Sermon, Church of the Messiah, Rhinebeck, New York
July 5, 2009
The Rev. Jay Hanson

As acolytes in a small church in Southwestern Minnesota we carried a cross and two flags during the processional and the recessional hymns. We learned that no flag can cross in front of the American flag in a procession. A couple of decades later, hardly any Episcopal church carried the flags in procession and you can sometimes find these flags tucked away in a storage closet on the church property. The practice of carrying the flags represented one relationship between church and state, and the elimination of the procession represented another. The latter relationship, eliminating the flags. represented a statement that the Church is independent of the state. As I recall, this statement was, at least in part, a response to the Vietnam War.

On this weekend in which we recall the Declaration of Independence, leading thirteen years later to the writing of the Federal Constitution, it is instructive to look briefly at the relationship between church and state, including from a biblical perspective.

Our first reading this morning was the call of Ezekiel, the prophet, one of three major prophets in the Hebrew tradition, the two others being Isaiah and Jeremiah. Ezekiel is confronted by God in a vision. The vision would take too long to describe here, but you can read it at home in the first chapter of the book of Ezekiel. It gave rise to the well known Gospel song, Ezekiel saw the wheel. In our reading Ezekiel is called by God to speak on his behalf and not care how people respond. God doesn’t expect Ezekiel to be well received because the people to whom he is speaking, the Israelites, are a rebellious house. To the point of our reflection here, note that Israel is a nation, admittedly a nation in disarray, many of whose leading citizens have been dispersed by conquering powers to live in surrounding countries not their own. Ezekiel’s home away from home is part of what is called the Babylonian Exile. It is one part of several centuries of dispersing Jews to other parts of the world, by the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Egyptians and later, the Romans. The overall movement is often called the Diaspora. North of town on 308 is a restaurant by that name, reflecting the fact that its Greek owners have made their home here away from their home of homes in Greece.

So for Ezekiel, Yahweh was the God of the nation of Israel. He may have been thought of by some as the only God, the God of the universe, but this nation felt called to be especially obedient. More was expected of it and the standards to which God held it were higher than for other nations. Many Americans feel that way also.

Stephen Fisher brought to my attention yesterday a reviewer’s comment on a book about Samuel Adams, American patriot from Boston, instrumental in the Revolution, the Boston Tea Party and the drafting of the Declaration of Independence. According to Wikipedia, the sometimes untrustworthy on-line encyclopedia, he also came from a long line of puritans who were makers of malt for use in making beer. The quote reads, “The idea that inspired Adams was religious in nature. He believed that God had intervened on behalf of the United States and would do so as long as its citizens maintained civic virtue, ‘We shall never be abandoned by Heaven while we act worthy of its aid and protection,’ he said.”

Our Pledge of Allegiance includes the phrase ‘under God’. The pledge it’s self actually dates to a Columbus Day ceremony in 1892 and the phrase under God was inserted at the request of President Eisenhower in 1954, partially in response to a sermon he had heard at the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, in which the pastor referred to Lincoln’s use of the phrase ‘under God’ in the Gettysburg Address and suggested to congress that it be incorporated into the Pledge of Allegiance. The original Pledge was written by the Rev. Francis Bellamy, a Baptist minister who was also a Christian socialist.

There is, of course, a fundamental theological problem with associating God too closely with a country. In the time of Ezekiel, people felt that if a country was having trouble, its God must be weak. Strong country, strong God, weak country, weak God. Ezekiel’s counter was to assert that Israel’s weakness was because God was using the other nations, to punish Israel, hence God remained strong while Israel was weak.

A more substantive way of getting to the same point is to point out that countries and empires come and go. Everything that comes and goes is secular, secular referring to that which passes away. We are seeing around the world today what happens when nations identify with their majority religion and try to make the country into a theocracy, a place where the religious leaders try to make everyone behave according to their interpretation of their religious documents.

The pharisees tried to entrap Jesus by asking him if it was okay to pay taxes to the emperor? The trap was that if he said yes, he was in trouble with the pharisees who opposed the tax. If he said no he was in trouble with the Romans who levied the tax. His answer was to give to Caesar that which is Caesar’s and to God that which is God’s. The text says they were amazed at his answer. The reason they were amazed is that he had turned the tables on them, for they knew that everything that belonged to Caesar belonged to God. That text is often misused in support of separation of church and state, when its real point is that everything is God’s and you can’t separate some out and claim it for someone else.

None-the-less, the idea of not having the state endorse a particular religion was indeed a revolutionary idea. The Quakers, understanding Jesus’ point precisely, claim a hierarchy of values in refusing military service of any nation. Having to make decisions of conscience like that makes any of us nervous.

I have no trouble with believing that we owe a greater allegiance to God than to the country. What I am grateful to the founders for is that they knew that none of us knows the will of God so perfectly as to use it to rule others. Also, both Ezekiel and Adams had to come to terms with the fact that rain falls on the just and the unjust. The good do not always benefit and the bad are not always punished. And, in a politically polarized world like ours, the will of God too often turns out to be the will of the liberals or the conservatives.

I and others, have erroneously asserted in the past that the writers of the Declaration and the constitution were also the writers of the Episcopal Church Constitution. That is an oversimplification, but the ideas of one were invested in the other as the two were written at the same time.

I was a volunteer at the convention in Minneapolis when the Church voted to approve the consecration of Gene Robinson as Bishop. My volunteer job was to be a page in the House of Bishops press area. As we waited for the bishops to spend their hour in prayer before their vote, some reporters from CNN came to get in line. They had just interviewed two delegates, one for Robinson’s consecration, and one against. One reporter said, “I never heard of the Episcopal Church until now, but this has been an amazing experience. These two delegates argued clearly but respectfully with each other in front of our cameras and then, off camera, genuinely wished each other well and hugged before going off to cast their votes. He said, I don’t go to church but if I did, it would be this one.

We are now involved in a similar dispute about the newly elected bishop of Northern Michigan, but around a completely different issue. The issues don’t matter that much. What matters is that we Episcopalians are structured, like the country, out of a fear of centralized power, especially a centralized power in league with the ecclesiastical power. Because our early leadership wanted neither the English King nor domination by the English church, it chose democracy over the temptations of theocracy.

Democracy is a fragile and imperfect solution to the problem of earthly power. But, however imperfect a solution, it is worthy of more than a few fireworks.