Below is the very lightly edited manuscript of a sermon I preached on Sept. 11, 2019 in Augustana Chapel at LSTC. The texts for the day were 2 Kings 18: 19-25, 19:1-7 and Luke 18: 18-30. An audio recording can be found on LSTC’s SoundCloud.
In my first time preaching here, near the start of last school year, I didn’t know this place or these people. I didn’t know my new place, my new people. Now that we’re at the start of my second year here, two related things about the people here—students, staff, and faculty—my new people, have come to stand out to me. We have a deep passion for justice, though of course we don’t always share the same imagination of what that justice entails or where it should be sought most immediately. And most of us experience persistent, haunting anxiety about the future. Such anxiety is well deserved and reasonable.
After all, most ordination processes—and the ELCA’s candidacy process is no different—offer opportunity after opportunity for your call to be questioned or invalidated; one chance after another for a group of people who don’t share your values or don’t even recognize the fullness of God’s love for you to say “We don’t want you.” If you’ve made it through the ELCA’s process, you could be sent practically anywhere—and it probably won’t be anywhere you particularly want to go—to serve people you aren’t sure you understand, and that’s assuming you don’t end up in an unjust limbo, certain of your call, approved by your denomination, and simply waiting for some congregation to open its doors and its heart to you, for some bishop to make you a priority. And if you’re Word and Service…well, would you describe yourself as an entrepreneur?
Doctoral studies offer similar opportunities to be unveiled as an impostor, as an academic fraud, or to be rejected by a handful of people who simply can’t recognize the value of your insights, your experiences, your questions and critiques. And if you’re a master’s student thinking about applying to a doctoral program, you’ve got to hope you’ll even have the chance to go through all of that. If you make it through that process, or happen to work for LSTC, you get to face the uncertain future of theological education, in all its depressing detail. And in this season of creation, we’re asked to remember—or rather, to pay attention to—our ongoing ecological disaster and the looming collapse of societies around the globe.
So, what does our faith offer us little by way of clear evidence that the future will be anything other than more of the same? [At this point in the sermon, I gave a thoroughly noncommittal shrug. Some people laughed.]
The title of this sermon—the word I have to share with you today, despite my persistent wish that I could sound a little less like Jeremiah without feeling that burning fire shut up in my bones—is “The Frustrating Promise of Divine Justice.”
At LSTC, we find ourselves haunted by God’s frustrating promise of justice. God promises justice for all creation, but our pursuit of that justice is almost always fraught with insecurity and uncertainty. God promises justice for the oppressed, but warns us that all the tools of power we’ve been taught to reach toward will fail us, and our most ordinary and basic desires only ensnare us more deeply in the injustice we strive against. God promises justice, but we have been taught and shaped in ways that make God’s justice seem like a punishment, rather than a reward; like a curse, and not a blessing.
As I connect our readings to the intersection of anxiety and passion in which we live, I’m going to focus on three things: the injustice of imperial power, the promise and demand that are God’s response to injustice, and some questions that can guide us as we confront that promise and demand with our passion for justice and our anxiety.
First, the injustice of imperial power. As you’ve likely learned in all sorts of classes, workshops, and other sermons, it can be helpful to think of injustice in two, related ways: systemic injustice and personal complicity. The interdependence of unjust systems and our day-to-day lives is a central feature of imperial power.
One way to understand the evil that is contemporary Empire at the systemic level, is to recognize that it reduces all of creation—every human or nonhuman animal, every plant, every rock and mineral, every body of water, every gust of wind or ray of sunlight—Empire reduces all of these precious creatures to resources in its global economic exploitation machine. Empire seeks to unify all of creation; not by drawing every creature into relations of mutual flourishing, but by finding efficient uses for any creatures it can, and discarding or destroying those it cannot use, or cannot use easily enough. Land burns, dries up, or floods; oceans become carbonated stews of algae and plastic; nonhuman animals and plants are driven to extinction or corralled in increasingly hostile environments; and human animals are ensnared in debt, worked to exhaustion, then an early death, or literally enslaved. In an intricately coordinated, yet wildly reckless way, all of creation is turned away from individual or collective flourishing toward the destructive maximization of profit for the few who can relatively and temporarily insulate themselves from the destruction consuming everything that God called good.
The imperial powers in today’s scripture readings didn’t have the global reach of contemporary Empire, but they certainly shared its ambition, and thrived on the expansion of unjust systems. Consider Assyria, the vast empire that threatened King Hezekiah’s small land of Judah. In their perpetual campaigns of conquest, the Assyrians did what invading armies do: they ruined fields, poisoned rivers and groundwater, spread diseases, destroyed local economies and, of course, murdered thousands upon thousands. And in consolidating their reign over their various vassals, they tore people from their lands, destroyed their forms of worship, demanded economic tribute, and executed those who dissented or resisted in a way that makes even crucifixion seem a bit less gruesome. Assyrian military and administrative systems perpetrated great evil against all of creation that lay within their reach.
