{"id":4693,"date":"2015-11-11T06:08:45","date_gmt":"2015-11-11T13:08:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/paperbacktheology\/?p=4693"},"modified":"2015-11-11T06:08:45","modified_gmt":"2015-11-11T13:08:45","slug":"walter-rauschenbuschs-gospel-of-the-kingdom-of-god-a-sermon-for-all-saints-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/paperbacktheology\/2015\/11\/walter-rauschenbuschs-gospel-of-the-kingdom-of-god-a-sermon-for-all-saints-day.html","title":{"rendered":"Walter Rauschenbusch’s Gospel of the Kingdom of God: A Sermon for All Saints Day"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"saints.001\"<\/a>Every year my church spends the month of November\u00a0studying the lives of four different saints. Typically I only hear the name Walter Rauschenbusch when it precedes a misleading\u00a0caricature of the Social Gospel movement.\u00a0Here\u2019s my attempt to commend this great saint to the church.<\/p>\n

In one of my favorite seminary courses we were assigned the book\u00a0A Theology for the Social Gospel<\/em>, by Walter Rauschenbusch. I had never heard of Rauschenbusch, so my plan was to hurry through it so I could get on to Karl Barth or Reinhold Niebuhr, guys I cared about. But, the book so captured\u00a0my imagination that I read everything of Rauschenbusch I could get my hands on. I even wrote\u00a0my first book, in part, as an attempt to reinterpret Rauschenbusch\u00a0from\u00a0a post-liberal point of view. [An Evangelical Social Gospel?<\/em><\/a>]<\/p>\n

Walter\u00a0Rauschenbusch\u2019s family came from Germany in the mid 1800s. Six generations of Rauschenbusch men before him had been pastors including his father August, who moved to America & converted to the Baptist Denomination (not exactly pleasing his German Lutheran family). Walter was the first Rauschenbusch to be born in America (1861), and he grew up in Rochester, NY. His father was a professor at the Baptist Seminary. His mother and father were living in what was, by all accounts, an extremely unhappy marriage. In fact, when Walter was four\u00a0years old his mother took\u00a0the kids to Germany without her husband, where they stayed for four years. They returned when Walter was eight years old, so that he could begin school.By that time he was already comfortable speaking & reading both German and English.<\/p>\n

Walter was a really smart kid, creative & curious. At age sixteen\u00a0he became quite serious about his faith in God, & from then on it was assumed he was headed for the ministry. When he finished high school, his father took him to Germany to The Gymnasium at Gutersloh<\/em>. German prep schools were so rigorous that graduation was considered equivalent to a bachelor\u2019s degree in America. Usually boys would enter at age nine, & graduate at age eighteen. Walter began at age fourteen, thus he was quite far behind at the outset.<\/p>\n

Rauschenbusch, however, was an incredibly\u00a0hard-worker, and he threw himself into his studies. By his senior year he was first in his class. He came home to go to Seminary, and once again graduated at the top of his class in 1886. When he did, he had his pick of ministry assignments. Larger English-speaking Baptist churches wanted him to pastor. Colleges wanted him on their faculty. Fresh out of seminary himeself, the Baptist seminary in India recruited him to be their new president.<\/p>\n

Rauschenbusch surprised everyone when he turned them all down, and took a job as the pastor of a small German speaking congregation, Second Baptist Church, in the Hell\u2019s Kitchen neighborhood of New York City. Today the neighborhood is\u00a0the gentrified home to stars like Madonna and Seinfeld. Back then it was the worst slum in the city, the seedy underbelly of Manhattan ripe\u00a0with prostitution, gambling, gangs, and violence. Rauschenbusch one said it had more saloons that churches. If you\u2019ve ever seen Gangs of New York<\/em>, it\u2019s set in the same time, and an adjoining neighborhood.<\/p>\n

