Empires fall. Christ's Church lives on. Sermon for 5 Lent - MLK Sunday, 4-6-25

"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."

The Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr. preached these words in a sermon on April 4, 1967, exactly one year before he was assassinated.

Something shifted in Dr. King in the two years before his death. Where before he focused mainly on the sin of racism and the struggle for equal rights for our nation’s Black citizens, toward the end he saw the struggle as one against capitalism, militarism, and nationalism – that poor people of all races were held in bondage by the sins of the powerful; that liberation for oppressed Black people in this nation would not arrive until the oppression of poor people all around the world ended.

Dr. King became a vocal critic of the militarism and nationalism of our nation’s war in Vietnam. Dr. King began “The Poor People’s Campaign” to draw sharp attention to the exploitation of workers that is endemic to the capitalist economic system.

Not all of Dr. King’s disciples, Black or white, favored this expansive approach. Judas-like, they scolded him for taking his eyes off what they thought was the prize; that the hard-won and still-hoped-for civil and political gains for Black people would be put at risk by preaching against the war, and for the economic rights of all workers.

Even more than a dream, Dr. King had a vision – a vision of what this nation and the community of nations could be. That vision led him to Memphis in early April 1968 to support striking sanitation workers. On the night before he died, Dr. King shared his vision of the promised land and prophesied, fearing no man, that he might not get there.

------------

I return to Dr. King’s words that I began this sermon with: "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death." And this prompts my question of him:

Fifty-eight years on, Dr. King: Is our nation spiritually-dead?

I liken spiritual death to what we commonly understand as brain death. The operating system is shot, but the heart beats on and the lungs rise and fall thanks to an outside apparatus connected on one end to the body and on the other end to a plug in a wall socket.

In my ministry, I have seen too many people kept alive this way; perhaps you have, too. We keep them hooked up in the hopes that some miracle might occur, but it rarely does. The merciful thing to do is to let go. The sight on the monitor of the flat-line and the monotone that accompanies it is wrenching. And it is true.

I wonder if Dr. King would say that this nation has been on life-support for nearly six decades?

Our nation’s spending priorities and patterns that Dr. King criticized have only gotten worse under successive presidential administrations and sessions of congress, controlled by both major political parties. When Dr. King preached, the purportedly more liberal party was in power. Since then, it has mattered not at all whether the more liberal or the more conservative party has held the majority. Carter and Clinton, Obama and Biden were no different from Nixon or Ford or Reagan or Bush one or Bush two.

But – you might object – what about this one now?!?

You may be right in your assessment that this president is in a class all by himself. By accident or intent, he may be the one finally to pull the plug.

Does that trouble you? – or terrify you? – this thought of the end of the American empire? – the wrenching but true flat-line and monotone? I expect it does.

And you would be no different, I expect, from the proud citizens of any other fallen empire who were patriotic in the noblest sense of the word.

In the two-thousand years of our Lord alone, the world has witnessed the deaths of these long-standing, Christian-influenced empires: the Roman, the Byzantine, the Holy Roman, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the French, the British, the Austro-Hungarian, and the Russian. The imagined thousand-year Reich of the past century, saluted today by some misguided and misanthropic souls, lasted a mere decade and a half – fifteen years too long, by my reckoning.

And here America is, twenty-five decades old, and spiritually-dead, if the good Dr. King’s diagnosis is correct.

Are we next? Is it our turn to die? And does it matter?

------------

One week before he died, at dinner with his disciples and his beloved friends Lazarus, Martha, and Mary, Jesus once again announced the Kingdom of God.

In typical Johannine fashion, Jesus did not say this as directly as he did in the synoptic Gospels: The Kingdom of God is at hand; the Kingdom of God is like.

The subtlety of Jesus’s statement was concealed in the distracting and fragrant aroma of the burial perfume.

The fullness of the Kingdom of God lives in Jesus, the Son of God incarnate. The “already” of the Kingdom of God found in Jesus is met by the “not yet” of the Kingdom of God that awaits its completion at the end of this earthly age.

Until then, in Jesus’s absence, the Kingdom of God, announced first to poor people, resides concealed within poor people.

The poor are, in the words of Peter Maurin, the ambassadors of Christ. Not the completion of the Kingdom, but the nearest expression of it that we have. This is why the Church prefers poor people – not because they are more virtuous or better than the rest of us, but simply because they were the first to receive the good news of the Kingdom.

And the Church prefers poor people because they are the last to receive the benefits of the empires of the world, if they benefit at all.

“You always have the poor with you,” Jesus said of his ambassadors, “but you do not always have me.”

I am with you always in the persons of the poor, Jesus says to us, even though I am not here in person with you now.

Poor people were disposable in all the fallen empires of the world, and they are disposable in our spiritually-dead American empire, living – if we can call it living – on life-support.

We do spend more money, much more money on defense – a defense which is really domination in Orwellian double-speak that renamed the Department of War – we spend more than we spend on social uplift. And today, every cut that is made by this administration to socially-uplifting programs skews the ratio of domination to liberation even more.

------------

A few moments ago, I asked if America’s death matters.

Of course it does, particularly for people who are poor, people who are most on the margins, people who are the most vulnerable, the disposable for whom the death-rattle of empire is dangerous beyond the philosophical debates over the shift from democracy to dictatorship that the more prosperous trade on social media and newspaper opinion pages – the same people who can update their passports and afford to move to another country.

When the end comes, Jesus said about the soon-to-fall Jerusalem, woe to those carrying children or nursing them at the breast; hardship will fall hardest on them. It has been thus in every fallen empire; thus it will be in ours. Christ’s ambassadors have always borne, and always will bear, a disproportionate amount of pain, because Christ bore a disproportionate amount of pain for us and for our liberation.

------------

There is hope.

There is hope in what the letter-writer to the Hebrews said, that our citizenship lies elsewhere, in heaven.

There is hope in what Saint Paul wrote in today’s epistle, that we “press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus,” regarding the loss of what was “as rubbish” to share in Christ’s “sufferings by becoming like him in death, if somehow we may attain the resurrection from the dead.”

If this kind of hope is too eschatological, too esoteric, too ephemeral for you to hold on to, I have another kind of hope: a hope that you can see.

There is hope in Christ’s Church.

The Church is not the Kingdom of God. But the Church is entrusted, responsible, age after age, for reminding its people of the Kingdom of God – that the Kingdom already is in Jesus, the incarnation of the Son of God; and that the Kingdom is yet to come, but most assuredly will come, when the world catches up in our time to what God has already accomplished in God’s time.

There is hope that the same history that chronicled the fall and death of empires – and that predicts the fall and death of our empire – that same history shows us that the Church lived on in every age and for every people whose hopes were dashed by their emperors and monarchs and parliaments; their dictators and presidents and congresses.

Sometimes subtly, out of expedience; and other times boldly out of courage, Christ’s Church – the institution, yes, but more importantly the people, who truly are the Church – Christ’s Church lived on.

And Christ’s Church lives on, not because the Church belongs to us, but because we belong to God. The same God who died at the hand of one empire and rose to conquer every empire; the same God who always is about to do a new thing.

Do you not perceive it? The promised land is still in sight. We should fear no man. Empires fall; the Church lives on.

†

Fr. Daniel S.J. Scheid, SCP

Lent 5 – April 6, 2025

All Saints’ Episcopal Church, San Francisco

“Empires fall; Christ’s Church lives on”