church/state – Page 2 – Salvaged Faith

marriage: job of the state or of the church

Posted on April 28, 20093 Comments

I found this conversation over on the Methoblog today.

TheoPoetic Musings: Same-Sex Marriage And Separation Of Church And State

I wasn’t aware of the Puritan view of marriage as strictly a civil marriage…

“Massachusettes history reminds us that what we commonly call marriage today was initially, and quite deliberately, constructed as a form of civil union. Although marriage was a fundamental aspect of these highly religious people’s lives and the foundational element of their social order, its reputation was separate from the church. The Puritan founders understood marriage as a social institution that needed adjustment according to changing circumstances, and they left the state to do this important work.”

I also know of a few couples in my life who have been religiously married but not legally married.

The question is asked in the discussion TheoPoetic linked to whether clergy should be part of legally-binding contracts. The point is made that in baptisms and funerals and communion there are no other state functions being performed… so why weddings?

I want to keep thinking about this. I’m intrigued by the notion of having civil marriages and then any tradition can have whatever kind of ceremony/blessing it wants. But in many ways, I kind of feel like that’s what we did when we got married anyway. We had all sorts of things we did to prepare for our wedding ceremony, and then had all of these paperwork things to do for the state. The piece that is the kicker- the state function performed is a signature on a document.

As I pondered this, I remembered a call I recieved a few weeks ago from a woman needing her father’s baptismal record. The courthouse seemed to have lost his birth certificate and they needed official documentation in order to have the correct name on a death certificate correction (my prayers go out to that family and their paperwork battle in their time of grief!). An acceptable official documentation for that state was our church’s baptismal record! In many places in Europe, it is the church who held the birth and death records – you can’t find them all in a local civic authority, because it was the church who was recording these things.

I also am thinking about why it is that clergy are able to sign that piece of paper. It is because we are licensed by an approved body (the church). Or rather, it is because the state recognizes the license I already have. I could get licensed by the state to perform weddings, as a friend of mine did, but I already have a license. No need. Also – the only real “official” thing clergy does as far as the state is concerned is sign the piece of paper. The state has no idea what the ceremony was like and has absolutely no say in what occurs. All they care about is that there are signatures on the form when it comes back. Really – the county recorder is the one who holds all of the civic power. They give out the licenses and require all of the paperwork. Clergy is little more than a witness to the fact that the marriage took place (as far as our official role as the state is concerned). As for other strange people who are licensed to marry: captains of ships… why? who knows (well, I’m sure someone knows and I’m sure a google search will give me the reason, but I’m tired and should be working on the church newsletter).

As I think about my role in the marriage of two people, it is to bless them and to speak to the role of God in their relationship. And something that is very important to me is meeting with the couple and counseling them prior to the marriage. All of these are things that are purely religious in nature. They have nothing to do with the state. My “state” function takes all of a second and more than feeling like an agent of the government, I feel honored that the couple chose me to unite them, rather than the justice of the peace… because it means that I get the opportunity to be a part of their lives and bring God into their marriage as well.

Lectionary Leanings

Posted on August 6, 2008Leave a comment

After preaching last week on who is missing… I feel obligated to listen for God’s word on how we reach those that we have named.

This week’s lectionary readings, have me thinking about going to where people are – instead of waiting for them to come to you.

Romans has this great two step plan for salvation: believe and you will be justified, speak and you will be saved. Well, speak not just anything… but speak the truth about God. That Christ is Lord.

One of the scariest questions (in my opinion) that had to be answered on our examination questions for ordination is “How do you interpret the statement ‘Jesus Christ is Lord’?” I have often hesitated to use that statement because of the way I have heard others use it. I hear it used in militaristic and political ways that seem to have no connection with the Jesus who speaks out of the scriptures. I hear it used solely as a means of gaining salvation, as the defining measure – rather than as a beginning point for a whole life lived in faithful action. I hear it in ways that separate and promote Christ from the Trinity.

What I realized is that the question is really about HOW Jesus is Lord and finally was able to write that we can only call Jesus, “Lord” in the context of the Kingdom he proclaimed. A Kingdom that is for the poor and oppressed, a Lord that walks along side the people and offers them life, rather than ruling from above. When we claim that Jesus is Lord, we are proclaiming a kingdom that is not of this world – that seeks peace and wholeness rather than power and domination. We proclaim that our final allegiance doesn’t lie with our family or the state, but with God.

