We are not yet where we were meant to be. Thank God the journey is not over in 1976. Corny as it may sound, we are pilgrims. Yes, we're pilgrims in search of yet another city. One we have never known. A city which the scriptures describe as one with true foundations, whose builder and architect is God. Therefore, no Christian can take place or time he has known as one's final destination. Rather, we open ourselves up to the Lord of life, who is offering us no less than a new future. This should be a marvelous and compelling prospect. But for most of us, we must confess it is not. For it calls for the kind of radical decision that we are not used to make a decision like that of Abraham, leaving behind things we consider essential, like traditions, accomplishments, possessions and positions.
It is particularly difficult to be like Abraham in the United States of America in 1976, is it not? Our national loyalties are so deeply permeated by notions of divine election, that to be like Abraham, with respect to our number one country looks like disloyalty, apostasy, even treason. Is it not true that for 200 years, we have been talking as though the City of God were under construction somewhere between Canada and Mexico? For confirmation, we can recall the speeches and prayers of our latest Thanksgiving Day, or the most recent patriotic celebration. Do you remember what we heard? Yes, once again, we heard that the city of God was rising somewhere along the historic shores of Virginia and New England, or the fertile plains of the Midwest, or the industrial beehive of California, or the majestic forests of the Northwest, or the oil rich fields of Texas, or the technocratic megalopolis, now reaching from Boston to Washington, DC, or even the atomic installations of New Mexico and Tennessee. That's where the city of God we have been told, is rising.
Is it any surprise, therefore, that we find it so very hard as American Christians to believe that God may have another location in mind for the building of his city? In spite of all the disclaimers, we continue to gauge the human fulfillment of any other people in terms of how far or how closely they parallel the accomplishments of our affluent American majority. It is no coincidence that we are the coiners of the terminology, development under development. We had no question as to which term characterized us and which characterized them. It is such arrogance that explains why the Third World explains increasingly its quest, not so much in terms about development, as in terms of human fulfillment.
But I resist the counter arrogance, domestic or foreign, which assigns to the American people today, a monopoly on human evil. No, we are no more evil than anyone else. In fact, the case could be made that we are slightly better than most other people, not because of any inherent virtue, but because we have been given much. Now, this is the crux of our problem. In practice, we are more evil than we realize, because of this persistent illusion that ours is, in some way, citizenship in the city of God and therefore, we go on uncritically imposing our power and institutions, by force if necessary, on others because we know best. How can they possibly be fulfilled? We ask. Apart from some imitation of the way we do things in this country.
Not surprisingly, we are outraged when fellow Americans like Martin Luther King, or Cesar Chavez or Vine Deloria remind us we are a long way off the mark. By the same token we are terribly offended when rather than regarding us as humankind's best hope. Much of the world today looks upon us as a threat to its longings, its lands, and even its lives.
We meant well, we really did, how could it have all come to this frightful contradiction, we ask. When we American Christians speak of that word, so popular today liberation, perhaps we should think first of the liberation of ourselves. And I really mean the liberation from our pretensions to superiority. I am convinced that our brothers and sisters of Asia, Africa, Latin America, and of the oppressed US minorities, will take care of their own liberation, whether we want it or not. I would rather want us to begin first, our process of liberation by breaking the bondage of that illusion during God's grace, we have been elected to provide the model according to which the rest of humankind will refashion itself. I can hardly think of anything more pleasing to God, or more beneficial for the rest of the world than for us finally to acknowledge that our messianic pretensions have been fed at the expense of diminishing or even destroying those who were not like us.
God's word from the passage in Hebrews we have just read could be a truly liberating word for us in 1976. And in the years to come. It is couched in very strange language, in language which is very difficult for modern American ears to hear. It is the language of sacrifice, the language of pilgrimage. But no liberation ever came apart from the grasp of a demanding vision. Here, the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews presents us with a radical alternative, to follow Jesus into a new future of promise, or to decline his leading in favor of a wilting preservation of things as they are. In this passage, Jesus appears on our behalf as both priest and offering before God's presence to make perfect intercession for us. Reenacting the Great Day of Atonement. He makes himself responsible for individual and collective sin, gaining for us a new status. Thanks to him, we are no longer separated from God or neighbor. Because that sin which held us captive to self-interest, disdain for others, or pretending to be better than we really are, is a sin that has finally been vanquished by the Divine human person of Jesus of Nazareth.
