God’s Authority

A sermon by Chris Whitmore

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be ever acceptable to, o lord our strength and our salvation. Amen.

Finaly the lectionary has given us some practical theology. In fact, I heard that in their last meeting, our kitchen table was wrestling with the question of what to do with those of us worried about eating food offerings left for pagan gods.

Of course, this reading is not in the lectionary to provide specific advice. Epiphany is a season that focuses us on our relationship with God and the idea of God’s authority in this world. The Old Testament reading for today, Deuteronomy, makes that point quite clear:

I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their own people; I will put my words in the mouth of the prophet, who shall speak to them everything that I command.

Anyone who does not heed the words that the prophet shall speak in my name, I myself will hold accountable.

But any prophet who speaks in the name of other gods, or who presumes to speak in my name a word that I have not commanded the prophet to speak--that prophet shall die."

The Gospel reading also touches on authority: Jesus provides a new teaching, one with authority, and even an unclean spirit recognised that authority (quite intentionally pointing out that the unclean spirit recognized it before those people with power/knowledge. And then we have the people with power/knowledge in Corinth hearing Paul’s response after complaining to Paul about those new Christians who just aren’t getting the new and improved social norms.

Corinth lies about half-way between Athens and Sparta and I’ve always found Spartan democracy fascinating. They had a rather convoluted electoral and governance system with several different divisions of power. One such division was selected from elderly men who benefitted from generations of wealth and privilege. Elections for elders were decided based on whose factions were able to shout the loudest. It was apparently this system on which the US constitution was based.

The oral laws of the Spartans were handed down to the mythical lawmaker Lycurgus, through the oracle at Delphi from the god Apollo and the deciding voice was to be left to the people. The idea of laws coming from God and the people having the final say separates, to some extent, our Canadian charter from the Constitution of the US. The preamble to the American Constitution famously starts with “We the people”. It is the preamble of the Charter that refers to God and tries to make a bridge between God and our idea of rationalism, “Whereas Canada is founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law.”

Like with ancient governments, ours is centred on the power of a supreme being. At the very least, I think God would find it cute that we think we need to state the supremacy of God and I think God would cringe at how that statement can be misused. Likewise, the need to state that a democratic constitution comes from the people strikes me as a bit odd and makes me wonder if it was truly from and for all the people. But I don’t think God would really worry too much about how an earthly law derived its authority so long as the law protected those who needed protection and helped all people to be equal and to grow into their fullness as creatures of God. I wonder if laws, either from God or written by humans, that lift people up in such a profound way are simply too hard for us to grasp, and that is why God sent us Jesus to give us a new teaching.

Constitutions and the rule of law came from a very practical concern. As societies grew, so to did the need to control ever more disparate populations. How that control is enacted was the main concern of French Sociologist Emile Durkheim. For Durkheim, the most basic social order was that of what he called the “horde” or a group of perfectly like individuals. I would imagine that this would be a society of one or perhaps the clonal pairing of Adam and Eve. The next order is the clan, in which members are not united through identicality, but through bloodline and marriage. Given the importance of lineage in the bible, it stands to reason that a clan takes centre stage as the basic functional unit. Along with it’s mutual genetic and social inheritance, a clan also shares in mutual responsibility and collective punishment. Take for example God’s use of a flood to wipe the slate clean.

But as clans came together into larger tribes, and villages of closely related families became cosmopolitan cities, the controlling force of mutual gain and the watchful eye of relatives began to fray and the logic of collective punishment became strained. No longer were societies held together by mere similarity or consanguinity. For Durkheim, the ritual practice of religions helps to glue together these larger societies. The rituals outlined in the Torah, for example, set boundaries around the people Israel and helped to hold those on the inside together through mutual customs and shared experience. Gods also have the ability to watch and punish when no one else is watching or where accountability cannot be guaranteed. With a society such as a family, it is easy for members to remember the sins of their brothers and sisters, but larger and more porous societies were at increasing risk from freeloading strangers in their midst.

As societies grew, so too did their Gods with monotheism as the logical concluding step. At least that was the idea until the Enlightenment and Rene Descartes famous phrase “I think, therefore I am”. By the end of the 1700 hundreds, the French and American constitutions had enshrined rationalism into law and with it the separation of church and state, religious tolerance and the focus on individual liberty.

While slightly different in approach, the constitutions of Canada, the US, and Sparta all try to define mechanisms for ensuring the rights of individuals while maintaining social order. The constitutions of Canada, (1982) and of Sparta (taking its full form about 500 years BCE) both clearly position the authority of the Government within the authority of God or even as an inheritance from God, not at all dissimilar from the laws of the Torah. Although the US constitution does not officially invoke a heavenly power, I think is quite fair to argue that religion and politics go hand-in-hand in the US.

I would like to change gears for a few minutes and will then try to tie some of these thoughts together.

I grew up in the 90s, a time preoccupied with the fear of disease. It was also a time – as was the time of Moses and of Christ and Paul and really all times – preoccupied with fears surrounding globalization, immigration, the relative opening of societies and the ever encroaching other. Disease was – and still is – a good boogeyman for those fears and in the 80s and 90s we had some new boogeymen.

