The Empire Strikes Back

I don't often post my sermons on this blog.  You can find them at the Sermon Archive section of monroeucc.org if you want to see them.  This one, which I gave on Nov. 20, 2011, is, I think, so timely and so important that I am putting it up here on my blog.

The Empire Strikes Back

A Meditation for Christ the King Sunday

Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

November 20, 2011

Scripture:  Matthew 25:31-46

Let us pray:  May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer.  Amen.

I imagine that most of you are familiar with the Star Wars movies.  In the first of those movies to be made (which turned out to be the fourth movie in the series—go figure) the rebels who are fighting the evil empire have some success in defeating the military forces of the empire, destroying its “Death Star,” a fearful weapon that had destroyed the home planet of some of the rebels.  The title of the second movie to be made (which turned out to be the fifth movie in the series—go figure) is “Star Wars:  The Empire Strikes Back.”  The demonic empire doesn’t back down and roll over in the face of the threat from the forces of liberation.  It fights back—hard.  The rebels pay a steep price for their resistance to the forces of empire.

Now, I wouldn’t be talking about the Star Wars movies in a sermon if I thought that they were merely sci-fi adventure stories, but pretty clearly they are not merely sci-fi adventure stories.  They are true myths, that is, they are stories that speak a truth about the spiritual forces, good and evil, that are at work in the world.  They speak specifically about the spiritual force of empire. 

As the theologian Walter wink has reminded us, all human institutions have a spiritual dimension to them.  The technical term for the spiritual dimension of an institution is its “power.”  Human institutions are somehow more than the sum of their parts.  They behave in ways that aren’t dependent solely on the will of the individuals who make them up.  They have a spiritual essence of their own, that is, they have their “power,” which is the spiritual side of their existence.  Power here doesn’t mean force or even the ability to do things or make others do things.  It refers to an autonomous being that is spiritual rather than physical.  Everything in creation has its power.  An institution’s power is its spirit, it is the way in which the character of an institution is maintained over time even though the people in the institution change.  All human organizations—governments, corporations, universities, service clubs, churches, every human organization—has its power.  Ideas and concepts have their powers too.  In our country the powers of nationalism and consumerism are particularly strong and active.  The powers are invisible, but they are the strongest forces at work in the world other than, we hope, God.  Every human institution acts according to its power.  That’s why groups of humans will do things that the individual humans in them would never do on their own, as when people who in civilian life would never think of taking another human life have no compunction about doing it when they are part of a nation’s military engaged in warfare.  They act not according to their own character but according to the power, the spiritual essence, of the military of which they are a part.

The powers are often demonic, which means that, like individual humans, they often act in ways other than the ways that God their creator intends and desires that they act.  Under the influence of their power, institutions act for their own self-preservation rather than for the good of God’s people.  They use violence to perpetuate their own might, caring more for status and influence than for justice.  Lucas’ empire of the Star Wars movies is a brilliant depiction of the spiritual power of empire, not only as it exists in a galaxy far, far away but as it exists in this world here and now.  That’s what makes the Star Wars movies so compelling.  They are mythic stories about, among other things, the power of a very real worldly institution, empire.

There have been empires in the world for as long as there have been written records of human institutions.  One very appropriate way to look at human history is to see it as a succession of empires—Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, Rome, the Arab Empire the Turkish Empire, the British Empire.  Each has risen, had a period of domination, and fallen again, and despite significant differences between them all of these empires have acted in some similar fundamental ways.  They have all established, defended, and tried to perpetuate themselves through the use of violence.  They have all been ruled, through one mechanism or another, by an elite of the wealthy.  They have all put their own power and survival ahead of all other concerns, and they have all claimed to bring peace, security, and prosperity to their people through the liberal application of force.  Those similarities reveal the power of empire in the technical sense of that word.

           Today is Reign of Christ Sunday, what we used to call Christ the King Sunday.  The parable of the Judgment of the Nations that we just heard calls Jesus “king.”  In the first three Gospels Jesus proclaims not himself (as he does in John) but something he calls “the Kingdom of God.”  The original Greek word in the Gospels that gets translated as “kingdom” is basilea, a word that in other contexts gets translated as “empire.”  We could very appropriately say not the Kingdom of God but the Empire of God. 

What Jesus taught and showed with his life is what we could call counter-empire, that is, empire the way God intends and wants it to be, in sharp contrast to empire the way it actually is in the world.  He showed us what empire is like when it is not fallen, when it is not demonic.  We see a little bit of that teaching in Matthew’s judgment of the nations scene.  That parable, like virtually everything else Jesus said and did, turns the world upside down.  It raises “the least” to the level of Jesus Christ himself.  “The least” here clearly means the ones the world thinks of as the least—the poor, the marginalized, the vulnerable.  This parable puts them on top, making them of equal value with Jesus Christ himself.  In the empire of God, the least are the most.

