Celebrating Interdependence Day

I’ve just returned from the Wild Goose Festival in North Carolina. Over one thousand people gathered to experience music, justice, art and spirituality. North Carolina is different from Northern California. Where we are a polyglot culture of religious skepticism, there it is a religious monoculture. Except when it isn’t.

Although you could probably find plenty of folks in North Carolina who still trust that America is a Christian Nation, the gathering of Wild Goose placed a giant question mark over that assumption. Although many of the Wild Goose folks would call themselves Evangelical Christians, just as many are post-Evangelical or never-Evangelical. Perhaps the thing that held us in community was a rejection of Imperial, Post-Constantinian Christianity.

In the year 313, Constantine set up the Church as the center of the Empire. The social movement started by a Galilean reformer named Jesus became the state religion of the empire that had worked to obliterate the Way of Jesus. Empire co-opted the Way. And as happens in all imperial co-options, the Way had to be sanitized. No longer could the Church be a community of exiles and equals under the leadership of Jesus. It had to become the community of the state power structure. The roots of the empire grew deeply in the church. They grew all the way into our own national experience.

Our memory was co-opted by our national mythology. According to this cooption, whatever was good for the nation was good for the church, and vice versa. If the nation wanted slavery, then the church would legitimize it. If the nation wanted to disenfranchise women from the political system, then the church could give a theological reason for so doing. But then something happened. Although imperial cooption had contained the church for 1600 years, it all began to come crashing down. The church ceased to hold the central position in our nation. The church might just as well be the nation’s critic as its creation. No longer just another aspect of civic life, the church became something more like an embassy in the midst of an alien country.

The prophet Isaiah wrote these words 2500 years ago, “Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food.” They are words written when empire had taken God’s people captive, had destroyed their culture, and sought to obliterate their identity.

They are the words that made the exile bearable. The exile is always called into covenant with God. We too are called into covenant with God – and are called to live as exiles; to look to God for our needs and depend on the promise of God that we will not be left desolate.

Empire cannot make this promise. It cannot promise us anything that isn’t tied up with conditions. Empire says that if we work hard enough, we may be lucky enough to earn its graces. But, please don’t expect something for nothing. Even in your soul’s life, empire tells us that we will have to work harder and harder to fill the huge void in your soul. And if you don’t - well, it's your own fault. You just didn’t try hard enough.

“Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy?” Why break yourself every day on the altar of empire’s expectations only to receive a broken heart? The promise of God is that there is more. “Everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.”

God’s gift is for every broken hearted victim who tries to make meaning from a world that doesn’t care. God’s gift is his love made flesh in Jesus. The promise says that our identity isn’t dependent on our own power or prestige, our possessions or property, but on God’s unconditional love and mercy. We can join God where she is to be found: the place of exiles. We will receive what we need to live our lives with integrity and grace. It is the place where the hungry are filled, the broken are healed, and everyone hears good news.