Proper 12 (July 24-30)
Texts: John 6:1-21;
Eph 3:14-21; Psa 145:15-16
GOD’S POLITICS REVEALED, PART 1:1 EQUALITY
I had a very unexpected inspiration for my sermon this week. My middle son Josh sent me a link to a podcast he thought I might like. The name of the podcast is The Gray Area, which “takes a philosophy-minded look at culture, technology, politics, and the world of ideas.”2 This particular episode was called “Taking Nietzsche Seriously.”3 Friedrich Nietzsche was a German philosopher who lived from 1844-1900,4 though in the last ten years of his life he was completely incapacitated by dementia and madness. Nietzsche is most famous for declaring, “God is dead. And we have killed him.” He’s infamous for being the philosopher used by the Nazis to justify their boldly horrific actions of war and genocide — the Holocaust. To this day, Nietzsche’s is the philosophy of choice by all forms of nationalisms and fascisms.
This podcast crystalized for me the main principle behind Nietzsche’s philosophy that makes it popular with fascists and nationalists. But let me set that up with two verses from our readings today. The first is the opening two verses of our Second Reading: “For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth takes its name.” The past several weeks we have seen St. Paul proclaim how Jesus the Messiah has come to gather all things together in heaven and earth, such that one new humanity is being created. This week we hear him speak of this in terms of all families being united by one God our Father. There is no implication of any families being superior to the others. They are all united by virtue of God’s love. It is the love of a parent whose love for all his or her children is unconditional and universal. The love of God as a parent loves each child as of equal value, despite any differences. This means that for every person on earth they are of infinite value for God by virtue of being created by God as God’s children.
The second verse to focus on for our readings is from our psalm: “You open wide your hand and satisfy the desire of every living thing” (Psalm 145:16). Here we see the scope of God’s love embracing every living thing. In short, a basic principle that we come to know in the Bible, especially through Jesus, is that all living things have equal value to God our Creator. It’s not just human beings. But we, created in the image of God, are here to care for all the earth. We aren’t to dominate the earth and its creatures. We are here to care for it, just as God does. God opens wide God’s hand and satisfies the desire of every living thing. This is our basic mission, to care for one another and for the earth as of infinite value to God, and so too for us.
Now, back to Nietzsche. When our founding fathers declared that “All people are created equal,” they were on the right track with one of the foundational principles of the Judeo-Christian God in the Bible. But Nietzsche flatly denied the biblical principle of the equality of all souls. He argued that the differences we can clearly see between human abilities mark some as superior — especially a small category of extraordinary people whom he called in German Übermensch — “Supermen” in English. Can you see how this thinking became attractive to Hitler and the Nazis? Hitler saw himself as an Übermensch and the white Aryan people of Germany as a superior race to all others. What is the fate of other inferior peoples? They are to serve their superiors and/or become expendable. The superior should rule. Do you see how this goes squarely against the Christian Gospel? Nietzsche actually posed the choice as between the Greek god Dionysus and that of Christ. Dionysus or Christ, he said, and he chose Dionysus. His last book was even titled The Anti-Christ because he could clearly see how his thinking directly opposed the person of Christ.
Brothers and Sisters, this is why “Christian Nationalism” is an oxymoron, two words that don’t belong together. Nationalism completely buys into Nietzsche’s principle that only the superior should rule. So Christian Nationalists see their identity as Christians as making them the only ones fit to rule. It is also why Christian Nationalism is generally melded to racism. It’s a neat fit.
Our history as a nation has been a long struggle between these two opposing principles. When our founding fathers wrote the Declaration of Independence, they got the most basic biblical principle right, “All people are created equal.” But then when they wrote the Constitution, they caved in to the nationalist principle of some people ruling over others. Only white, land-owning men were given the right to vote. The others were assumed to be inferior people whose purpose was to serve white men. And African peoples were defined as three-fifths of a person; they were to be enslaved. If any women or people of color acted against this, then violence was justified. Non-cooperation meant you were expendable. The dark side of our nation’s history is the servitude of women and genocidal behavior toward enslaved African people, whose labor we stole, and to the people native to this land, whose land we stole.