           Empire isn’t a concept that applies only to other people and other times.  Many of us Americans today have come to understand our country in terms of empire.  The United States may not have anyone we call the emperor or even the king, but we are nonetheless the dominant world empire of our time.  We see our imperial status in the way the country was formed by expanding and taking over land that had belonged to others, to the native nations, to Mexico, and others.  We see it in the way we use our military power today to project and to protect our supposed economic and political interests around the world.  Our invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan after 9-11 are perfect examples of the working of the power of empire.  Empire uses military force to project itself in the world, and the United States has done that more times than we can keep track of.  President Obama, our current emperor, just last week announced a new deal with Australia that will have us creating a new military presence on the north coast of that country, a move in pure imperial style to protect our supposed interests from a supposed threat from a competing empire, China.  We have some sort of military presence in over 150 countries around the world.  We spend almost as much on our military as the rest of the world combined spends on theirs.  We are indeed today’s world empire. 

          We see our imperial nature at home too.  Just one quick statistic:  In 2007 the top 1% of our population owned one half of all of our country’s wealth, and the growing concentration of wealth in the hands of an elite few that we have observed since the 1980s has only accelerated in the years since 2007.  We think we’re a democracy, but those are the wealth distribution figures of empire; and empire can never coexist with democracy for long. 

          We are empire, and the empire strikes back.  It strikes back against anything that it perceives as a threat.  Last week it struck back across the country against the Occupy movement, a movement that names the radical income and wealth disparity in our country and calls it undemocratic.  The power of empire acts in ways blunt and in ways subtle to perpetuate empire.  The various police agencies who dispersed Occupy groups across the country recently may not have consciously coordinated their efforts, but in the combined assaults on Occupy groups across the country we see the power of empire, that is, the spiritual dimension of empire, asserting itself through those various police agencies. 

          We also see it in the way the so-called “mainstream media” reported the assault on the Occupy movement.  NPR, for example, reported the authorities in New York justifying that assault by pointing to the First Amendment, saying it guarantees the right to gather but not the right to encamp, that is, it’s ok if you gather in protest as long as you don’t do it for too long or too effectively.  Sources less beholden to the empire for their financing reported a real attack, with police destroying property and assaulting protesters.  In Seattle King 5, a mainstream media outlet, reported the attack on Occupy demonstrators in downtown Seattle with pepper spray as a reasonable response to provocation from the demonstrators.  On the other hand, the Rev. Rich Lang, a local United Methodist pastor and activist, reports how he was temporarily blinded by pepper spray as, dressed in clerical garb and wearing a cross, he tried to separate police and protestors.  He was not threat to anyone.  An 84 year old woman was also attacked with pepper spray.  Are we supposed to believe that she was a threat to the police?  Lang speaks not of a reasonable police response to provocation but of the reality of police brutality and a breakdown in discipline among the police, who continued attacking protestors well after any conceivable reason for doing so had ended, not that there ever really was one to begin with.  The spirit of empire affects every aspect of American life.  Some Americans are finally starting to wake up to that reality.

          Today we celebrate Reign of Christ, or Christ the King, Sunday.  We could call it Christ the Emperor Sunday, but Christ’s empire is radically different from the empires of the world.  It is an empire in which the last are first and the first are last.  It is an empire in which peace is attained through nonviolence and justice rather than through violence and oppression.  Unlike in the world’s empires, in Christ’s empire people are more important than profit; and all have enough because no one has too much.

          Christ the King calls us to the task of building God’s empire of peace and justice. To do that we must dismantle the structures of worldly empire.  We must renounce militarism and the use of violence as a tool of national policy.  We must overturn structures that create and perpetuate the power of the wealthy at the cost of the welfare of God’s people and of God’s good creation.  If we do, the empire will strike back.  Of that there is no doubt.  It struck back against Jesus, crushing him like an annoying gnat and thinking that that act of violence destroyed his word of the Kingdom of God.  It didn’t.  It didn’t destroy the word of the Kingdom of God then, and the violence of empire can’t destroy the word of the Kingdom of God today. 

Today is Christ the King Sunday.  We know what Christ calls us to do.  Are we ready really to accept Christ as our king?  Are we ready to renounce the power of empire and really work for the building of the Kingdom of God?  It isn’t easy.  The empire strikes back.  Jesus knew that the empire strikes back, but that threat didn’t stop him.  Will it stop us?  Amen.