This affirmation in itself is strange to modern ears. In spite of all its mystery, is the one affirmation on which we can open ourselves to the future with unshakable confidence, because it is no longer our future, but God's future. Its appropriation, however, does not cease to be an Abrahamic one, this time with a supreme difference. The one who goes before us does not leave our destination in question, for he is our destination. It is His presence that makes the location of the City of God and actual experience. And where is he? And where does he lead us? The Epistle to the Hebrews read today says outside the camp.
What does outside the camp mean? Well, you will recall that the tent containing the Holy of Holies was placed in the midst of the camp. God made Himself uniquely present in the Holy of Holies. And the people naturally assumed that everything around it became sacred by association. There God had been known as the liberator of human captivity to sin, a bullock was sacrificed for the sin of the priest, a goat for the sin of the people. The burning carcasses symbolically extinguishing sin were thrown outside the camp. Therefore the camp became the realm of disinfected security while everything outside took on the character of infected lostness.
No one can blame the insiders for the temptation to confuse their religious activism with active obedience. Nor can anyone forget that the outsiders were left to go on as though neither God or neighbor was for them. Thank God he had something else in mind. Jesus lived and died as an outsider in solidarity with all outsiders. He also rose to new life among outsiders bringing with his resurrection hours of liberation against which no evil force could ultimately play triumph. The clue is inescapable. If we too are to share in His resurrected humanity, it is time to go outside whatever camp keeps us from His pilgrim presence, that camp maybe for you and me, comfort, security, status, prestige, structure, or even religion.
The prize cannot be romanticized. We are to share Christ's shame in the world. Dietrich Bonhoeffer comes to mind, he could see one basic difference and only one between Christians and pagans, the Christian shared consciously the sufferings of God in the world. This means we shall challenge aggressively and lovingly, anyone or anything that keeps our fellow outsiders from the divine gift of a holy and a whole humanity.
My revolutionary friends perhaps should heed at this point, the words of the celebrated guerrilla fighter martyred in Bolivia. He said, unless the revolutionary is moved by deep feelings of love, he may be the next oppressor. For a Christian, certain kinds of aggressive, unloving opposition are not optional. To follow Jesus outside the camp, inescapably implies opposition to racial bigotry, to economic oppression, to unjust government, to irresponsible investments, to brutalizing prisons, to the abuse of legal power, and to religious exclusivism. To oppose all of these forms of inhumanity is both to follow Jesus, as well as to discern the signs of the City of God and meet the cities and towns where we live.
This is what makes the Christian pilgrimage a constant experience of thanksgiving in the midst of suffering and rejection. Let us not miss the note of suffering and rejection. It is impossible to conceive of a Christian a congregation or a fellowship of churches opposing for Jesus opposes, without a constant measure of suffering and rejection. But we don't have to be long faced. The author of Hebrews witnesses to the joy of this pilgrimage in recalling that for God, nothing is more pleasing than the praise of thanksgiving. The writer assumes that those who have been liberated from the hole of the past, or the fascination of the present, are grateful for a new beginning, that they can turn the leaf, that they can get on with the business of living for tomorrow. He assumes also that only those who claim nothing as their own but receive everything as God's gift are at last free to be for others. Therefore, he closes on a note of generosity. Do not forget to do good, and to help one another. For this also pleases God.
My dear fellow Christians, let us go outside the camp. That is really where the promise lies. Let us not remain in it, glorifying the past or apologizing for it. Let us not go on beating our guilt-ridden breasts over failures which are now passed, which are precisely for that reason in the business of Jesus's perfect intercession for us. Instead, let us assume on his responsibility for the consequences of those failures, not because we are condemned by them, but because Jesus Christ now liberates us to deal with them as a challenge to a more responsible future.
Christ Jesus has given us a new beginning. Here on Earth have we no lasting city. Instead with Him we are pilgrims looking yet for another city. Amen.