Luke 13:31-35
Philippians 3:17-4:1
I have long opposed ethno-nationalism, the idea that any state is defined as belonging to a single ethnicity or religion. Note that I did not say race, for while race is one of the most powerful lies in our nation, it is ultimately a lie, with no biological or anthropological basis.
As a child, I learned the story of the genocide and ethnic cleansing targeting America’s First Peoples, reading heart-breaking histories like Dee Brown’s “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,” learning the story of Chief Joseph and the failed flight of his people in the Pacific Northwest.
As a young adult, I would learn about Latin America, the unique combinations of colonizers, indigenous peoples, and descendants of the enslaved African diaspora in every country. I visited the Atlantic coast of Nicaragua in my twenties, then under United States embargo as Ronald Reagan waged war against imaginary communists in that region. There I was able to observe the intersection of the three cultures, long before we re-framed our own American story to acknowledge this exact same reality, First Peoples, European Colonizers, and Enslaved Africans. The hidden history of Asian immigrants was yet to be told.
Like so many of you, I watched in horror as Yugoslavia fell apart and fell into a series of ethnic wars. I spent a year backpacking around other parts of Europe while that war was unfolding, avoiding the Balkans but hearing stories, and was back in the United States when more than 8000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were massacred by Serbian ethno-nationalists at Srebrenica. At the same time, Hutu ethno-nationalists slaughtered more than a half million ethnic Tutsi in Rwanda.
I have been especially vocal as a faith leader and public theologian about the targeting of Muslim minorities in China, Myanmar, and India.
And, of course, I am a committed anti-racist, opposing white ethno-nationalism in the United States in all of its forms, none more so than White Christian Nationalism, a grotesque perversion of the gospel.
Yet, despite this consistent concern for minorities and commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusivity, I have always placed an asterisk next to modern day Israel. While it described itself as a Jewish state, there have always been non-Jewish Israelis, including Muslim and Christian Arabs, Bedouin tribespeople and members of the Druse faith. The Shoah or Holocaust that ended eighty years ago has been seared into our minds, seemingly justifying the creation of Israel as an ethno-state, already a dream before that horror after centuries of antisemitism and pogroms.
And that was where my thinking stopped, an uncomfortable carve-out for modern-day Israel, until the October 7, 2023 terrorist attack led by Hamas and the retaliatory Palestinian genocide by Israeli Defense Forces.
I have had to erase that asterisk, to close that carve out. While I believe in both the morality and reality of the existence of Israel, I can no longer ignore the evil ethno-nationalism that controls the current government. Like the late Jimmy Carter, I believe Israel as it exists today is an Apartheid state, not unlike the Apartheid racism of South Africa that still drives Elon Musk and his genocidal efforts to cut U.S. Aid to Sub-Saharan Africa, to kill as many Black Africans as he can.
The only path forward for Israel and Palestine, I believe, is the least promoted, not the destruction of any of the peoples of the region, not a two-state solution of antagonistic ethno-states, but a truly diverse democracy encompassing Jew, Christian, Druse, and Muslim, regardless of ethnic identity, a future neither of the genocidal warring parties wants or would accept.
The irony is that Israeli ethno-nationalists and their American supporters hope for Israeli boundaries that existed for only two very brief periods in history, for about a century during the reign of King David and his son Solomon, three thousand years ago, and for about a half century under the corrupt ethno-nationalist Hasmonean Dynasty that ended sixty years before the birth of Jesus. And even by the time of the Hasmoneans, the region was already multi-ethnic as a result of wars and migration
During the lifetime of Jesus, the region was a hodge-podge of jurisdictions and ethnicities, all under the brutal rule of Rome. The sons of King Herod, a Jew but not a Hebrew, held nominal positions of power. The Roman governor ruled from the coast, visiting Jerusalem as seldom as possible. The Decapolis of ten Roman cities was thoroughly cosmopolitan. Even in the rural back waters, you could hear Aramaic and Greek in the streets, while official documents were in Latin and the language of the synagogue was ancient Hebrew, a language Jews in the Diaspora no longer knew.
Jesus interacted with non-Jews frequently, healing them willingly, and even unwillingly in the case of the Syro-Phoenecian woman. He visited Gentile towns like the one where he found a mentally ill un-sheltered man living in the cemetery and healed him.
Jesus was preaching a Jewish Reformation in a cosmopolitan context. We have no way of knowing whether he was aware of the Jewish-adjacent Gentiles known as theophobes, or God-fearers. What we do know is that a member of the Pharisaic Movement from Tarsus in modern-day Turkey would reinterpret the life and teaching of Jesus for the Gentiles in a way that spread, first among theophobes, and then more widely.
