You ever notice when you have the right passion but you unleash it in the wrong direction.
C.S. Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity:
Wickedness, when you examine it, turns out to be the pursuit of some good in the wrong way. … Goodness is, so to speak, itself: badness is only spoiled goodness. And there must be something good first before it can be spoiled.
This is a key point. Wickedness - or sin - is only the morphing of something good. It’s just the pursuit of some good in the wrong way or too much. Every evil that can be done is just a twisted version of something good. So when we talk about passion, God has a plan for us. This plan of God's will be pushed and prodded against until you compromise away God's plan for your life or remain firmly planted in his plan for your life.
Let’s set some framework.
First, our big commandment. This is what we are to have passion for.
“Teacher, which is the most important commandment in the law of Moses?”
Jesus replied, “‘You must love the LORD your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. A second is equally important: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ The entire law and all the demands of the prophets are based on these two commandments.” Matthew 22:35-40 (NLT)
Love. An invisible thing but the most important idea. Paul tries to give a good definition to the intangible in his letter to the church in Corinth.
If I could speak all the languages of earth and of angels, but didn’t love others, I would only be a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. If I had the gift of prophecy, and if I understood all of God’s secret plans and possessed all knowledge, and if I had such faith that I could move mountains, but didn’t love others, I would be nothing. If I gave everything I have to the poor and even sacrificed my body, I could boast about it; but if I didn’t love others, I would have gained nothing.
Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful or proud or rude. It does not demand its own way. It is not irritable, and it keeps no record of being wronged. It does not rejoice about injustice but rejoices whenever the truth wins out. Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance. Prophecy and speaking in unknown languages and special knowledge will become useless. But love will last forever!
Now our knowledge is partial and incomplete, and even the gift of prophecy reveals only part of the whole picture! But when the time of perfection comes, these partial things will become useless.
When I was a child, I spoke and thought and reasoned as a child. But when I grew up, I put away childish things. Now we see things imperfectly, like puzzling reflections in a mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely.
Three things will last forever—faith, hope, and love—and the greatest of these is love. 1 Corinthians 13 (NLT)
Now, I want to spring with this foundation of love already established into a current news story that holds an idea that I see many falling prey to: Christian Nationalism.
The headline reads: “Michael Flynn: From government insider to holy warrior" (https://apnews.com/article/michael-flynn-christian-nationalism-investigation-50fa5dcff7f99cf93409fcd6c1357bee)
He's quoted as saying, “If we are going to have one nation under God, which we must, we have to have one religion. One nation under God, and one religion under God, right?”
Then it goes on to define Christian Nationalism: “Christian nationalism seeks to merge the identity of Christians and Americans, so that to be a ‘true” American is to be Christian – and a certain type of Christian. The ideology pushes the idea that the United States was founded on biblical principles [which I have no doubt it mostly was] and has a favored relationship with a Christian God, said Samuel Perry, a sociologist at the University of Oklahoma who studies conservative Christianity and politics.
I’ll be honest. When I think of what I could compromise to grow my local church, adopting Christian Nationalism would be it.
Now I find the next sentence to line up with my observations too. “It is distinct from the practice of Christianity, and Perry’s research has found that many Americans who are inclined toward Christian nationalism don’t go to church.”
Perry goes on to say: “This has nothing to do with Christian orthodoxy. It has nothing to do with loving Jesus or wanting to be a good disciple or loving your neighbor or self-sacrifice or anything like that. It has everything to do with Christian ethno-culture and specifically whit Christian ethno-culture.”
Some big ideas there. But the cliff note version. It has nothing to do with following Jesus – loving God and loving neighbor. Instead, it’s a mixed up identity of white and Christian culture.
Christian Nationalism is something to be avoided.
When we become more passionate for political power and having society shaped the way that we want, when we give up love for that, we are left with a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. In the end, pursuing that over following Jesus results in nothing. Or maybe even something worse than nothing. The destruction of all things God calls us to do as well as His Kingdom being neglected. For if we don’t focus on God and His kingdom, nobody will.
I have no problem if you think the election was fraudulent. People have thought that my whole life. It's as if we don't remember 2000 or 2016 and now it's wrong to feel that way.
But Christian nationalism is where I draw the line. I will adamantly oppose it.
