“Your kingdom come.”
Second Sermon on the Lord’s Prayer
Easter III; April 30, 2006
John 18:33-38a
Let’s hold the image there: Jesus and Pilate facing off in the Praetorium, Pilate’s question echoing in the air, unanswered. The two of them – the political and military administrator and the beaten prisoner that we call “King of kings and Lord of lords” – facing off is the image for today’s sermon on the petition in the Lord’s Prayer, “Your kingdom come.” I say that because it is not uncommon – maybe you can find it in yourself – to experience the two of them facing off inside a person. Christians have dual citizenships, dual loyalties: we belong to the Kingdom of Heaven, and we belong to a “kingdom of this world.” That is, we belong to a nation-state. For this sermon, I will explore the tension in that face-off between Pilate and Jesus, and wonder out loud what it is we are asking for when we pray, “Your kingdom come.”
In thoughtful Christian citizens the struggle between the two is real. Pilate represents the demands and responsibilities of the nation-state: public order, security, the application of power for the common well-being. The figure of Jesus represents the search for truth, the loyalty of truth-seekers to a community and a good that transcend the nation-state. It is all too easy to caricature the face-off, however. It is too easy to say that Jesus is good, Pilate is bad. The Kingdom of Heaven is good, the nation-state is bad. It is too easy to say that Pilate and Jesus should join hands and seek common ends, that the nation should enforce the good as the Kingdom of Heaven sees the good, and the Heavenly-minded should support unquestioningly the nation. It is also easy to say that Pilate is good and Jesus is bad; Richard Dawkins recently made one of his outrageous comments and claimed that religious faith is a greater danger to the world than AIDS and several other nasty things. 1 But I don’t imagine that anyone hearing or reading this sermon is actually in danger of believing the caricature “Pilate good; Jesus bad” and so I’m not going to spend any energy on it. It’s too easy to take potshots at people who aren’t present.
I believe that within the Christian citizen, the person with loyalty to Jesus and loyalty to the nation, Jesus and Pilate are facing off, and there is a real, palpable tension between them. When we experience any tension, we want to resolve it, because tension is uncomfortable. Tension is also remarkably creative, but that’s another sermon. We want to resolve the tension somehow and so Christian citizens seek ways to resolve the tension between Pilate and Jesus. How?
What if we slide over toward Jesus, ignore Pilate and let the tension resolve toward Christ? What does that look like? Two possibilities come immediately to my mind; perhaps you can think of others. One possibility is simply to give up on the kingdoms of this world. Utopian communities inclined to this resolution of the tension. We will build our own city of God and wall out the world; we will look to our own ends and let the world go on its way without us. They do not tend to last, as you know. Has any actually been a force to better the well-being of the entire human race? You and I can fall to the same failing if we turn inward to our personal or family lives, ignoring the world around us and its demands and needs, even without joining a utopian community. To wall ourselves off that way requires us to ignore the teaching of Jesus on the role he intends us to have in the world. Jesus urges us to be salt for a tasteless world and light to a darkened world.
Another possibility of sliding toward Jesus in resolving the tension is to expect Pilate to submit to Jesus, to expect the kingdoms of this world to serve the Kingdom of Heaven. That seems like an ideal to hope for; the kingdoms of Europe saw themselves in that way at one time. That didn’t seem to prevent them from going to war with each other. We have a First Amendment to the Constitution that is supposed to prevent the United States from becoming the servant of a particular religious movement, including the religious movement that you and I may consider the best one. That does not prevent many from trying to make public policy serve their religious preferences. Whatever you may think of homosexuality, a thoughtful reader of the United States Constitution must conclude that to prevent same-sex marriage by amending the Constitution is a violation of the Constitution’s intentions and integrity; it is an attempt to make the nation serve religious dogma. There is a movement called “Christian Reconstruction” that is said to wish to establish a theocracy in the United States, to subvert our democratic institutions in order to make us a truly “Christian” society as they perceive it. 2 Any attempt to co-opt the integrity of the United States to advance a religious dogma – even religious dogma that I am committed to – is a misguided movement to erect the Kingdom of Heaven within a kingdom of this world.
Well. If that hasn’t made you uncomfortable, then this next part will. It is equally misguided to try to resolve the tension by sliding toward Pilate, to co-opt the Kingdom of Heaven to support the nation-state. T. S. Eliot’s play Murder in the Cathedral is a witty, no-holds-barred exploration of the particularly English phenomenon of making the Church of Jesus Christ a department of the government. The English forced the Church to be subservient to the government. Although force of law has not been applied in this country to that end, the popularity of American institutions and the American tradition of self-rule have led to a wide-spread feeling among citizens that the Church is part of the American way of life, and exists to support the American way of life. In other words, we take it for granted that one feature of being a good citizen is membership in a church. It is a curious phenomenon that you will find the flag of the nation prominently displayed in our houses of worship. It seems that that custom spread during World War I, when churches started to display the nation’s flag as a way of reminding Americans of German heritage that is was clear which side of the war was God’s side of the war.3 It is a too-easy resolution of the tension to act as though Jesus is an American, or that he favors the United States, or that the Church is somehow to serve the ends of the nation. Let’s leave Pilate and Jesus facing each other, the tension still in the air.
