Whose Kingdom, Which Lord? Jesus & Nationalism, part 5 (Concluding Exhortations… Native Americans as Victims of Nationalism)

May 27, 2010 By Kurt Willems 22 Comments

This is part four of a five part series on Jesus and Nationalism.  It reads as one fluid written sermon so you may want to read the rest of the series.  I have never spoken this sermon but figured I would use the blog to get the text out there…

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So, lets return to where we began this morning.  Does the painting that puts Jesus in the center of our national identity help or harm the cause of the Kingdom of God?  In my experience in God and politics conversations that I’ve had, many people truly believe that God has divinely foreordained the form of government in America.  I have heard people appeal to the Constitution and its amendments as though they are a moral supplement to the Bible.  I have friends who have made comments to me on several occasions about how the right to bear arms is an expression of Christian freedom.  Or some will start a conversation on some kind of ethical issue by saying, “but the constitution says…”  In other political circles, the conversations sometimes can become dangerous in that people can put all of their hope in government to solve the world’s problems.  But, as we have seen this morning, the New Testament clearly is careful not to align the Church with any nation or political ideology.  This is not to say that God doesn’t want governments to preserve order and justice in societies, but we must understand that all human governments are his accommodation to our broken world; never a path to his ideal plan for the cosmos.  When we place the cross and the flag too closely together [Read more...]

Filed Under: (Series) Jesus and Nationalism, Greg Boyd, Nationalism, Nonviolence, Politics, Roman Empire, Theology Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 22 Comments

Whose Kingdom, Which Lord? Jesus & Nationalism, part 4 (When 2 Empire's Collide)

May 26, 2010 By Kurt Willems 6 Comments

This is part four of a five part series on Jesus and Nationalism.  It reads as one fluid written sermon so you may want to read the rest of the series.  I have never spoken this sermon but figured I would use the blog to get the text out there…

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Now lets turn back to Luke chapter 2 for a moment.  We started with a question about if Caesar Augustus is important to the story that Luke is trying to tell us about Jesus’ birth.  What do we know based on verse 1 of this chapter?  We know that the great Emperor has decreed that the whole world must be counted.  This was an effort to make sure that the taxes could be taken with greater accuracy.  For those in Judea, like the parents of Jesus, this was simply a reminder of the poverty and suffering of their people because of the Roman Empire.

And think about Caesar Augustus again.  Remember the announcement about his birthday that we read earlier that dated to 9 BC?  Lets look at it one last time and see if anything starts to come together for us about the first birthday of Jesus. [Read more...]

Filed Under: (Series) Jesus and Nationalism, Greg Boyd, Kingdom of God, Nationalism, Nonviolence, Politics, Powers, Roman Empire, Theology Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , 6 Comments

Whose Kingdom, Which Lord? Jesus & Nationalism, part 3 (Give to Caesar What is Caesar's?)

May 24, 2010 By Kurt Willems 65 Comments

This is part three of a five part series on Jesus and Nationalism.  It reads as one fluid written sermon so you may want to read the rest of the series.  I have never spoken this sermon but figured I would use the blog to get the text out there…

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And it is to a question regarding some of these particular kinds of coins that I want to shift our attention for a moment.  In Luke chapter 20 we read:

20 Keeping a close watch on him, they sent spies, who pretended to be sincere. They hoped to catch Jesus in something he said so that they might hand him over to the power and authority of the governor. 21 So the spies questioned him: “Teacher, we know that you speak and teach what is right, and that you do not show partiality but teach the way of God in accordance with the truth. 22 Is it right for us to pay taxes to Caesar or not?”

23 He saw through their duplicity and said to them, 24 “Show me a denarius. Whose image and inscription are on it?”
“Caesar’s,” they replied.

25 He said to them, “Then give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.”

26 They were unable to trap him in what he had said there in public. And astonished by his answer, they became silent.  Luke 20.20-26

Here Jesus is confronted with one of the most direct political questions that we see addressed in the entire New Testament.  Do the Israelites need to pay taxes to the Roman government that has set itself up as God?  How will Jesus answer this question?

What is important to understand about this situation is that Jesus finds himself in a difficult situation.  First of all, a strict observer of the Torah would not have even had the type of coin required for the tax because it had an image of the Caesar on it.  All such coins would have been considered to be a graven image.  But, they were of the impoverished and dominated peoples of the Roman Empire (all with the exception of the Jewish elite who had compromised their standards by becoming in “cahoots” with Rome so to speak), so what option did they have?  Jesus’ answer to “…give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s…” basically meant, [Read more...]

Filed Under: (Series) Jesus and Nationalism, Greg Boyd, Kingdom of God, Nationalism, Nonviolence, Politics, Powers, Roman Empire, Theology Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , 65 Comments

Whose Kingdom, Which Lord? Jesus & Nationalism, part 2 (Caesar Augustus and Empire)

May 19, 2010 By Kurt Willems 31 Comments

This is part two of a five part series on Jesus and Nationalism.  It reads as one fluid written sermon so you may want to read the rest of the series.  I have never spoken this sermon but figured I would use the blog to get the text out there…

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Earlier I had you turn to Luke chapter two which is the longest account we have in the bible of the birth of Jesus. Let’s read verse one together:

In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world.  Luke 2.1

Let’s stop there and ask a few questions.  First, who is Caesar Augustus?  What makes this figure so important that he gets mentioned in the same narrative as the birth of Jesus?  Second, why does this text mention the “Roman world?”  How is this significant in regards to Jesus’ situation when he is born?  Are these two references to Caesar and to Rome simply to mark a specific moment in history?  Perhaps, Luke wants to give us clues about when Jesus was born?  Based on the details in this chapter, it is quite easy to assume that this is his aim.  But what if there is something more to Luke’s method of writing than simply marking dates.  Maybe he is telling [Read more...]

Filed Under: (Series) Jesus and Nationalism, N. T. Wright, Nationalism, Nonviolence, Politics, Roman Empire, Sermon Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , 31 Comments
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