Injustice is not simply colossal systems crushing creation underneath, of course. Humans get caught up in those unjust systems, we become part of them. They pay us, they feed us, they give us shelter and medicine, they teach us what loyalty is, who to love and what to buy to make sure they love us back and that they know we care…we depend on those systems. Sin intimately insinuates itself in every aspect of our lives.
The Romans were masters of weaving their subjects’ personal lives into the fabric of the empire. There was no such thing as honest wealth under Roman rule. The great Roman trade network was built on slavery and the forced dispossession of land. Great plantations, worked by slaves and cultivated on land stolen from the conquered, provided a foundation on which wealthy Romans could build their own mercantile empires. Roman coins themselves often bore the face of Caesar only on one side, reserving the other for images of conquered nations and victorious Roman soldiers.
Economic entanglement was one of the tools that bound individual Roman subjects to the imperial machine that devoured their lives and lands. This economic tool of Empire provides the context for Jesus’s claim in our gospel reading: “Indeed, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kin-dom of God.” This isn’t just the idea that attachment to wealth makes it difficult to prioritize God and your neighbor, though I suspect that’s true. It’s not just the idea that God favors the poor and marginalized, though I believe that. Essential to Jesus’s skepticism about the possibility of the rich ruler’s participation in the kin-dom of God is that the man’s wealth didn’t stand alone, as though his hard work produced it out of nothing. His wealth was a form of entanglement into systems that were subverting and destroying God’s creatures on a massive scale. With his wealth came intimate entanglement into imperial networks of trade, exploitation, dispossession, and slavery. With his wealth came a basic certainty that should the empire fall, he would find himself in a world that offered no security, no future, however compromised the future offered by Rome might have been.
The rich ruler’s wealth bound him tightly to the Empire that propagated the very injustice against which his God had pronounced judgment over and over again, and today wealth does the same thing. Wealth still necessarily binds our fortunes to that of Empire. Whether your money comes from distant slaveowning ancestors, parents, your own work and investment, or some combination thereof; whether you intend it for personal enjoyment, security in retirement, the education of your children, the health and growth of the church, or for more broadly philanthropic purposes…whatever wealth you have ties you tightly to the destructive designs of Empire through economic entanglement like that which ensnared that rich ruler.
For there is no such thing as ethical investment or consumption in a world where slave labor and dispossession are the basis of a global imperial economy, in a world where methods of resource extraction, processes of production, systems for the transportation of goods, the sheer scale of consumption, and the careless disposal of that deemed useless soak every single thing we buy from almost anywhere in the blood of the earth that sustains our life.
Ancient empires and the global Empire of our time strangle the life from whatever creatures exist in the territory they claim, and they are never satisfied with the notion of boundaries on that territory. Empire enslaves and destroys creation, and does so by binding human creatures to itself, by making its will the inspiration, boundary, and captor of our passionate, anxious will, by making us dependent on its mockery of mercy for whatever scraps of abundant life we might be able to hold onto as it feeds everything we are and love to its all-consuming machine.
Just as Empire weaves together systemic injustice and personal complicity, God’s response to injustice has two related components: a promise and a demand. God’s promise is stated and restated throughout Scripture by any number of prophets and/or unwed mothers: justice will prevail, the wicked will be destroyed, the just will be rewarded, the humble will be lifted up in this life and the next. Despite our thorough entanglement in the injustice of Empire, God promises, as Jesus puts it in our reading today, that “what is impossible for mortals is possible for God,” that we can be saved, that justice can and will win out.
This is an ancient promise, grounded in divine covenant after divine covenant, reaffirmed for Hezekiah in his confrontation with the Assyrian Empire and verified by Jesus in lands occupied by the Roman Empire. But there’s always a catch, isn’t there? There’s always something a little off with God’s promise. Hezekiah isn’t exactly promised victory, is he? He’s promised that the Assyrian emperor will “fall by the sword in his own land,” which comes true as he’s killed by one of his sons in a succession dispute. Jesus, trying to make Peter feel better about following some mystical weirdo into repeated conflicts with authority figures, promises that it is those who give up everything that will “get back very much more in this age, and in the age to come eternal life.”