Most of the German immigrants lived in Hell\u2019s Kitchen, and worked in the garment industry turning their cramped apartments into small factories sewing and assembling dresses to take to the foreman who would find a nit-picky reason not to pay full price. Anyone who argued too much would be fire, since there were hundreds of people ready to take their job. Those who worked in factories had it worse. At the time, the U.S. had highest rate of industrial injuries in the world. On average, 35,000 people a year\u00a0died at work, with little or no compensation and often no punishment when employers were at fault.<\/p>\n

Most immigrants worked 60 hours a week for eight to ten dollars a week\u2013not nearly enough to live on\u2013but that was okay since there was a good possibility you would die before your disappointing paycheck came. To make ends meet families would often take on borders to share their tenement apartments. Often two full families (10-12 people) would cram into these dark, overpriced, 3-room apartments. Landlords were bound by no laws & took horrible advantage of renters. They could evict people for\u00a0no reason at any time, without warning, so, of course the immigrants put up with the rats & mice & bugs & diseases that spread so quickly & killed so many\u2026 especially\u00a0the children. Nearly 70% of all deaths in the tenements were children five years old and under.<\/p>\n

Few people\u00a0cared about the immigrants. They were cheap labor, that\u2019s all, and their lives were expendable.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve all heard of the famous first voyage of the Titanic that sank in 1912, killing 1500 people. A decade earlier the Steamship Slocum caught fire just off Manhattan while carrying 1500 German Lutherans heading to a church picnic. The lifeboats had been\u00a0wired in place, and life preservers were rotted & useless. Over 1000 German immigrants died that day. Why have we never heard of that disaster? Because they were all poor, and they were all immigrants. The company who ran the vessel wasn\u2019t even punished for their negligence.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the world Walter Rauschenbusch faced. This wet-behind-the-ears seminary graduate waded into the deep end of the pool & became the pastor of Hell\u2019s Kitchen\u2019s Second\u00a0Baptist Church, a job which meant a lot of things you might not normally associate with that role.<\/p>\n

Rauschenbusch was more than just a preacher to his congregation. He was often asked to be an unofficial lawyer, or counselor, and interpreter, advisor & representative. When his parishioners needed help, they couldn\u2019t call a lawyer because they didn\u2019t have the money. They couldn\u2019t call the police because they were corrupt. They only had two real options: call the gangs, or call the pastor. Walter did much more than just preside over weddings & funerals. He was intimately involved in the\u00a0lives of his parishioners, bearing their burdens as he was interpreting for them, advising them, and helping them navigate a culture that was foreign to them.<\/p>\n

This mean that, on a daily basis, this upper middle class whiz kid who had been given every advantage found himself face to face with grinding poverty and infuriating injustice. The problems his people faced\u00a0broke his heart, made him mad, and eventually messed with his theology.<\/p>\n

What made the poverty & injustice even more absurd was that, just a few blocks uptown, New York\u2019s high society was living in lavish affluence. This was the era of the Robber Barons. There were no labor unions, safety regulations, or child labor laws, and there was a huge disparity between rich & poor. The rich were completely insulated from the lower class. They were living in the same city, but they were in two different worlds.<\/p>\n

Rauschenbusch did all he could for his people, but the way\u00a0society was organized, he found there wasn\u2019t much he could do to change their situation.<\/p>\n

He told story of a woman in his church whose husband was run over by a streetcar & killed. It was the streetcar driver\u2019s fault, so the company offered her $100 compensation for her loss. The amount would barely cover the cost of a funeral. Rauschenbusch went to the company on the woman\u2019s\u00a0behalf & asked for more\u00a0money. They told him that $5K was the legal limit, but the streetcars killed so many people in Manhattan\u00a0everyday that they\u2019d go bankrupt if they paid that much to each family. If they wanted more money, they\u2019d have to sue to get it. The woman lacked the money for a lawsuit, and it wouldn\u2019t have mattered anyway, because the company had plenty of\u00a0judges on the payroll. In the end, gave her a hundred dollars\u00a0in $1 bills to make it look like more money.<\/p>\n