In my lectionary discussion group, we spent quite a bit of time bemoaning the crazy and chaotic world around us… and I heard many laments about the downfall of Christianity in America. But I am more than prepared to say that living in a post-Christian America may in fact be exactly what we need to more fully accept Christ as our Lord. Living in a post-Christian America means that we no longer are Christian by default, but that we now have the ability to choose to deeply commit our lives to this way. And it means that there are new opportunities to share this gospel with people who are disheartened by the world – to offer them a future of hope that lies now within our modern politics, but with God’s kingdom. We offer an alternative to the world as it is – not rose colored glasses – but a connection to something that is bigger that our current struggles.

I’m also thinking a lot about Matthew and Peter’s venture out onto the sea in connection with a poem by the late Eddie Askew. I can’t remember the title or which book its in, but here is the piece of the poem I have:

And, suddenly, I notice with unease, you standing with them, outside the boundary wire of my concern. Not asking that they be admitted to my world, but offering me the chance to leave my warm cocoon, thermostatically controlled by selfishness, and take my place with them, and you. At risk in real relationships, where love not law, defines what I should do.

I keep thinking about how often we tell people to come to church, rather than take church to them. I think about all of those people who will never on their own accord set foot in our large brick building. I think about the people who are in the bars in town – or working at the grocery store or the dollar general or the gas station. And I think about Jesus standing with them out in the storms of their lives.

While the storm was raging on that lake, the disciples were relatively safe in their boat. It seems they were more startled than anything else by this figure that appears and Peter doesn’t really believe it could be Jesus… what on earth is he doing out there? Why doesn’t he stay where it is safe… either get in the boat or stay on the short! He is outside the boundary of where Peter thinks he should be. And so to make sure it is really him, Peter wants proof. If it’s you Lord, command me to come to you. And Jesus says, Come.

Peter gets out there, but its scary to be in the world without all of the safety of the church (ahem, I mean boat). and so he falters and Christ picks him up and helps him back into the boat. It is new and terrifying to try to proclaim Christ out in the world, rather than just in the safety of the church, but we are called to do so. Not because Jesus tells us to (after all, Peter is the one who suggested it)… but simply because that is where Jesus is.

Priorities

Posted on June 22, 2008Leave a comment

This morning’s gospel passage is not one of those that tend to make us all warm and fuzzy inside. On the surface, it appears to offer no real “good news” at all.

But that is because the gospels have this fantastic ability to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable all at the same time. To those who are facing persecution and pressure because of their faith – this passage from Matthew offers encouragement, and offers hope – it is a reminder that while those around them might be able to destroy their bodies, their lives in the fullest sense, rest with God and not man. Jesus tells those who are persecuted three times in this passage to not be afraid. As our missionaries minister to people in China, a place where there are real persecutions because of the name of the Lord, this message is one of comfort.

But here in the United States, we don’t typically face that kind of conflict. As much as we hear it being lamented on television these days, Christianity really isn’t under attack in this nation. There are isolated instances where someone is forced to confess or deny their faith under threat of death, like the young woman whose admitted faith in Christ propelled another young man to kill her in the Columbine shootings. And those events stay with us – but they are not our daily experience.

Brian Stoffregen is a Lutheran pastor in Arizona and in his weekly reflections upon the scripture, he brought these questions forward: “Does the lack of opposition to our faith mean that it is strong or that it is weak? … If we aren’t suffering in some way, why not? Is it because we are surrounded by people who are already in Jesus’ “household,” or because we are failing to be witnesses?”

Let me repeat that: is it because we are surrounded by people who are already in Jesus’ “household” or because we are failing to be witnesses?

I think the answer to that question is both. We are not daily facing persecution because we are both surrounded by people who are already “in” and because we fail to be witnesses.

For a long time, we have thought of ourselves as a Christian nation. There is a strong Judeo-Christian ethic and language that is used in politics and government and in the culture in general.

In these last few decades however, that unity between Christians and the nation has started to unravel a bit. The United States today is one of the biggest mission fields in the world with many who are not only unchurched, but to whom church is a strange and scary place. And the alliances between various flavors of Christianity and political parties is beginning to dissolve as many evangelicals find themselves looking at both moral and social issues.

While many people are feeling very anxious about this separation, about being one religious group among many, about not having the “in” with the state, I for one, am celebrating. I cherish our separation between church and state, not only in politics, but also in our schools, and in the various other places where the state and church act together – and it’s for a very simple reason: I don’t trust the state to do church.

When the state or government and the church are in bed together, things get complicated. You suddenly have multiple duties’ pulling you this way and that, and I think in the end, the church loses. We lose precisely because of this passage from Matthew this morning – we lose because we are already surrounded by people who are supposedly “in” and we also fail to be witnesses – we let the state tell us what to believe and we lose our prophetic voice.

Above all, we get confused about who we are serving.

