Come On Home

 

This is the text of a sermon I gave at Monroe Congregational United Church of Christ in Monroe, Washington, USA, on August 31, 2025.

Come On Home

for

Monroe Congregational United Church of Christ

August 31, 2025

Rev. Tom Sorenson 

Scripture: Psalm 81:1, 10-16 

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 sustainer.

 I suspect that we all know that there are books in the Old Testament named for prophets. If you didn’t know that before, you know it now. There are also prophetic voices elsewhere in the Old Testament including in the psalms like the one we just heard. This morning I want to start by asking: Just who were the ancient Hebrew prophets? What were they all about? I suspect that most people think that they were people who could predict the future. And yes, they did predict the death and destruction for Israel and Judah that actually happened, but that truly is not what they were primarily about. They were primarily about speaking God’s truth to the people and to the people’s rulers, They did that mostly in a context which, frankly, isn’t that different from our own context. They believed that the Hebrew people, who once had followed God, had turned their backs on God and on what God wanted from them. Prophet after prophet condemns them for doing it. Prophet after prophet says God condemns them for doing it. They say God condemns them for worshiping other gods and for being unjust toward those in need, especially the widow, the orphan, and the stranger, those people being among the most vulnerable among them.

But of course, falling away from God and God’s ways is hardly a problem restricted to ancient Israel, is it. Friends, we are living in a country that is, tragically, a classic example of a country falling away from God. This country has fallen away from God virtually from its very beginning. Yes, there are good things about our country, the Constitution’s Bill of Rights, or at least most of it, primary among them. But that doesn’t change other facts of history like this one. Our country was founded in racism and has remained racist to this day. Europeans brought enslaved Africans to America starting in 1619, one year before the Pilgrims, our Congregationalist forbears, landed at Plymouth Rock. Race-based slavery didn’t become illegal everywhere until 1865. In the South, white supremacists did everything they could to reduce Black Americans to a status as close to slavery as they could get. It was a bit different in the North, but the North, and our Northwest, were always nearly as racist as the Jim Crow South. This racism is still very much with us, and our federal government and the MAGA movement that supports it are essentially today’s expression of white racism and white supremacy.

Racism is not the only way our country has fallen away from God. We have done it in much the same way the ancient Hebrews did. We have failed and failed massively at truly caring for the vulnerable in our midst. The social safety net of many other countries puts us to shame. We have never had an adequate social safety net, and our government today seems hellbent on making it even worse than it already is. See, for example, their drastic cuts to the Medicaid on which my badly disabled twin brother depends.

And in our country today we see other ways that we have strayed from God. Strayed, that is, not from bastardized religion like Christian nationalism but from the true God of justice and peace for all people. The powers in our country truly have turned away from God. They follow their own counsels, as our psalm puts it. They follow their own counsel into policies and practices of violence and of gross injustice. They have our federal government serve the ultra-wealthy among us and deprive the poor and needy of even the most basic social services. They seek to install themselves in power permanently through unjust voting laws and armed soldiers in the streets. Yes, folks, our country has strayed from God. Sometimes it tries to cast that straying as actually following God, but it most definitely is not following God.

Yet the MAGA movement isn’t actually the cause of our deepest problems. It is a symptom of problems much deeper than the MAGA movement itself. Problems like racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia,  and excessive, even radical, individualism. A mania about guns that shocks and appalls the rest of the world, a mania we saw the consequences of tragically on display last week in Minneapolis. A patriotism so radical that it has become destructive nationalism often covered by what its adherents call Christianity. MAGA doesn’t cause those things, it is a symptom of those things. Our country has strayed from God in many ways from its very beginning, and the movement that supports its government today strays from God in more ways than I can count.

That’s the bad news. But even in these difficult times there still is good news. We hear that good news in scripture, including from the prophets and from prophetic psalms. We can come back. We can come back to God. God may well be leaving us to our own counsels at a time when those counsels turn against God, but that doesn’t mean that God has abandoned us completely. God hasn’t abandoned us completely any more than God abandoned the ancient Hebrews completely. We hear this promise in this morning’s psalm: “O that my people would listen to me, that Israel would walk in my ways!” If they would, the psalm says, God would satisfy them with “honey from the rock.”

God was still there for the ancient Hebrews, and God is still here for us. God is calling all of us back. God calls to everyone who has strayed from God: Come on home! I will welcome you the way the father welcomes the returning prodigal son. I have not given up on you. I have not left you for good. I don’t believe that you have left me for good. So come on home! Come back to God. Folks, if our country would do that, MAGA would quickly become a distant memory not a current reality. With God’s help, we really can turn our country around and bring it closer to God than it has ever been before.

Now one enormous, necessary caveat. What I just said doesn’t mean everyone has to become Christian. It doesn’t mean we need to turn the United State into a Christian nation, something MAGA claims it is but it has never truly been. God doesn’t call just Christians to return to God. Christianity is not the only faith that preaches God’s ways of justice and nonviolence. The separation of church and state is one of the very good things about our nation.

Which doesn’t mean we shouldn’t let our Christian faith guide our political views and actions. The gospel of Jesus Christ is nothing if not political. Jesus’ primary image for God’s will for God’s world is “the kingdom of God.” And “kingdom,” of course, is a purely political concept. We don’t live in a kingdom, though we may be threatened with our country becoming something very like one today. But Jesus’ teachings about the kingdom of God apply to us today as much as they applied to the Roman Empire in Jesus’ day.

So let’s call and help our country to do what the ancient prophets called their world to do. Return to God. And return to God doesn’t mean make the country Christian. It means steer our country back in the direction of what Jesus called the kingdom of God. Steer our country away from racism, away from radical individualism, away from guns, away from so many other problems we face. Steer it toward peace attained through nonviolence. Toward true distributive justice for the ones Jesus called “the least of these.” Toward the creation of a truly meaningful social safety net for people in need. Away from xenophobia and fear of immigrants. Away from white supremacism and Christian nationalism. All of those things, and indeed many more things about our country, contradict the gospel of Jesus Christ. They contradict the moral teachings of every great religion, and even many secular atheists advocate kingdom values.

I don’t have any magic answers to the question of how we do it, and I know that many of you are already doing what you can to help turn this country around. Here are some ways we can do it that have occurred to me. We can do it through our vote, at least for as long as we still have one. We can do it by joining mass demonstrations against the MAGA movement and the damage it is doing to our country and to God’s world. We can do it by speaking out in every way we can.

And we can do it through prayer. Prayer brings us closer to God than anything else does or can. Prayer by itself isn’t enough to turn this country around. But Pope Francis said that you pray for those who are hungry, then you feed them. That’s how prayer works. So let us pray for our country. Let us pray that she turns around. That she turns away from violence and injustice and toward God’s ways of nonviolence and radical justice for everyone. Let’s pray, and then let’s act. It is indeed what God calls us Christians to do. It is indeed what we must do if we are truly to be disciples of Christ. May it be so. Amen.