Rauschenbusch wasn\u2019t used to bearing these injustices, but\u00a0now faced\u00a0them everyday. He saw how those who ran the systems didn\u2019t care about those on the bottom, and he felt he had to do something\u2014he just didn\u2019t know what. So, he began by writing for newspapers, and telling people\u2019s stories.<\/p>\n

He told one story about a tailor whose daughter was dying of consumption (T.B.). For months the man had worked all day, then hurried home to spend all night rocking his dying\u00a0daughter.\u00a0Already\u00a0exhausted & heartbroken, he knew that\u00a0she was only getting worse. He left for work that morning knowing his daughter would die that day, but he couldn\u2019t stay with her because his boss promised to fire him if he didn\u2019t come in to work.<\/p>\n

Rauschenbusch wrote this in\u00a0a newspaper article, and he told his readers that the next time they found\u00a0themselves annoyed with the man who was\u00a0altering their\u00a0suit because he didn\u2019t\u00a0speak perfect English, or wasn\u2019t working fast enough to suit them, maybe they should check & see if he\u2019s choking back tears because his little girl was about to die, and he was stuck at work fitting rich people with new suits of clothes.<\/p>\n

Rauschenbusch wrote scores of articles like this, & they had an impact. He\u00a0was kind of an anomaly\u2014at home with the immigrants in the tenements, speaking German & living in squalor\u2014but as part of the clerical class, he was also educated, well traveled, and comfortable rubbing shoulders with society\u2019s elite. He & his wife maintained a close friendship with Aura & John D. Rockefeller for years. As Rauschenbusch navigated these two worlds he realized that the gospel he preached was of little use in either situation. Typically, both\u00a0the poor and the rich considered themselves to be Christians.<\/p>\n

When he preached a gospel of personal salvation to the poor, he felt as if\u00a0he was saying, \u201cI know your life is miserable right now, but everything will be ok when you finally die.\u201d It seemed cruel, and did nothing to offer them hope for today.<\/p>\n

When he preached personal salvation to the rich, felt like saying, \u201cYour callousness & indifference to the poor people living just down the street doesn\u2019t matter. You\u2019re ticket\u2019s punched for heaven, so you\u2019re good.\u201d It seemed careless, and did nothing to call them to account for how they treated the vulnberable.<\/p>\n

A theological crisis occurred in his mind. If the gospel was good news at all, it had to be good news to the woman who\u2019s husband was killed by the streetcar, & the man whose boss wouldn\u2019t let him stay with his dying daughter. It had to call the rich to do more for the poor. So Rauschenbusch dug into the scriptures, and for years he immersed himself in the lives of the people and the teachings of Jesus in the bible.<\/p>\n

He noticed that the gospel of personal conversion<\/em> was not something Jesus seemed overly concerned with. Look for yourself. Jesus hardly ever talked about it personal salvation. There was, however, nearly always a social dimension to the teachings of Jesus. He meant for the gospel to change the situation for those who were suffering and living on the margins of culture.<\/p>\n

When John the Baptist was in prison and he realized he was probably going to die, he sent his followers to as Jesus to see if Jesus\u00a0was really the Messiah. It\u2019s like he was saying, \u201cI\u2019m about to die for you\u2026 tell me you know what you are doing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jesus\u2019s answer was anything but straight forward. \u201cGo tell John what you hear and see: that\u00a0the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news [euangellion<\/em>] brought to them.\u201d<\/p>\n

John\u2019s question was, \u201cAre you the Messiah.\u201d Are you the king of Israel? Are you the one to bring the KOG to earth?<\/p>\n

Jesus\u2019 answer was: if the blind receive sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor receive good news, then you know God\u2019s kingdom is coming.<\/p>\n