I get it. I really, sincerely, at the core of my heart do. We all want to be around like-minded people. We want to quit fighting battles with the world. We want to raise our kids around people who share our values.
The place for that isn't the United States though. That’s a misdirected passion. A passion for things that are good invested in the wrong place, which I think is always the source of the greatest atrocities. The place for that passion is following Jesus in your church with your church family. Then letting that love overflow into the relationships around you.
Now, you'll notice the sentence in the articles that says most Christian Nationalists don't go to church. That’s been my observation too. This is where the passion to build a better world gets messed up in practice. That passion to build a better nation, detached from church, produces Christian Nationalism.
The kingdom of God needs passionate people serving Jesus together. But history shows us that trying to make the nation Christian doesn't work out well. Let's not repeat those mistakes.
So if you’re flirting with the idea of being a Christian Nationalist, I encourage you to get involved in a church and serve the Kingdom of God with all your heart, soul, and mind. And together, we'll love and help our neighbors to make this world a better place.
You do rightly feel a call to invest your life in something bigger. It's just misdirected if you unleash that passion on Christian Nationalism. Take the humble and serving path modeled by Jesus over the path of the sword and power.
Now, if I was talking to you as a person in a position of authority in the State, my message would be different. I would be telling you to align the state as much as possible to the kingdom of God without oppressing people. Work for the poor. Work for the powerless. Bring about justice. Live in righteousness. And as much as we can do that in our lives, we must. But I’m not addressing this message here to the people who control this land. Instead, in a way, we are the poor and powerless. None of us has the power to get any law changed beyond locally and even then we struggle. We barely have a voice.
But we must recognize that we, as people who have surrendered our lives to Jesus and His will, will sometimes face a state that is opposed to the will of God. And generally, when it does that, it will proclaim that it is doing the will of God. And when that happens, we still do God’s will, and not what the state wants. We see this in the life of Corrie Ten Boom. The Germans were rounding up Jews to put them in concentration camps after conquering the Netherlands. And what did she do? She and her sister rebelled against the authorities and helped the Jews. This is living out the loyalty above all other loyalties.
And resistance to the evil German state was widespread among the Christians in Nazi Germany. Jews weren’t the only people killed in the Holocaust despite that being what we think of when we think of the Holocaust. It is estimated that 3 million Christians were killed in the Holocaust, but it’s hard to find an accurate number, as it is also hard to tell who was executed just because of their nationality regardless of their religion. But they also spied on and targeted priests and pastors. At Dachau, the Germans held 2,720 priests and pastors in the concentration camp. One of them is one of my heroes, Pastor Martin Niemoller. A hero because of his boldness that caused him to be sent away to that concentration camp.
As Dr. Laurence White described it in a message I heard him give:
In 1934, during his second year as chancellor of the German Reich, Adolf Hitler invited the leaders of the evangelical churches of Germany to a meeting in Berlin. His goal was to quell mounting criticism from the Christian community of the Nazi regime and its attempts to subvert the churches. Among those present at that meeting was a fiery young Lutheran pastor from a Berlin suburb…named Martin Niemoller. Niemoller would later recall this encounter as the moment from which he knew that Germany was doomed. Hitler was amiable and deliberately reassuring as he sought the support of these prominent churchmen. He promised the pastors that the position of the church in Germany was safe and secure - that its legal protections, its tax exemptions, and state support would remain unchanged under the Nazi government. Niemoller pushed to the front of the group to confront the chancellor directly and reject his casual consignment of Christians to social irrelevance. Standing face to face with Germany's ruler, the brash young pastor asserted: "Our concern, Herr Hitler, is not for the church. Our concern is for the soul of our country." An embarrassed silence followed his remark and it was immediately evident that Niemoller spoke only for himself. [He, like Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, stood alone.] His chagrined colleagues quickly shuffled him away from the front of the room. Noting their timid reaction, the dictator smiled as he replied, "The soul of Germany, you can leave that to me."”
