This July, we celebrate the 250th anniversary of our country’s founding. Did you know Bethesda was founded just over 125 years ago?(Dec. 1900) Big milestones, indeed, for two of the most significant gifts in our life together! This anniversary, on the heels of my recent trip to our nation’s capital, has me mindful of these gifts of God.
I desire to thank, praise, and serve God as a member of his church and as a citizen of our free country. I want to distinguish thoughtfully and carefully between these two gifts, to receive them for the good and different purposes for which God intended them. I pray not to mix them too closely, nor to keep them at arm’s length as if the church lived in a disconnected world of “Bible stories.” God has a word for us today. God’s living and creative word speaks to life as we know it on the ground.
Martin Luther talks most directly about the blessing of good government in his explanation of the fourth petition of the Lord’s Prayer in this Small Catechism: “Daily bread includes… devout and faithful rulers, good government, good weather, peace, health.” The first observation to make is that good government is a gift from God, and it is something for which we ought to pray. The first objection one could make is that God has not seemed to provide good government in all times and places. What do we make of this?
Our Lord Jesus came to establish a kingdom “not of this world.” Israel was warned about the tragic trade-offs when demanding a king to rule over them. The New Testament Church was urged to live peaceably with the established authorities and to pray for all in high positions. Taken together, and at the risk of oversimplification, we can observe the scriptures do not sanctify one God-given form of government.
Rather, God exercises his authority among the earthly kingdoms in varied ways, working through the “power of the sword” to curb sin and its natural consequences, and to nurture the proper conditions for life to flourish. But God’s instrument of salvation is not the government, nor even the highest forms of the institutional church. The power of salvation is the gospel of Jesus Christ. The Word of Christ brings a new Kingdom into the midst of the old on the lips of prophets, pastors, the weak and suffering, children and saints alike.
I find wisdom in Benjamin Franklin’s view that religion flourishes in purity without govt. aid. “When a Religion is good, I conceive that it will support itself; and, when it cannot support itself, and God does not take care to support, so that its Professors are oblig’d to call for the help of the Civil Power, it is a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one.”
I’m grateful to God to raise my family in this free country, and I pray for America in her ongoing struggle for equality, life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I also thank God for the gift of his church and the particular witness of the Lutheran heritage that delivers Christ and his mercy daily and abundantly.
Shalom, Pastor Tom