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God &
Caesar: Repentance & Forgiveness in Politics |
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A sermon
preached by Sandra Olsen on October 20, 2002 |
What do we owe to Caesar and what do we owe to God? Do religion and
politics ever meet? Jesus commands us to give each its due, but he
never tells us what exactly belongs to each domain. And so we are
left pondering. Though out the centuries Christian thinkers have
pointed out that we inhabit two kingdoms, the kingdom of God and the
kingdom of earth, and it can be very dangerous to confuse the two.
The Protestant reformer, Martin Luther, insisted that the law of
love cannot be enacted politically because nations contain criminals
and sinners, who must be restrained and sometimes punished. And so
justice is the best the earthly kingdom can hope for. Justice is the
political expression of the law of love.
But what about repentance and forgiveness, something we all struggle
with in our private and personal lives. But do they have a place in
the political world? John mentioned in one of his sermon's last
month that nations and their leaders rarely ever express the need
for national repentance. There are exceptions, of course, Lincoln,
Gorbechev, and even Jimmy Carter. Well, that sermon got me thinking
and reading, and I learned something very interesting.
How many of you know what happened on May 8, 1985? One of the most
important political speeches of the 20th century was made by the
then president of Germany's Bundestag, Richard Freiherr von
Weizsacker. Before the German legislature, he gave a lengthy,
unflinching, excuseless enumeration of Nazi crimes and the many
degrees of association with those horrors that ordinary Germans had.
This was the first time a senior Western German leader publicly
challenged the widely heard justification, "I did not know."
Hitler, he said, did not keep his hatred from the public, but rather
used the entire nation as a tool of his hatred. Every German, he
said, could witness what Jewish fellow citizens had to suffer. Who
could remain innocent, he asked, after the burning of the
synagogues, the looting, the withdrawal of rights, the unceasing
violation of human worth? It all added up, he said, to "a mountain
of human suffering, suffering through death and destruction,
suffering through the loss of all that one had mistakenly believed
in and for which one had mistakenly fought and worked for." That
last reference would have included the president himself, who in
1939 was a 19 year old second lieutenant in the German army invading
Poland, Later this same young man would sit as a defending attorney
at the Nuremberg trials. My God, he must have asked himself, what
had I defended?
While the speech made headlines across Europe, it was hardly
mentioned in the American press. Why? Do we shun the idea of
national repentance? Do we think there is no relationship between
what is said in political speeches and what goes on in the depths of
our souls?
The words spoken that May 8 by the German president actually helped
some people in a little German village walk their own path toward
repentance. The story began on March 17, 1945 when five British
airmen, flying an American plane, were forced to parachute into a
German village. Three weeks earlier American fire bombing had killed
4000 people in the area. On the orders of a town official the Hitler
Youth executed the five men on the spot. These executions were a
secret the town lived with---until 1989 when a retired Catholic
priest learned the truth, and began talking publicly about what had
happened. His words were neither appreciated nor welcomed. You
should keep out of politics, he was told. That is Caesar's world,
not yours. But the priest reminded the village of the 1985
presidential speech, and said, "These are our sins; we must repent
and seek forgiveness. There is no more hiding." Soon others joined
his voice, and eventually a memorial to the five airmen was built.
In 1992 a 74 year old Englishwoman, Mrs.Taylor, finally learned the
truth about how her airman husband had died. Traveling to Germany
for the dedication of the memorial, she stood near the place where
her husband had been shot. Father forgive, the plaque read, But let
the living be warned. One of the men who arrived late to the
dedication---after Mrs. Taylor had departed--- was a sobbing old
man, who confessed that he was among the Hitler Youth who shot the
airmen. I did not have the strength to even look at her, he said. I
wonder if she could ever forgive me?
Repentance and forgiveness: do they have any place in Caesar's
world? If our answer is no, then why do we have our nation's flag in
this sanctuary? If the answer is no, then why don't we remove it
right now! But if the answer is Yes, then the hard work really
begins, the hard word of trying to figure out what is the
relationship between Caesar's world and God's world. What does one
have to say to the other? How does one challenge the other? Jesus
commanded, Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is
God's. And so there we have it: two kingdoms, two flags, two
loyalties---yet one God in Jesus Christ who stands over both.
So what do we do? Where should these two flags---the Christian flag
and the American flag---stand in relation to one another? Where
should we place them, in this sanctuary and in our lives? What do
you think? For the time being, perhaps we should just return them to
their usual position. |
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to engage and support people in worship, learning, fellowship, and
service, so that all may find in our community the Spirit of the living
Christ. We are an Open and Affirming Church: All are welcome
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