God’s promise is never quite as unambiguous and certain as we might hope, as our anxiety tries to coexist with our passion for justice. That’s because this promise is contingent on God’s demand, though not in the “earn your salvation” way that would probably make me less securely employed at a Lutheran seminary. God’s promise that justice will prevail, that you will enjoy prosperity and eternal life is contingent in that you can’t enjoy the fulfillment of the promise—can’t even recognize God’s justice as justice—if you walk in the ways of this world. God demands that you absolutely reject imperial notions of power, security, and reward in favor of faith in the divine promise of justice.
God made a demand of Hezekiah: “Do not be afraid because of the words that you have heard, with which the servants of the king of Assyria have reviled me.” For Hezekiah to be able to recognize a promise of Assyrian instability and retreat as a taste of God’s promised justice—not a promise of the ascendancy of his own people, whether by seeking the favor of a greater power or gambling on the possibility of a decisive military victory, but the mere promise of a reprieve—for that qualified promise to feel like justice, Hezekiah had to be able to recognize that imperial power could offer nothing but death and destruction to enemies and allies alike, that the only possibility of his humble nation being exalted lie not in Judah’s exploiting the fruits of imperial injustice, but in the loosening—however modest—of imperial control.
And the demand Jesus made of the rich ruler: “Sell all that you own and distribute the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.” I’d be inclined to believe it was a miracle that this man even went out to Jesus and asked him an earnest question, given the constant spying and testing Jesus and those surrounding him faced. But how could someone so tightly tied to imperial injustice ever actually follow through on that divine demand?
And so Jesus says, “what is impossible for mortals is possible for God.” God’s promise and God’s demand are given and reaffirmed, over and over, in the context of a world structured by sin. Empire devours and enslaves, but God promises that justice will prevail, that the mighty will be humbled and creation will be redeemed. Empire enlists our aid in its dismantling of God’s good creation, but God demands that we stand against imperial might, that we divest ourselves of everything we hold dear, of everything that would promise us comfort and safety, power and victory, that we might be open to what is impossible for mortals.
But what does this actually mean, in light of the concrete realities of injustice that infest creation today? Those of you who know me know that I’m not likely to get up here and preach that we should sit around waiting for God to send some warriors made of light to do “what is impossible for mortals.” I believe, though, that where God’s promise—that justice will prevail—and God’s demand—that we reject imperial promises of security, of a future, that we “study the way that is blameless” and “walk with integrity of heart”—where God’s promise and demand meet is where we are called to watch, wait, and work.
We can’t expect that we’ll come up with a plan that works perfectly, that we’ll devise a winning strategy, that we’ll craft the right set of policies and influence the right change makers or take over the right set of institutions to reverse this ecological disaster and cure society of exploitation and violence. We can’t expect that we’ll be good, just, and faithful enough to fix this by leaning into our strengths. As with Hezekiah’s modest reprieve, the promised victory of justice over imperial injustice will not come in any form we can anticipate. And it will only be enjoyed by those who have “left house or wife or brothers or parents or children, for the sake of the kin-dom of God,” those who will “get back very much more in this age, and in the age to come eternal life.”
If we seek victory over Empire while clinging to its promises of security, comfort, beauty, meaning…then when God’s victory comes—perhaps when human societies do collapse, when our technology falters and fails, when our death grip on creation’s abundance is finally broken—we will feel only sorrow, only loss as the redemption of all creation is ushered in.
Your passion for justice and anxiety at the start of the school year are where I began this sermon. As it comes to a close, I want to give a little thought to what you might be able to do with God’s frustrating promise of justice right here and now, in this place of learning, during this academic year. Again, those of you who know me know I like to provide questions, rather than answers, so that’s what I’ll do now. I’ll end with a few questions that might guide you as you confront the ways in which imperial evil looms over our world and worms its way into our hearts, as you try your best to “study the way that is blameless” and “walk with integrity of heart” (Psalm 101 was the day’s psalm).
What do you believe was promised to you, when you received the call to come to this place, to pursue justice here?
What means do you imagine are available to you as you pursue that promise faithfully?
How are you going to endure the frustration—if not outright suffering and sorrow—that pursuit will inevitably bring?
And how can you use this year to strengthen yourself for the journey ahead…how can you more fully draw on the strength of others around you, of those God has gathered around you and into whose company God has gathered you, as you pursue the justice God has promised creation?
This year, as every other, holds its breath, waiting for God’s promised justice to rain down and renew creation. And like every other year, this year will offer you plenty of frustration as you pursue that justice and find it far out of reach or offering itself in a form that feels more like sacrifice than justice. This year, ask these questions of yourself and one another, that we all might be able to embrace God’s justice when it makes possible what is impossible for us, when God’s justice returns our evil Empire to the dust from which we were made, along with the ambitions and hopes of all those who weep at its passing.