saw a film about events leading to the Revolutionary War. It captured the intense disagreements about revolution within colonial America. When the time came for the fomenters of revolution to make their case, the film almost ruined my day.

I can't quote the words exactly, but their gist was, "Let's meet at the Bruton Parish Church. Our ideas will have a better chance of succeeding there than anywhere else."

Like the Apostle Paul among the idols of Athens, it distressed me to see patriots using the Church to political advantage. "You can't co-opt the church for political purposes like that! It's wrong!" What I didn't realize until I read Mark Noll's book, America's God, was how frequently the founding fathers and even church leaders co-opted the church for political purposes.

Jesus expressed what is at stake here in Mark 12:17. Then Jesus said to them, "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's." Caesar is possessive. If unchallenged, Caesar will take for himself what properly belongs to God, either by force or by guile.

Every time the Church becomes prominent enough to get Caesar's attention, the issue of what belongs to Caesar and what belongs to God is contested. The American experience in the last half of the 18th century offers many examples of that tension.

It is a story that I have read as a cautionary tale for Christians, who want to be involved in the affairs of our nation and at the same time maintain the integrity of the Church. I'd like to illustrate for you how easily some patriots distorted the Christian message and how others debased it.

Distorting the Message
It has always been difficult to separate church and state in this country. A good example of their uneasy partnership emerged from the 1984 presidential campaign, when President Reagan traveled to Texas to speak to the Texas Baptist Convention.

As the president spoke to pastors and denominational leaders, both the separation of church and state and the mingling of church state emerged for all to see. Mr. Reagan said to them, "I know you can't endorse me, but I can endorse you." They roared their approval. The Great Communicator had delivered Texas Baptists to the Republican Party.

We can trace this kind of thing back to the late colonial period. Benjamin Rush was a Philadelphia physician. He received medical training in Edinburgh, London, and Paris prior to the Revolutionary War. While there, he also received an education in the ideas that were already laying the groundwork for the American Revolution.

Rush had been shaped spiritually by the revivalistic branch of American Presbyterians. When his faith and his politics came together, something new was born. We see it in a letter he wrote to Granville Sharp in England in 1783. "The 'language' of American independence 'has for many years appeared to me to be the same kind as that of the heavenly host that announced the birth of the Saviour of mankind,'" (Noll, 65).

Rush's mix of faith and nationhood came through in a letter to Thomas Jefferson in 1800. "'I have always considered Christianity as the strong ground of republicanism ... It is only necessary for republicanism to ally itself to the Christian religion to overturn all the corrupted political and religious institutions in the world,'" (ibid.).

It might be helpful to hear the same kind of thing from someone, who came to reject the American experiment. The Rev. Charles Nisbet was a Scot, who had courageously supported the American Revolution, while still in Scotland. Then, he came to America. Some of you may have gone to Dickinson College or had children, who graduated from Dickinson.

Nisbet became president of the college during its early days of struggle. There, he changed his mind about America. Promises whispered by moonlight seem crude by daylight. As his disillusionment grew, he wrote something to friends in Scotland that bears eloquent witness to the mingling of Christan faith and American politics.

"He was informing Scottish correspondents about how Americans construed the Bible: 'In the Beginning the Sovereign People created Heaven & Earth,'" (Noll, 66). It is easy to write that off as the complaining of a bitter man; but his exaggeration ridiculed a real confusing of American politics and Christian faith.

Debasing the Faith
Distortions are one thing, debasement is altogether different. It is hard for us to remember the non-Christian ideas that made their way from France and Germany through England and into the New World in the 1700s. It's hard to remember that none of the first five presidents professed unambiguously to be Christians.

Among early patriot leaders, none was as openly anti-Christians as Tom Paine. His 1776 book, Common Sense, played a major role in justifying the war with England. Even then, he had probably come to a conclusion about the Old Testament (Noll, 83), which he expressed later in his 1790 book, The Age of Reason.

He said "'that most of the Old Testament ... deserves either our abhorrence or our contempt,'" (ibid.). But he wasn't shy about using the Old Testament to make his case for revolution against England. Here's what he wrote in Common Sense.

"'Near three thousand years passed away from the Mosaic account of the creation, till the Jews under a national delusion requested a king. Till then their form of government ... was a kind of republic administered by a judge and the elders of the tribes,'" (ibid.).

They may have been a cynical use of the Old Testament, but it was an effective way to persuade deeply religious men and women that revolution against England had a kind of divine sanction about it.

Tom Paine's tactics remind me of the young Methodist father, who told his Presbyterian father-in-law, "We named the baby John Wesley Smith."

The father-in-law was unimpressed. He said, "The least you could have done was to give the boy a name that honored the Presbyterian side of the family."

"But, sir," he said, "I did that. I named him John after John Calvin, and I named him Wesley after John Wesley."

When Tom Paine and others like him have had their say, I feel a little like that father-in-law. Maybe there's some Christianity left in there, but it's hard to recognize it.

This Almost Chosen Nation
I don't give you these examples simply to find fault. The founders of the nation faced a daunting moral challenge. President George Washington expressed it well in his farewell address of 1796. Here's what he said.

