Grace and Peace to you from God, our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
I was visiting one of our shut-ins recently, and the subject of politics came up. I have been visiting some of our shut-ins on a monthly basis for almost five years, and politics sits pretty close to home on everyone’s personal agenda. This person’s concern was about the loss of personal freedoms. He is unhappy about the recent changes to our corporate healthcare policy, and feels that we are going the wrong way with the state controlling too much of our lives.
I suggested to him that in my opinion, things were going the other way. As an example, I gave television and how when I was growing up in the fifties, Lucy and Desi had twin beds because censors didn’t want to suggest that they were sleeping together even though Lucy was eight months pregnant. Now, not only do the soaps have queen sized beds, they are occupied with people, mostly undressed and in suggestive or provocative poses. If you have HBO at night, …whoa…Let’s not even go there!
Finding the right balance between limiting personal freedoms and attaining the public good is a never-ending discussion, or should I say argument. We live in a state of tension between absolute freedom and absolute domination by the state.
It seems as though it’s always a question on people’s minds. In today’s lesson from St. Mark the teachers of the law ask Jesus, “Rabbi, is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar or not?” It is an ironic question. Jerusalem and Judea, where the temple was standing, was a theocracy. The chief priests, the Sanhedrin, and the religious powers had control over peoples lives if they were Jewish. Yet, a layer above this was the Roman Procurator, or military governor who had absolute control over non-Jews, and in a pinch Jews alike. The chief priests wanted Jesus killed, but they couldn’t enact capital punishment, so they had to present Jesus as an enemy of the state. Jesus muddies the waters by giving them his enigmatic and mysterious answer, “Render unto Caesar things that are Caesar’s and to God, the things that are Gods”. Biblical scholars’ have been arguing over what he meant exactly, by these words, even since.
Today is our national birthday. July 4th. Perhaps we ought to reflect a bit on how the church and the state interact. Our church, the ELCA, talks about institutional separation, but functional interaction. This is so because God, and our Lord Jesus Christ, has a commitment to making the world a just place where people can thrive and flourish. God’s wants America to be not only a free nation but also a righteous nation.
The church for example, has been involved in what are perceived as political issues for centuries. The Abolitionist movement, which began in England, but which came to America before the American Revolution was a PAC – a political action committee. Slavery was a morale evil and had tremendous social consequences for both the enslaved and the enslaver. William Wilbeforce, an English MP, gave his life and health opposing slavery. The abolitionist movement gave us many of the political tools of persuasion in common use today among them the boycott, (sugar and rum were both slave produced products), tract literature, petitions signed by thousands, and letters to politicians among other. All of these were designed to persuade lawmakers that slavery was evil and God wanted it to end. The correctness of the abolitionist movement today is seen as a no-brainer, yet our own Civil War resulted from a gigantic clash of powerful interests who profited greatly from slavery and the slave trade. Churches even divided over the issue – including our own Lutheran church.
I’ve just been reading a fascinating book on the 18th amendment, commonly called Prohibition. The church was instrumental in creating a coalition of power groups – PACs, which sought to prohibit the sale of beer, wine and spirits. In the 1880’s until 1910 America was a very different place. Vast numbers of immigrants came to the US to escape European poverty only to be horribly exploited over here. Men and women often worked 12-14 hours a day in sweatshops. Because so many people needed work, wages were very low. To escape their misery, people drank in bars and saloons to escape from their circumstances. The often lived in tenement slums, 10 to a room. Visit the tenement museum in NYC’s Bowery District; I am not exaggerating.
In their misery, men often drank away the families living. The Anti-Salon League and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, two allied political action committees, arose seeking to close salons for good. Their literature, some could called it propaganda, predicted that closing its salons and prohibiting liquor sales would eliminate child and wife abuse, mortgage failure, increase worker productively and introduce heaven on earth.
Oddly enough, their vision was propelled by a novel Biblical interpretation called pre-millennialism which firmly believed that Christians should start the building of God’s perfect kingdom on earth, a process which would hasten Christ’s return.
The group that promoted prohibition also included, very strangely, anti-immigration groups who feared the rising power of recent European immigrants including recent German, Italian, Irish and Polish immigrants many of whom were Catholic and were used to drinking beer and wine with their meals. The Jews, who were also drinkers, were seen as threats as well.
While motivated by a sincere desire to overcome a social evil-drunkenness-there was a dark and sinful side of this power coalition. That is what makes all attempts to legislate morality suspect. Prohibition was also aided by the fact that most of the American beer brewers-Miller, Schmidt’s, Pabst, Anhuser-Busch and Adolf Coors were all Germans and held close ties to their German roots. As America proceeded into World War 1, anti-German sentiment and pro-prohibition fever coalesced. Amazingly in 1919, the last of the required state legislatures ratified the 18th amendment.
Looking backward, prohibition was a disaster. It put thousands of people in California’s vineyards and Milwaukee and Cincinnati’s breweries out of work. The states lost almost 1/5 of their revenue and hastened the introduction of personal income tax. Additionally, organized crime was given a huge boost and the Revenuers, Federal Agents given responsibility for enforcing prohibition, were easily corrupted and people drank illegally imported Canadian liquor and still-made “moonshine” and “bathtub gin”, some of which caused lead poisoning and blindness.
In 1933, we had another Constitutional Amendment to repeal the 18th. As a society, we have been processing the aftermath of prohibition’s attempt to eradicate sin and establish the Kingdom of God. The debate rages in our own time and has major financial and social consequences. This fall, California may be the first state to legalize the production and sale of marijuana. The argument being that prohibition has created greater social ills than regulating it would. More than half the people in the US incarcerated in our prisons are there because they were found using or selling drugs. The costs are staggering, up to $80,000 for each inmate incarcerated. Folks who argue for its legalization cite this argument, as well as project the billions of dollars in taxes that legalization would generate. These are powerful motives in a state where teachers and other needed public servants are being laid off by the hundreds.
The Gospel reminds us that Christ has redeemed the world from sin and challenged us to create a more humane, more just and as free a society as we can make. It isn’t easy. We live in a fallen world, and all our attempts to do what is right and good, can also be corrupted so that personal self-interests are met and other people aredemonized. Luther tirelessly reminded us that we are at the same time Saints and Sinners – our motivations are always mixed and rarely pure.
The Good News is that Jesus has taken sin’s effect into his own body on the tree of the cross and that we are free to live and to act as we believe Jesus would want us to do. God has sealed us with the Holy Spirit, our hearts and our minds and encourages us to participate fully in the political system-always keeping in mind “what would Jesus do”.
In Jesus’ Name. Amen.
Who We Are