Hilton Head Island, SC – July 3, 2016
The Chapel Without Walls
II Kings 25:1-12; Matthew 23:37-39-24:1&2
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – Jesus left the temple and was going away, when his disciples came to point out to him the buildings of the temple. But he answered them, “You see all these, do you not? Truly, I say to you, there will not be left here one stone upon another, that will not be thrown down.” – Matthew 24:1&2 (RSV)
Is the USA a nation in peril?
The biggest mass murder in our nation’s history happened in Orlando three weeks ago. Yet another apparently mentally unstable man used an assault rifle and a semi-automatic military pistol to kill 49 people and to wound more than 50 others. And still the Congress has done nothing to outlaw assault rifles and pistols in the hands of ordinary citizens, or even to put up any serious obstacles to purchasing them. After the third-to-last mass murder in America, The Times of London had this cartoon on its editorial page. It shows the American flag. The 50 stars in the blue upper-left rectangle are bullet holes, and the white stripes have red running down into them, representing the blood that was shed by the victims. Is the USA a nation in peril?
Many pundits have been saying for years that the government of the United States has become a virtual oligarchy. It is mostly wealthy people who are elected to federal public offices, they say. Further, only the exceedingly wealthy are able to purchase the politicians they want in certain offices across the political landscape, they say. Hundreds of thousands of dollars, or millions of dollars, or billions of dollars, are spent on Congressional, Senatorial, or Presidential elections, they say. And it is true. Our government appears to become more oligarchical every time another election rolls around. Is the USA a nation in peril?
But think of the office of the American presidency itself. Depending on what may happen in the presidential elections of 2016 and 2020, it is quite plausible that from 1988 to 2024 we could have a President named Bush, a President named Clinton, a President named Bush, an interloper President named Obama (claimed by some to be Kenyan and Muslim), and a President named Clinton. A period of 36 years, and potentially for all but 8 of those years, or in other words 28 years, the Presidents would have the either the surname “Bush” or the surname “Clinton.” Are we becoming an oligarchy of two families? And if so, is the USA a nation in peril?
Think about the presidential primaries in 2016. The two successful candidates who have emerged victorious from the electoral battles both have favorability ratings well below 50%. “The people” seem displeased with both candidates, but nevertheless they are the candidates. Donald Trump, the candidate of one of the two major political parties, is becoming increasingly unpopular in his own party. Hillary Clinton has no widespread popularity in her party, in part because another candidate, Bernie Sanders, gave her a very vexing and grueling run for the nomination. Sen. Sanders is still making it very hard for her to go into her party’s national convention feeling politically positive and secure. Two presidential candidates, one widely claimed by many Republicans not to be a Republican and the other self-proclaimed as a socialist, ran very spirited primary campaigns, each gaining millions of votes in the process. But “the people” were not truly represented in either of those votes, because only a small fraction of eligible voters cast ballots for either Mr. Trump or Mr. Sanders, or for anybody else. What does it mean when the most enthusiastic primary voters elected Donald Trump as their candidate, and his own party fears and/or detests him, and voters in the Democratic primaries came fairly close to electing Bernie Sanders as their candidate, a man who has never even claimed to be a Democrat? Is the USA a nation in peril? Are enough people sufficiently alarmed by the major meaning behind the Presidential Primaries of 2016?
The top 1% of Americans in income and assets have relatively more than the bottom 99% than at any previous point in our history. The gap between the exceedingly and excessively wealthy and everyone else continues to widen at an alarming pace. Every year there are a few more American billionaires than there were in the previous year. There are now millions of American millionaires, depending on how you choose to define the word “millionaire” (and I am not going to attempt to do so, knowing that it would lead us into a disputatious detour). But in light of the growing disparity between the Haves and the Have-Nots, is the USA a nation in peril?