Ebola was first identified in Africa a decade before I was born. Prion diseases started making headlines with the first death from Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease in the US in 1988 and BSE hitting Alberta in 1993. Prion diseases really are straight from sci-fi movies. They’re terrifying. But there was another disease that really defined the 80s and 90s: AIDS.

HIV/AIDS embodied the stigmas I just mentioned: a foreign zoonotic disease from Africa, spreading around the globe, and at first believed to only infect gay men, people of colour and intravenous drug users. It mostly infected people already on the margins of society and its no wonder that Ronald Regan’s administration was better known for making jokes about HIV than making helpful policy. While things did improve a bit under George HW Bush, he focused more on condemning behaviours that he felt led to HIV infection than on providing adequate resources to fight the disease. I don’t know how effective that strategy was, but in the final year of his presidency, there were 41,920 confirmed deaths from HIV/AIDS in the US.

Barbara Bush, however, took a different tack from her husband. One of her first public visits after ascending to the office of First Lady was to Grandma’s House, a Washington-based hospice for children with HIV/AIDS. The photograph everyone remembers from that visit was of her holding baby Donovan. A first lady holding a baby should not be that remarkable but holding a baby with HIV/AIDS was a whole other story. By 1989 the science on this new disease was getting better, but public opinion and the preponderance of misinformation was not. People thought you could get HIV from hugs, from tears, from dirty dishes, from urinals used by gay men. Bush knew better than that. When the nurses were not able to console the crying baby, Barbara instructed them to, “Give me that baby. I’m a grandmother.” Donovan stopped crying and we now have that iconic image.

But there was a problem with that photograph: babies were seen as the innocent victims of AIDS, a point that Barbara’s husband HW liked to make whenever he got a chance. The corollary is that adults with AIDS are not innocent. Through their sinful or at least distasteful behaviour they chose to get AIDS.

Barbara Bush quickly came to understand that deeply flawed logic and the stigmas facing adults with HIV, so when Lou Tesconi, an activist who was HIV positive, told her that the whole community needed a metaphorical hug from the first lady, she reached out and gave him a hug. In fact, she hugged him twice, the second time to make sure that it was seen by the press, not so she could look good for the press, but so the nation could see that they were safe to show love for people with HIV/AIDS.

Before becoming an activist, Tesconi was a lawyer-turned-seminarian, but when it was discovered that he was HIV positive, his path to priesthood was blocked. He was kicked out of seminary, and, by Bush’s account, he was disowned by his parents. “A poor substitute,” bush later said to reporters, “I hugged that darling young man… But what he really needed was family.”

In this illustration, while HW was able to write laws, it was Barbara who showed a clearer understanding of the function law in society. For H.W., HIV/AIDs represented a moral failing of the individual and by extension represented a failure of the state to monitor and control society, a function they inherited from God. Barbara on the other hand, saw the aids crisis as a failure of families and nations to love all people, including and especially those on the margins.

Are laws meant to forbid and punish or are they meant to permit and liberate? Are laws meant to push people out of society or are they meant to welcome people in and bind them together?

In the time of Moses, God gave the law to God’s people as a gift. The law was the direct outcome of God’s love for God’s creation. The law defined the community. The law held the community together and instructed God’s people on how to live with and within the love for and of God and with love for one another. The problem for Jesus and later for Paul was to continue the intent of the law, while also expanding the definition of the people Israel in an increasingly larger and more pluralistic society and with the urgent need to draw people in. Or, to look at it another way, Jesus and Paul sought to explain how pluralism and a religion that invites all to the table need not necessarily be in opposition to the 613 laws of the Torah or to the new teachings of Jesus or even to the laws of the state. In fact, that ability welcome others in, with love for our neighbours and love for God, is key to following the law.

Christ and Paul wanted us to see the bible through a lens, first, of love and secondly a lens focused on the dynamics of power. Paul was writing to the people with knowledge, which on its own means power. But there are other clues as well to indicate the power dynamics at play in the Church at Corinth. For starters, Paul is writing to the people who were concerned about other people not eating food that may be associated with idol worship, positioning the recipients as the people of power within the church. These are the people who have rightly interpreted Christ’s teachings and have found a new liberty in it. “But” as Saint Paul says, “take care that this liberty of yours does not somehow become a stumbling block to the weak.” In other words, out of love subordinate your self and your knowledge to love those with less power and in more need.

I guess in my story above, I have positioned HW as the law and Barbara as Jesus or at least Paul. I’m not sure if that was really what I was trying to do. I think that Barbara had a fuller understanding of the meaning of her calling, instead of just hearing the call itself. HW was correct in seeing himself as the creator and protector of laws, but those laws take their validity from their ability to serve the people – to serve all people – but especially to serve those most in need of protection. This idea of protecting those most in need, those with the lowest status, those with the furthest to go is what Paul was advocating to his friends at Corinth.

Do we need to eat certain food or not eat certain food to enter the Kingdom of God? No. But we must truly understand the intent of God’s law and God’s word. Love your God and love your neighbour as yourself. A law such as this does not need to declare its authority from God or from the people. A law of love is a gift from God for all of God’s people.

Amen