Rauschenbusch began to see that for Jesus,\u00a0the Gospel and the coming of the kingdom of God (God reigning in all the earth) were\u00a0one and the same. He noticed the word Kingdom or kingdom of God appeared 162 in the New Testament, usually on the lips of Jesus himself. He noticed John the Baptist\u00a0preached about the\u00a0kingdom. Jesus preached about\u00a0the kingdom. The Apostle Paul preached about the kingdom. Jesus told his followers to preach about the kingdom.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0lights went on for Rauschenbusch, and he saw the words\u00a0\u201cthy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven\u201d contained much more power than just how to get into heaven when you die. He wrote, \u201cChrist\u2019s conception of the kingdom of God came to me as a new revelation. Here was the idea and purpose that had dominated the mind of the Master himself. All his teachings center about it. His life was given to it. His death was suffered for it. When a man has once seen that in the Gospels, he can never unsee it again.\u201d<\/p>\n

So when we read a text like our story for today from John 13, with an eye toward Jesus\u2019s\u00a0teaching about the kingdom, we see things we didn\u2019t used to see:<\/p>\n

\u201cJesus knew the Father had put him in complete charge of everything, that he came from God and was on his way back to God.\u201d The beginning of this famous scene is a kingdom claim. Jesus is claiming that he\u2019s in complete charge of everything. Who\u2019s in charge of everything? Only a king. Once you see that you can\u2019t unsee it.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe got up from the supper table, set aside his robe, and put on an apron. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the feet of the disciples, drying them with his apron. When he got to Simon Peter, Peter said, \u201cMaster, you wash my feet?\u201d Jesus answered, \u201cYou don\u2019t understand now what I\u2019m doing, but it will be clear enough to you later.\u201d Peter persisted, \u201cYou\u2019re not going to wash my feet, ever!\u201d Jesus said, \u201cIf I don\u2019t wash you, you can\u2019t be part of what I\u2019m doing.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Jesus\u00a0has just claimed kingship, yet he\u2019s doing the job of the servant. This is fascinating to me. Jesus\u2019s\u00a0kingship is best expressed through servant hood. The washing of feet was a symbolic cleansing. Jesus told\u00a0Peter\u2014this is where it all starts. You have to let me do for you what you can\u2019t do for yourself.<\/p>\n

\u201c<\/i>After he had finished washing their feet, he took his robe, put it back on, and went back to his place at the table. You address me as \u2018Teacher\u2019 and \u2018Master,\u2019 and rightly so. That is what I am. So if I, the Master and Teacher, washed your feet, you must now wash each other\u2019s feet. I\u2019ve laid down a pattern for you. What I\u2019ve done, you do. If you understand what I\u2019m telling you, act like it. And you\u2019ll find peace.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Jesus changes back into the clothes of the teacher & he says: here\u2019s your lesson; j<\/em>ust as I washed your feet, so you wash each other\u2019s feet.\u00a0I\u2019ve laid down the pattern for you & the pattern is servanthood. If you do this, you\u2019ll find peace.<\/em><\/p>\n

Here he doesn\u2019t mean inner peace. He means shalom<\/em>: the right ordering of your life, not just personally, but socially & relationally. Your common life will be rightly ordered when you serve one another.<\/p>\n

The gospel of the KOG is not just about your personal salvation, although it\u2019s certainly about that. It\u2019s about human communities, & the way we organize our common life together. Jesus wants to redeem the systems of the world: economic, social, political, judicial, governmental, educational, and so on. He wants it all. Rauschenbusch discovered what the great Dutch church & political leader Abraham Kuyper had said:<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, Mine!\u201d<\/p>\n

Jesus looks at everything that is & says, \u201cMine. I want all of it. I want to bring all of it back into right relationship\u00a0to God.\u201d<\/p>\n

Walter Rauschenbusch\u00a0rediscovered this & he began to preach it powerfully. First, Jesus comes to us and washes us clean. Then we go to each other & we serve one another unselfishly. And all of this is gospel. All of this is the good news of kingdom of God. As we allow the way we organize our common life together to come under the Lordship of Jesus, the kingdom of God, we will begin to experience God\u2019s shalom,<\/em> God\u2019s peace, God\u2019s ordering of creation.<\/p>\n