It is important to understand that our perils are almost all internal. That is, the dangers to our national stability do not come from other nations, such as China, Russia, North Korea, or Iran, or form Islamist terrorists; they come from within. As Walt Kelly’s prescient possum Pogo so wisely observed so many decades ago, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” We are the primary cause of our malaise; we are our own greatest enemy. We seem to be incapable of even wanting to solve our own problems, and our rancor toward government is symptomatic of our peril. Certainly government, and particularly the United States Congress, is partly to blame, but we the people are the underlying cause of our peril. We do not seem sufficiently interested in solving our problems to join forces to try to overcome them. We are in a long-standing political and moral neutrality, which really means we are in a long, slow slide into moral torpor and ennui. We are ethically enervated. We lack the energy and stamina seriously to address the causes of our distress.
There may be some consolation in knowing that every other nation which ever existed has gone through periods such as the one in which we now find ourselves. Years ago Paul Kennedy wrote a book called The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. He chronicled the similar patterns experienced by all world powers as they rose and fell before the inexorable march of history. No nation can remain dominant forever. But are we now in danger of losing our dominant position?
The biblical nation of Israel was never a great power at any point in its long history. For various periods of time it was a relatively strong kingdom with respect to its neighbors, but it was never an Egypt or Babylon or Assyria or even Syria. It was at best a small regional power. Probably it was the strongest under King Solomon. And it became strongest under him for a very questionable reason. The Bible dispassionately declares that Solomon had a thousand wives and concubines. He made Bill Clinton and Donald Trump look like celibate monks by comparison. Solomon would exchange nuptial vows with a princess from somewhere, and then when her father died, he would take over his father-in-law’s territory. It was maybe smart marital politics, but it was dubious marital policy, both politically and theologically, as the writers of I and II Kings gently pointed out.
Solomon was king in the latter half of the 10th century BCE. The northern kingdom of Israel was conquered by the Assyrians in 722 BCE, and the southern kingdom of Judah was conquered by the Babylonians in 587 BCE. For four centuries, then, the Israelite kingdom was fairly independent and fairly strong.
In our first scripture reading we heard about the final collapse under King Zedekiah. The Babylonians came and besieged Jerusalem. They captured the fleeing monarch and his guards, killing Zedekiah’s sons before his very eyes and then cutting out those eyes. There are 40+ kings of Israel and Judah whose reigns are briefly described in I and II Kings and I and II Chronicles, and all but a handful of them were summarized by saying that they “did evil in the sight of the Lord.” (Apparently displeasure with government and government officials has an ancient and honorable tradition; it did not originate in late 20th century and early 21st century America.)
The United States of America is not close to collapse the way Judah was in 587 BCE. We are still by far the most powerful nation in the world. For all our faults, which are many, we still have many admirable and quantifiable strengths. The kings of Judah made some terrible blunders in foreign policy, not the least of which was trying more earnestly to get along with the Babylonians than hopelessly trying to keep them at bay. By the turn of the sixth century Before the Common Era, there was no way Judah was going to survive as an independent kingdom.
The destruction of Jerusalem and Judah at the hands of the Babylonian army was the greatest national calamity in the history of the Jews up to that time. The next gigantic calamity came almost forty years after Jesus was crucified, which happened sometime near the year 29 CE (AD) or so. In the year 68 of the Common Era, the Jews of Judea staged a revolt against the Roman Empire. The revolt lasted from 68 to 72 AD, which is astonishing, because the military power of Rome was immense, and the military power of Judea was microscopic. In a classic example of asymmetrical guerrilla warfare, the Jews held out for four years, until their last fanatical holdouts were all slain at Masada in the year 72.
Apparently Jesus clearly foresaw this colossal defeat. At least that is what we are meant to conclude by reading what he said in the Gospel of Matthew (chs. 23-24) and is repeated in various parts of Luke. A day or two before the crucifixion, Jesus and his disciples left the temple in Jerusalem. As they started to walk down from the Temple Mount, the disciples asked Jesus to look back at the splendor of the temple complex. Pointing to the gleaming marble buildings, Jesus said to the twelve, “You see all these, do you not? Truly, I say to you, there will not be left here one stone upon another, that will not be thrown down.” And that is exactly what happened. The Romans leveled both the temple and Jerusalem itself. It was the second huge national calamity in the history of the Jews, the Holocaust under Hitler in the 20th century being the third and by far the most devastating.