And so they did -- Christians looked the other way while innocent people were slaughtered and a nation was led down the path to destruction. (source: http://downloads.frc.org/EF/EF16H41.pdf)
For many of them, their loyalty to God was not above their loyalty to the state. They just went along with Hitler. They didn’t want to rock the boat. They didn’t want to cause any outrage. They didn’t want to sacrifice like Niemoller and find themselves also in a concentration camp. They just conformed to the State rather than Jesus. And atrocity followed. That is the end result of the church conforming to the state. It is never good. It empowers the powers and principalities of this world to unleash hell on earth unhindered. When we cave to the pressure to give blind obedience to the state, we become a tool for evil rather than a vessel for the beauty and way of God to flow through. We lose our prophetic voice as we become an example of conformity rather than the countercultural revolution of Jesus.
I propose that loyalty to Biden (or Democrats) or loyalty to Trump is just as spiritually damaging. We shouldn’t give loyalty to anyone above Jesus.
Martin Niemoller gave the famous quote, which I’m sure that you know even if you don’t know Niemoller:
In Germany they came first for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me--and by that time no one was left to speak up.
This wasn’t some abstract concept for Niemoller. He was then imprisoned by Hitler and served at concentration camps for eight years. He wasn’t released until he was freed by the allies in 1945. Unlike his famous peer, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Niemoller made it out alive grew old, and eventually died in 1984, spending his life going around the world giving a warning such as this sermon serves here today.
We can easily point the fingers at Christians who compromised the gospel in Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany, but we have to be careful to not do the same thing here in America.
We have to keep focused on God. And the scary thing is that evil will disguise itself in Scripture, in God language, in sheep’s clothing.
Remember when the devil tried to trick Jesus. The story goes….
Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted there by the devil. For forty days and forty nights he fasted and became very hungry.
During that time the devil came and said to him, “If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become loaves of bread.”
But Jesus told him, “No! The Scriptures say, ‘People do not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”
Then the devil took him to the holy city, Jerusalem, to the highest point of the Temple, and said, “If you are the Son of God, jump off! For the Scriptures say, ‘He will order his angels to protect you. And they will hold you up with their hands so you won’t even hurt your foot on a stone.’”
Jesus responded, “The Scriptures also say, ‘You must not test the LORD your God.’”
Next the devil took him to the peak of a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. “I will give it all to you,” he said, “if you will kneel down and worship me.”
Get out of here, Satan,” Jesus told him. “For the Scriptures say,
You must worship the LORD your God and serve only him.’”
Then the devil went away, and angels came and took care of Jesus. Matthew 4:1-11 (NLT)
Disguising evil into something that seems good. Satan is a master of that craft.
And we have one right here in front of us. A very similar temptation to the last temptation given to Jesus here. A temptation to control the governments of this world.
The siren call of the American culture and nationalism is alluring and tough to resist. Where have we compromised?
We can just say that the battle of loyalties is a thing of the past and deceive ourselves. All eras seem to have moments where the state strives to pull us away from our ultimate loyalty to God.
But no matter the situation, we must always choose faithfulness to God. A loyalty above all other loyalties. We always choose love.
Dirk Willems was one of many fugitive Christians because his doctrine didn’t jive with the Catholics or Protestants during the reformation. Back when churches had control of the states. Eventually, he was arrested and imprisoned for his faith.
Unlike many others, Dirk escaped from the prison tower he was locked in. He tied together strips of cloth to make a rope, which he used to slide down the prison wall. He set out across the countryside, when a guard spotted him and started chasing him. In Dirk's path of escape was an ice-covered pond. He took the risk and crossed the thin ice safely. The guard – who wasn’t on a prisoner’s malnutrition diet - was substantially heavier. When he crossed the lake after Dirk, he fell through the ice into the freezing water.
[My own thoughts: Yes, Dirk was freed. His pursuer fell into the water! I would take that moment and run to freedom, but Dirk had other thoughts.]
Dirk asked himself, “Was this God's rescue? Has God saved me from my enemies?” Dirk realized the answer was, “no.” For Dirk, this was a call to help someone in need. He believed in Jesus's teaching to love even our enemies. So Dirk turned back and rescued the guard. Dirk saved his enemy.
Afterward, Dirk was arrested again, placed in a more secure prison, and was burned at the stake. (source: https://izbicki.me/public/youth-group-questions/dirkwillems.pdf)
How is that for a happy ending? Dirk gave up his life to love his enemy. A loyalty above all other loyalties.
We’re called to place loving God and loving others above all else. No matter the cost. Avoid Christian Nationalism. Use that passion we have for creating a better world to be a better people, loving God and loving one another.