"'Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, Religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of Patriotism, who should labour to subvert these great Pillars of human happiness .... Let us with caution indulge the supposition, that morality can be maintained without religion. ... Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that National morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle,'" (Noll, 203-204).

Think about it for a minute. The Church and the aristocracy had been the guardians of human morality in Europe for a thousand years. Only in one place on earth had those twin supports for morality been constitutionally forsaken – America. Washington and most other American leaders wondered how morality would be maintained without them. They turned to the churches for support.

The churches were ready. They responded in two effective ways. First, they tapped into the powerful ideas and vocabulary of independence and worked them into their preaching and teaching so thoroughly that it was hard at times to know where religion ended and politics began. It produced over time a remarkable moral conscience in the soul of the nation.

The other effective response was religious revivals. Evangelists of all kinds traveled to the great cities of the Eastern Seaboard and along the Erie Canal. Baptist Farmer Preachers and Methodist Circuit Riders followed the population into the Deep South and into the Appalachian Wilderness. Camp meetings brought people for extended periods of religious fervor. It was raw at times. One historian described people on the frontier as those who wanted their whiskey straight and their religion red hot.

Christianity tamed the frontier. It held its own in urban America. It produced over time a remarkable moral conscience in the soul of the nation. Washington had no idea that this was how the nation would get the moral support he asked for.

And the Church gave the nation something else. You may remember John Winthrop's magical desciption of New England, which he penned on the transatlantic crossing in 1630. He said, "Wee must Consider that wee shall be as a Citty upon a Hill, the eies of all people are uppon us."

Richard Niebuhr, a voice from the 20th century, said one time: "American Christianity and American culture cannot be understood at all save on the basis of faith in a sovereign, living, loving God. Apart from God the whole thing is meaningless and might as well not have been," (The Kingdom of God in America, xvi).

Embedded in this "nation with the soul of a church" has been the conviction that America is a chosen nation. The specifically theological language has largely disappeared from political discourse. But from Abraham Lincoln's "almost chosen nation" to the doctrine of Manifest Destiny to the Bush doctrine of exporting democracy to the Middle East the idea has not died. We refer to it as American exceptionalism, but its roots are in Calvinist ideas of election.

The Pastoral Center of Gravity
Earlier, I said that Caesar is possessive. If unchallenged, Caesar will also take for himself what properly belongs to God, either by force or by guile. The Bible offers two different attitudes the Church has taken toward Caesar.

Look at Revelation 13:1, 6, 7, 18. I saw a beast coming out of the sea. He had ten horns and seven heads, with ten crowns on his horns, and on each head a blasphemous name. He opened his mouth to blaspheme God, and to slander his name and his dwelling place and those who live in heaven. He was given power to make war against the saints and to conquer them. If anyone has insight, let him calculate the number of the beast, for it is man's number. His number is 666.

That attitude has been reserved for those terrible moments, when Caesar has turned the power of the state against the Church in order to take for himself what properly belongs to God.

But now, look at Romans 13:1-2. Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, he who rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves.

That is the default attitude of the Church toward the state, whether the state is a dictatorship or a representative democracy. Under these more favorable conditions Caesar may resort to guile in order to take for himself what properly belongs to God. I want to talk some day about how we the Church can live constructively in the face of Caesar's guile. For now, I am content to remind us of the Church's uniqueness.

The Psalmist once prayed for Israel: May God be gracious to us and bless us And make his face shine upon us; and then he said why: that your ways may be known on earth, your salvation among all nations. Psalm 67:1-2.

We, the people of God, make known the salvation of God to the nations of the world. No one else does that. As pressing as our nation's problems are, we must never let them blind us to the priority of the spiritual over the political. The reformation of th UN is urgent, but the world needs Christ far more.

English, evangelical, Colin Gunton, said it well: "The Christian community is there to remind the state that political and moral programmes are secondary to and dependent upon redemption. There is reconciliation and justice only through the judgment of God and the cross of Christ that lead to repentance and forgiveness," (The Actuality of the Atonement, 193).

That is what makes us the salt of the earth. If we forget or neglect or lose our absolutely unique role in the salvation of the world from sin, we become just another part of the problem. If the salt loses its saltiness, how will you season it?

Here's another way to think about this. The deepest currents of history are cultural, rather than political and economic. So, what do we mean by culture? Culture, which drives history, is what people honor, cherish, and worship – what they are willing to stake their lives on.

That's where we come in. The spiritual, specifically the religious, roots ethics and culture in the transcendent. And for reasons that we considered throughout the month of January, Christianity deeply informs American ethics and culture. Christian spirituality does this with its message of redemption in Christ.

"I am the light of the world," said Jesus. "He who follows me will not walk in darkness but will have the light of life" – John 8:12. The Apostle Paul called Jesus Chrst the hope of glory (Colossians 1:27). The Revelation (11:15) foresees the days when the kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he will reign for ever and ever.

Do we want to engage our culture? You bet we do. If we are to do it with gracious discernment, then we will never forget the priority of Christ over the political realm.