Of course, another way of sliding to that end is to think of religion simply as a nice hobby, a handy way of giving children a good moral foundation and of providing a tame professional class to handle weddings, funerals and prayers on public occasions. Again, I don’t think that’s an issue among you, so I’m not going to spend any time on it.
As a preacher of the Gospel and a citizen of a particular nation, I urge you rather to live in the tension of being citizens of two realms: the Kingdom of Heaven and the nation you belong to: in our case, the United States of America. This is not easy to do, because it means living with the highest calling of each realm: the highest calling of Christ, and the highest ideals of the nation. That means, as Reinhold Neibuhr pointed out, that we cannot expect the United States of America as a nation to embody the self-giving love of Jesus that is basic to Christian life. The best we can expect of a nation is justice; when translated into political possibility, Godly love becomes the struggle for a just society. At the same time, as Christians, we cannot give up our commitment to the self-giving love of Jesus Christ just because the nation might demand it. Often, that will lead to conflict between the demands of Pilate and the demands of Jesus, and you and I will have to make difficult choices between them. When we do, I hope we will remember the transient, temporal nature of every nation and the permanent, eternal quality of the Kingdom of God shown in the love of Jesus Christ.
But realistically: as citizens of the United States, we are fortunate to live in a nation whose ideals embody what Christians believe to be the highest possibility for justice in a nation-state. As Christians and as citizens, of course, we ought to be clear-eyed about how often the nation fails to live up to those ideals. Most of us, I suspect, would be inclined to agree that the United States is a truly great nation. I ask, though: What makes it great? Is it our ability to beat up on any country that does something we don’t like, to overthrow governments that earn our disapproval? Is it our enormous military capacity that makes us great? Military capability is a necessity in this world; a large, prosperous nation needs military vigilance to survive and to protect the well-being of its citizens. But it does not make a nation great.
The United States is a great nation because of a constitution and public institutions that are founded upon an ideal of liberty and that spread that ideal in a democratic community. The United States is a great nation because as a society we have tried to take seriously the Constitution’s purposes to “form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”4 Our greatness as a nation is embodied in the institutions that we create and reform in order to advance those purposes. When Christians who are also citizens of the United States give up on any of those ideals we betray not only Christ but also the best that Pilate is capable of. At the end of an admittedly long sermon you do not need me to catalog the ways we are in danger of compromising those ideals, but I hold them before you again.
When you see me wearing a sport coat or a suit, most of the time you can find two things in my right breast pocket: a New Testament and a little book that contains the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. That I carry both of them symbolizes for me not the suggestion that the United States is a Christian nation, but rather the acknowledgement that Jesus and Pilate are facing off in me, and my loyalty to Jesus and my loyalty to the ideals of the United States are in creative tension with each other, calling for loyalty and dedication but not seeking an easy resolution.
So what do you and I ask for when we pray, “Your kingdom come”? I think that prayer is an explosive sigh, the outburst of those who live in the tension between Jesus and Pilate and who are unwilling to resolve that tension easily, but who beg God to resolve it in God’s time and in God’s way. God has already inaugurated the Kingdom in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, and in another sermon some day I’ll explore the ways the Kingdom of God is already powerful and present within and among us. For now, don’t rush to resolve the tension in ways that will betray both Jesus and Pilate, but continue to pray for God’s activity and for God’s Kingdom to come.
Let us pray. We pray for your kingdom, our God, to be the strong force which guides us and gives us hope. We pray for wisdom to live with the tension between Christ and Pilate, between our Christian discipleship and our national citizenship, for the good of all. In Jesus’ name we pray, amen.
Robert A. Keefer
Westminster Presbyterian Church
Clarinda, Iowa
[1] “It is fashionable to wax apocalyptic about the threat to humanity posed by the AIDS virus, ‘mad cow’ disease, and many others, but I think a case can be made that faith is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.” (The Humanist, LVII, 1) In an article in the early 1990s Dawkins called religion a virus that is difficult to eradicate and suggested that for parents to raise their children as Christians ought to be considered child abuse. Sigh.
2[1] I have not had a lot of time to look into this, but the home site appears to be at www.chalcedon.edu. I should note that Christian Reconstruction itself claims not to have the agenda attributed to it and noted in this sermon. In an article at http://www.chalcedon.edu/articles/article.php?ArticleID=180, Mark R. Rushdoony claims that the goal of Christian Reconstruction is to reduce the power of the State (including the nation-state) so that other political entities – school, church, family, city – can have greater power. All of these, however, are to be governed by biblical law.
3 Rick Nutt, Contending for the Faith (Presbytery of Cincinnati, 1991), p. 98.
4 Preamble to the Constitution of the United States of America.