Paul, Saul in Aramaic, would found churches throughout Turkey and Greece, and would continue to write to them, offering counsel, resolving disputes, and sometime chastising them for straying from his interpretation of the teachings of Jesus.
The earliest Christian text we have today is Paul’s first letter to the church at Thessaloniki, written around 52 C.E., only three decades after the execution of Jesus. Already, you’ve got an established church in Greece, and Paul offering reassurance as they anxiously await the Second Coming of Christ. This is no longer just a Jewish Reform.
Our reading this morning comes from a text we call the Epistle to the Philippians. It is widely accepted as authentically Paul, though it appears to be a compilation of several separate letters he wrote to Philippi. And it is there that Paul describes the members of the church as having citizenship in heaven.
Now, the idea of citizenship isn’t a throwaway with Paul, who erroneously thought his Roman citizenship would protect him.
Today, we assume that everyone is a citizen of somewhere, a concept incorporated into international law since the Second World War, though there are still people rendered stateless by ethno-nationalist governments every year. Emma Goldman, author of our first reading this morning, legally immigrated to the United States in 1885. Thirty-four years later, she was deported because of her political beliefs, much as the Trump Administration seeks today to silence and even deport those who oppose the Palestinian genocide in which the U.S. has been an accomplice, shredding the First Amendment in the process. Visitors with visas and legal residents with green cards have all been swept up by the jackboot of ICE.
In Paul’s time, most people were stateless by today’s definition. There was Rome, then there was everywhere else in the empire, everywhere else being occupied territory like the West Bank or Ukraine’s Donbas region today, with a violent foreign army brutalizing the population, seizing crops and resources and people.
There was no such thing as Judean citizenship, or even any sense of Judean borders, just the administrative jurisdictions of Roman prefects, Caesar’s legions, and puppet kings, all fluid.
To say to people who had no citizenship that they had citizenship in heaven was a big deal. The early church had some folks who were well off, what we might today think of as middle-class, but it also had folks who were vulnerable, even some who were enslaved. God’s option for the poor and powerless somehow made it from the Jewish Reform of Jesus into the Gentile church of Paul.
Paul’s heavenly citizenship has nothing to do with modern concepts of the nation-state, nor does it adhere to any idea of permanent borders, the modern and arbitrary drawing of lines defining not just regions of power, but also regions of identity. Just like the Kingdom of God preached by Jesus, citizenship in the Way of Jesus was about choice, and about how to be in the world. It was, to borrow from another of Paul’s texts, to be in the world but not of the world.
Paul famously erased other distinctions as well, declaring that there is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, master nor slave, but all are one in Christ. Had he lived in our scientific age, I have no doubt he would embrace the LGBTQIA+ community, and maybe not be so miserable himself.
The Philippians did not have a sense of ownership of their government, for they did not own their government, not even those few who held full citizenship. The government was a distant thing of oligarchs and mad men, murderers and thieves, subject to sudden change on days like yesterday’s Ides of March.
It wouldn’t be until 313 C.E. that the Edict of Milan decriminalized Christianity. For the first two and a half centuries, Christianity was known by Romans for its intolerance, for in most of the Roman Empire people identified with and borrowed bits of multiple religions, and complied when commanded to offer sacrifices to Caesar or the Roman gods. Only Christians and Jews refused to compromise, and Jews received a dispensation as an ancient religion.
Today, with our incredible technology, we can come to understand in some small way life in countries like Korea and India and Nigeria as we watch programs on streaming services like Netflix and Disney+. The terrorism of Hamas and the war crimes of Israel are live-streamed into our living rooms. And so-called Christians seek to create a white ethno-nationalist theocracy in our land, equating citizenship in the people of Christ with citizenship in the ethno-state, something Paul never would have imagined. The man thought the world was about to end! Neither he nor Jesus himself was trying to build an earthly kingdom.
And today, if we are citizens of anything, it is not of one nation, a fluke, an accident of our birth, of one race or ethnicity or religion. Even the idea of being citizens of one species, homo sapiens, seems too small. We are citizens of the Earth, one tiny miraculous system sustaining life, and as far as we know so far, the only such wonder in the universe.
In fact, I wonder if the two flags behind me shouldn’t be supplemented with others more in line with our values. The church I served in Maine, after months of the usual silly congregational debate when we make these decisions, added an Earth flag, a Pride flag, and a United Church of Christ flag to the front of the building.
If we are going to create lives of kindness and community rather than the American way of competition and cruelty, we are going to need to erase the borders that define some as the other. They may be located in a different space, eat different foods, pray in a different building, but they are not them. They are us, and we are them, all of us judged not by the color of our skin, but by the content of our character, just as Brother Martin preached so many years ago.
May God bless all of creation! Indeed, She already has. Amen.