Did Jesus actually say that, or did Matthew just say that is what he said? It is very plausible to imagine Jesus did say it. Even for decades before it happened, there was already too much prideful resistance to Rome. Great imperial powers do not take kindly to rear-guard actions by bit-part players on the world stage. You could ask the Indians or Mexicans or Cubans.
Much of the New Testament was written after the destruction of Jerusalem, the Jewish temple, and the occupied Roman province of Judea. It was by far the most important political and military upheaval for the Jews in the 1st century of the Common Era. Yet the New Testament says absolutely nothing directly about it, not even in veiled references. Jesus’ observations in Matthew 23 and 24 may be the only remotely oblique reference to it. So why didn’t any New Testament writer say anything specific about the Jewish Revolt? It was because they knew they were a people in peril. They were trying at all costs to avoid provoking the Romans against the Christians similarly to how angry the Romans became against at the Jews. They were, in other words, trying to save their own skins and the skins of all 1st-century Christians.
Intra-national relations are always far more important to nationalists than are international relations. People interested mainly in themselves and their own countries do not care what is happening in other countries. Many of the people who voted for Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in the primaries are concerned primarily about their own welfare and what they narrowly perceive to be the welfare of the United States of America. The British citizens who voted to leave the European Union a week and a half ago cared far more about Britain than about the European Union. But Britain without the EU will almost certainly be an economic and political disaster, and the EU without Britain might possibly collapse. People often put their own nations in peril by being too obsessed with the well being of their own nations.
The greatest peril ever faced by the USA did not occur in the 20th century during World War II or in the Cold War which followed it. And nothing we are facing now is even close to the dangers we faced back in the 20th century. No, the greatest calamity ever to threaten us occurred in the 19th century, from 1861 to 1865. It was, of course, the American Civil War.
Before it was certain how that war would end, the man whom I think was the wisest and most astute statesman and politician this country ever produced gave a short speech in a new military cemetery at a small town in southern Pennsylvania. He said of the-then current state of affairs, “Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.” He concluded the best-known speech ever delivered in the United States of America by saying, “It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us …that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth.”
“We the people” are almost always the problem, and “we the people” are also almost always the solution. We must pay closer attention to our life in community. We must never think small; we must always think large. The question ought never to be posited, “What is best for me?” or “What is best for my kind?” or even “What is best for the USA?” It must be, “What is best for all of us, citizens of the USA and of the world? What brings the greatest good to the greatest number? How can we produce the most justice, especially for the poor and politically ignored or forgotten?” The political process is always essentially a human process. But too often it focuses far too much on certain humans or citizens, rather than on all humans and citizens.
In a democracy (which really means in a republic), one of the most important actions we all regularly must take is to vote. It is moral cowardice and ethically unacceptable not to vote. In 2016, no matter how tightly you must pinch your proboscis when you go into the voting booth, you must nevertheless go. If you don’t, you have no valid rationale even to comment on the ever-present national political debate over what should be done. Furthermore, non-voters are among the main culprits in putting our nation in danger.
In the old days, when all of us were very young, there were thousands of railroad crossings on thousands of American roads. As we approached them, signs told us to “Watch, Look, and Listen.” There was danger at those crossings, and for their own safety and well being, everyone needed to watch, look, and listen. In the upcoming election and in every election, we need carefully to watch, to look, and to listen.
The world belongs to God, not to us. We are merely its caretakers. But it is God who has given us that heavy responsibility. We are all our brother’s keeper, our neighbor’s neighbor, our fellow citizens’ fellow citizens in the ever-ongoing task of attempting to create a more perfect union. God requires perfection of no one, but He does require diligence of everyone.
Is the USA a nation in peril? A major part of the answer that question lies with us, and with every American citizen as citizen. After all, “citizen” doesn’t mean merely “resident.” It means “permanent participant in the civic political process.” To God be the glory in our life together.