And yet persisting in the middle of this history is that grand biblical principle that “All people are created equal.” It serves as a beacon to act, as Abraham Lincoln called it, “the better angels of our nature.” He opposed the nationalism of the South, their insistence on the white rule over enslaved people, and he used soaring rhetoric that elevated the equality of souls. He mused, for example, that if slavery depended on skin color, any man could be enslaved to a man with lighter skin than his own. If it was based on intelligence, then any man could be enslaved to a man with a better intellect. Lincoln saw where this argument led: “Say you, it is a question of interest; and, if you can make it your interest, you have the right to enslave another. Very well. And if he can make it his interest, he has the right to enslave you.”5 “I should like to know,” he continued, “taking this old Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men are equal upon principle, and making exceptions to it, where will it stop?”6
In his 1863 address at the dedication of a national cemetery for the soldiers killed in battle at Gettysburg, Lincoln acknowledged that the United States was in the midst of “a new birth of freedom.” He explicitly tied the nation not to the Constitutional principle of the protection of property, on which slaveholders had based their right to spread slavery across the land, but on the Declaration of Independence, which gave birth to “a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that ‘all men are created equal.’” The Gettysburg Address reminded Americans they were engaged in a great test of “whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure.” He urged them to rededicate themselves to the great cause of America: “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”7
Brothers and Sisters in Christ, I put before you this morning that we are in the middle of another great test for our nation. Can this nation conceived on the biblical principle of “all people are created equal” survive? Or would those who go by the opposing principle — that some people are superior and should rule over the others — should that Nietzschean philosophy finally win out and do away with our 250 year-old grand experiment in democracy?
Since Lincoln and the Civil War, we have made some great strides. We’ve abolished slavery and gradually given the right to vote to many more people — though that right to vote is now under pressure once again. The election process itself is under attack as being unfair, though those attacks are based on no evidence whatsoever that have held up in court. It seems clear to me that the cries of corrupted elections are only leveled when the supposedly superior people don’t win. And so if the superior people, meaning white Christians, don’t win, it must be because the elections are rigged. Because it’s obviously God’s will for the superior to rule over the inferior. This is the thinking of nationalism. And as Lincoln opposed it in his day, we too must oppose it in ours. I believe that this election in November means that we either step backwards into the authoritarian governments of kings and their friends, or step forward into another “new birth of freedom.”
Why am I talking politics like this? Because I believe that the biblical journey which climaxes with Jesus the Messiah is very much about coming to see the politics of God that oppose our usual human politics, an opposition so clearly posed by someone like Nietzsche. Nietzsche articulated the usual human politics of division based on the superior ruling over the inferior. Previous generations had always tied that to a god who puts a rubber stamp on it. The gods chose those who are superior and put them in place to rule. In the light of Christ, Nietzsche saw clearly that this had always been a ruse, a justification on the part of kings to keep their places at the top. Jesus Christ, and the Hebrew prophets before him, had shown us a very different God, one whose love truly is lavished on all God’s children equally. A love which maintains the each person, and every living thing, as having infinite and therefore equal value. Nietzsche saw clearly that it was time to declare this God dead and proceed on our own human authority with the Supermen among us claiming the right to rule over the others.
Christian Nationalists have taken this philosophy and simply reinstalled the false gods of old, in Christ’s name, in order to justify their rule over others. They take not the true principle of freedom from the Declaration of Independence which Lincoln championed, but instead the flawed attempts of the founders in the Constitution which gave the right to vote only to white male landowners. Except the Christian Nationalists anachronistically also put one more qualification on that: Christian. It’s just the white Christian men who should rule, with white Christian women in a supporting role — and maybe a few people of color thrown-in in secondary roles.
Brothers and sisters in Christ, I believe that not only is our democracy at stake this November, but also a true living out of our biblical faith. All people are created equal. All the families of the earth live under the love of the same heavenly parent, who has sent Jesus, and all who faithfully follow in his name, on the mission of creating one new humanity in the place of all our divisions. God opens God’s hand and satisfies the desire of every living thing. This is the foundational principle we bring to the ballot box this November. Amen
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Bethania Lutheran Church,
Racine, WI, July 28, 2024
Notes
1. Since in John’s Gospel the miraculous feeding of the crowd and an ensuing dialogue takes up all of chapter 6, we will be reading it for several weeks. The main principle I glean from the “miracle” itself is that of abundance vs. scarcity, which will be the subject of next week’s sermon, “God’s Politics Revealed, Part 2: Abundance.” This week’s sermon, on this week’s Psalm and Second Reading, is conceived as a first step in talking about the politics of God revealed in the miracle of John 6.
2. https://www.vox.com/the-gray-area
3. https://open.spotify.com/episode/2FLgCbjIB3OStrCzJaZozD
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche
5. Quoted in Heather Cox Richardson, How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America (Oxford, 2020), 67-68. I highly recommend this book as a global reading of U.S. history in terms of inequality vs. equality.
6. Quoted in ibid., xviii-xix (my italics).
7. This sermon paragraph is a direct quote of a paragraph in Richardson’s book, ibid., 47-48.
