Ours is a missionary calling. Members Christ's body are sent into
the world as aliens and ambassadors
to a foreign
culture. (Php 3:20; 2 Cor 5:20; 1 Pet 2:11) Let me state this negatively. We are not primarily administrators of Caesars domain. As most people in my subculture know, the
church is not a co-dependent arm of pan-theistic governing powers who stir up the mob with
the promise of bread and circus. The handouts
these powers impersonally offer shame their recipients and support a vicious bureaucracy
which is a cruel substitute for real covenantal presence in and with the poor. We get it, even if a large percentage of the
country does not.
Yet, neither is the one true and
universal Church of Christ a mob supporting a coercive insurgency—even
if that pagan insurgency pretends to champion some of our values, and
it won big yesterday. Jesus is not Bar
Kokhba trying to throw off the Roman establishment and make God’s chosen nation
great again. At the same time, Jesus is
most certainly not Constantine, who in a fragmenting world, chooses to double
down on the resentments of a culturally-Christian minority in order to prop up a newer version of an outdated regime. The results of yesterday suggest that that gig may be over,
anyway.
Again, primitive Christianity, if consumer
religion will let us be interested in such a thing, insists that Christians are
foreigners. The point is not merely
that our greatest loyalties ought not to lie with the host culture. Our
primary function is to be an embassy representing a different Kingdom. The point is that even if Christians are
granted the rights of Roman citizenship, our political engagement must be entered
into as if we are missionary diplomats, guests of Caesar’s regime, making
sensitive suggestions about how to love and die for saint and sinner alike. The church stands as an alternative temple to
competitive politics, exhibiting the power of personal engagement and deferential
love. This bears witness to the lordship
of the true King of all ethnicities who is busy, himself, personally welcoming
the stranger, personally coaching the poor, empowering men and honoring women, healing the sick, renouncing
coercion, and freeing the addicted of every nation. Christian politicians, if that expression is
not an oxymoron and an abandonment of our ambassadorial role, must seek the flourishing
of the whole rather than agitate stronger factions who intend to stick it to
the other sides.
This ought to be basic ecclesiology. But for those of us raised in the lap of Pharaoh,
it’s hard to stop defending our position as the sons of Pharaoh’s daughter, and
become a powerless ambassador for a nation of slaves.