Rauschenbusch kept right on talking about the aspect of the gospel that is personal\u2014the redemption from sin, being washed clean thru Christ. But, he also began talking about the aspect of the gospel that is social. The gospel is personal in that it\u2019s about your relationship with Jesus and the transformation of your life. The gospel is also social in that it\u2019s about how relate to one another, and how God has chosen to bring all of creation back under the Lordship of Jesus. Rauschenbusch believed that anytime we untether those two things, we lose the power of the gospel, because Jesus\u00a0is always at the nexus of those 2 things.<\/p>\n

The example I use in the book I wrote on Rauschenbusch, is how rocket engines function in space. Space is a vacuum. Since here\u2019s no oxygen, even the highly combustible rocket fuel they take with them won\u2019t burn. If you want your rockets to fire in space, you have to carry your own oxygen. The power to get home is in the nexus of the two things, the mixture of rocket fuel and oxygen. The Gospel is like that. There\u2019s a personal dimension between\u00a0you & God, and there\u2019s a social dimension between all of humanity and\u00a0God, and between the systems of the world and the Lord who wants to redeem them. The power of the gospel is in holding those two together. If you lose one or the other, you lose the power because that\u2019s where Jesus is. Rauschenbusch wrote,<\/p>\n

\u201cWhoever uncouples the religious and the social life has not understood Jesus. Whoever sets any bounds for the reconstructive power of the religious life over the social relations and institutions of men, to that extent denies the faith of the Master.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We can\u2019t separate our private faith, from our public life. They have to stay connected, or the gospel loses its power. Our faith cannot simply be\u00a0private, because the kingdom of God is about all of life.<\/p>\n

Whereas before he would talk about personal sin. Now he talked about the realities of social sins as well. He called\u00a0people out for the way they treated the poor. He was fearless. From labor unions to political parties, government agencies to corporations, Rauschenbusch confronted anyone who selfishly served their own interests. He called them to serve the common good, and told them: There is no turning to God without a turning toward each other; there is no turning toward each other without turning first to God<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Whereas before he talked about the person in relation to God. Now he talked about social groups in relation to God as well. He drew heavily upon the prophets of Israel, and the way the prophets often described Israel as single entity who sinned together, suffered together & repented together. One of the ideas he popularized was that social entities are much more powerful than individuals. Groups impact society much more than persons.<\/p>\n

Social groups have a more widespread influence than any one person. A Social groups lifespan outstretches a single person\u2019s life. Social groups don\u2019t cease to exist if a few members die, or leave, making them more impervious to criticism than individuals. (You want to leave our group? Fine. We\u2019ve got so many members we\u2019ll keep right on trucking.) Social groups have tremendous power to change behaviors. They can actually make good people do bad things. We see this in things like the Rwandan Genocide, where individuals who wouldn\u2019t\u00a0think of killing another person did so when asked by a group. Rauschenbusch thought that when social entities go bad it\u2019s actually\u00a0much worse than when a person goes bad because groups have a bigger and longer lasting impact.<\/p>\n

Whereas before Rauschenbusch talked only about person salvation, now he talked about corporate salvation as well. By this he meant that it was possible for whole groups, corporations, even political parties and social organization to come under the Lordship of Jesus<\/em>. He thought this to be a good thing, because social groups also have the power to make bad people do good things. People who might never be generous or share, will actually take part in virtuous behaviors because the group calls it out of them.<\/p>\n

I see this all the time here at Redemption. On our own, none of us are really that holy, but we\u2019re part of this church that calls something better out of us. I\u2019m not that good on my own; but because of the goodness of the group, I\u2019ll do much more good than I would\u00a0when left to my own choices.<\/p>\n

As Rauschenbusch preached about the gospel of the kingdom, it took fire among Christians in the U.S. The church began to work for the common good. As churches became more involved in communities and public life, things begin to change. Many things that we take for granted today began in this movement<\/p>\n