At the very beginning of this passage from Matthew we find ourselves in the midst of a discussion about servants and masters, disciples and slaves… the question being asked of disciples in Matthew’s community, in Matthew’s time would have been: Whom do you serve? It is a question that is very pointed, very direct and gets us to the heart of the problem.

As we wrestle with that question today, I want us to really think about it personally. And as we start to do so, we need to think about the multiple things that demand time and energy and commitment from us.

At the end of each set of rows, there is a pad of paper and some pencils or pens. Take one of these and pass them down the row and then I want us to take some time to really think about the five things in your life right now that you are called to be faithful to – that demand something of your life. They may be things like your job, your family, the country… or something much more specific to your calling. What are the things that you feel like you have some responsibility to in this world? Write them down and then order them 1-5, with 1 being the thing that is the most important to you.

(5 minutes)

I don’t know about you, but writing down those things was extremely difficult – and tiresome. There are so many things that demand something from us and I think that most of us, most of the time, feel stretched and pulled in so many different directions that it is hard to know which way is up. It is hard to know which is the most important and it seems to change with the circumstance.

We are all here this morning, however, because of a shared commitment to follow God and to follow Christ. Let me just cut straight to the point and ask how many of you have God or Jesus on that list of five things?

This morning’s scripture is about allegiances, it’s about priorities, and it’s also about what happens when those priorities conflict.

Matthew was writing to a community that followed Christ, and they did so at their own peril. Day after day, they kept getting into trouble for the same kinds of things that Jesus did – because they were trying to live out the Kingdom of God in the face of a different kind of kingdom.

Sarah Dylan Bruer writes:

“They believed that only God could claim the kind of power over others that so many [like the Emperor, the family patriarch, the slave owner had taken] — and so they proclaimed Jesus’ teaching, “Call no one father on earth, for you have one father — the one in heaven” (Matthew 23:9). Their belief that God was calling every person — male and female, slave and free, of every nation — led them the build a community in which women and slaves were received as human beings with agency to make their own decisions and gifts to offer the community — and they didn’t ask anyone’s husband, father, or owner for permission to do so. They built pockets of community living into a radical new order that looked more like chaos to many onlookers, and that threatened to undermine the order of the Empire. And so their neighbors, their friends, and sometimes their own family turned them in, hauling them before governors as agitators, to be flogged, or worse.”

In their attempts to follow Christ faithfully, to make that allegiance the first priority in their lives, they came into conflict with the Empire and their roles as citizens, and they came into conflict with their families. But they were clear as to which of those things were the most important, and they were willing to sacrifice, even their own lives to be faithful to Christ.

In my own experience, these kinds of conflicts are messy and painful. In March of 2003, our country started to go to war with Iraq and I was a naïve college student. I kept thinking about all of those things that I had learned from Jesus and felt deep in my bones that this military venture was wrong. And in conversations with my roommates and other friends, we all found ourselves similarly moved. Matthew 10:27 reads “what I say to you in the dark, tell in the light; and what you hear whispered, proclaim from the housetops.”

And so, as Christians, we stood in opposition to the war. We kept coming back to the notion that all human beings were children of God, the hairs on all of our heads are numbered and we are all valuable in God’s eyes. If that was true, any life lost, was something to be mourned. A group of us got together and began to erect crosses on the lawn in front of the chapel – as a reminder that there was a real human price to this conflict.

The morning after the crosses had all been put up, we walked onto campus to see one of the most painful things I have ever experienced. The crosses were torn down, many broken apart, and some of the broken pieces were used to spell out “God Bless the USA”

That day, I learned how messy our priorities can be. I learned what happens when we start to equate something like patriotism with faithfulness to God. And I also learned how important it was to be clear on who you serve.

Our campus was torn in two that semester. We learned what it meant that Christ brings a sword not peace. The truth is that we are faced with a choice and that we must choose who we will serve. We must choose which one of those things that pull on us, and that we love, which of those things that are in and of themselves good, which one will be the guiding force for everything else.

And it will cause conflict. Any of you who have chose at one time or another to put your family before your job knows what a strain that puts on work relationships, or vice versa. Priorities and allegiances matter. Who we serve matters. But Christ tells us that if we chose to serve him. If we chose to be known as his followers, then we are in the palm of God’s hand. We should not be afraid, because we have life in Christ. We will find our lives and our fullness, when we follow him.

It will not be easy. And it doesn’t mean that we give up everything else. It means that when we make our relationship with Christ our first priority, all of those other relationships change, and we learn how to witness, we learn how to love, and we learn how to truly live God’s kingdom in this world. Do not be afraid and follow him. Amen, and amen.