“God of the Past, Present and Future” 
The mightiest nation is subject to God
Sermon Preached by
The Reverend Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, June 29, 2003
Text: Micah 4:1-5
This week I received in the mail something I'd been looking forward to for a few weeks: a renewed copy of my British passport. I applied for it some weeks ago and with great expectation opened the envelope. My heartbeat sped when I saw the symbol on the front and my name on the cover. I felt for a moment - just for a moment - proud to be British. I put it away and pulled out my other passport - my Canadian passport - and I looked at that with equal, if not a little more glee, for it was given to me some four years ago. When I compared the photographs I preferred the one in the Canadian passport - a little more hair, looking considerably younger. In my British passport I look like I've just come out of Sing Sing! Why does that always happen to your photograph on formal documents?
As my heart leapt with joy about being a Canadian I thought back to that day when I sat before a citizenship judge and had to answer a myriad of questions that a new Canadian must, such as: “When did Newfoundland enter Confederation?” And, “Who was my Member of Parliament?” (In that order of importance, of course.) And then I just decided to do what all Englishmen do: I made a cup of tea (putting the milk in first), had a cucumber sandwich and watched a CFL game with Winnipeg playing Ottawa. And I felt: “I truly am a citizen of the world this day.”
As I looked at the Order of Service this morning, I thought what a telling statement it is about the nature of this great country: A Yorkshireman was reading the Scripture and a Lancastrian was preaching the sermon, two former enemies in a previous generation and time, sitting up here together, taking part in a worship service in this great, glorious and free land. It seems to symbolize what is good about this nation in which we live.
I thought of those people from my own land who throughout the ages have come to this particular country, and why they did so. In a wonderful book, “The History of Canadian Peoples,” there is a telling account of the 80,000 orphaned children who came to Canada from the United Kingdom. between 1860 and 1920. They did so because when they lost their parents there was no form of social support for them, no safety net to hold them. Rather than work as slave labour in the mills and mines, they made the decision to come to this country. Here they settled and found a new life and became part of a new and emerging and exciting nation. People, who had they stayed in their own land would have had little or no chance for success, little or no chance of advancement, came to the shores of Canada and found a new home and a peaceful place to live.
Just this week I went down to the Davenport/Perth area and visited “The Stop,” a drop-in centre for those in need, a place that this church supports financially and in other ways. I wandered around for an hour or so and met many of the people coming in to get food, counselling, support and encouragement. Nick Saul, the leader, said: “Do you realize that the people who come to us come from all over the world? Jamaicans, Portugese, Spanish - from all over - and they find a place of sustenance. Do you realize the struggles of these people when they come to this land? When they can't speak the language and get a job? When they're not able to advance themselves without a caring, helping hand? Many of them spend all the money that they earn simply paying their rent. It's hard to get ahead. And yet, when I look at what The Stop does, when I look at the generosity of people across the country, I sense that they are trying to support, nurture and encourage them, because they want to give them a hand-up, a way to be a Canadian, to be supported and strengthened and assisted.”
It really made me feel proud to be in this country and to see who had come here. Now, I want you to tuck that reality into the back of your mind for a moment. I want to go back in time some 2,700 years, to the time of the prophet Micah. In the passage that was read for us this morning, Micah was having a vision. It was a vision that was shared by another prophet - Isaiah, in Isaiah 40. It was a vision of the land of Judah being a gathering place for all nations, who would come from far and wide to worship at Mount Zion. They would bring with them their different ethnic backgrounds but would understand God's justice and righteousness. They would humble themselves before the God of Jacob. In other words, Jerusalem, Judah and Israel, too, would be a gathering place for people to know and understand and worship the living God. Micah said: “It shall come to pass in the latter days,” although he didn't define what he meant by the latter days. He said: “The people will come to know the power of God and the freedom and justice that is in God's heart.”
I want to look at that text this morning because I think it tells us a great deal about our sense of what a nation should be and, most especially, our sense of what God desires for the nations. First of all we must understand that to understand the past and draw it into the present is a very difficult thing to do.
Recently, I went to see “My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” and what a joy it was. Don't you all, after having seen it, want to be Greek? That's what I found. There is a very telling line in this movie, where Tula, who for those of you who don't know is the central figure, is about to get married and is having a conversation with her brother. As she is struggling with marrying a non-Greek man and keeping her Greek heritage her brother utters these words: “Tula, don't let your past dictate who you are, but carry it with you into the future.”
The more I thought of that phrase, and what he was trying to tell her, the more I saw that the same is true for the way in which we should appropriate the past and our past religious history in the present and into the future.
In other words, we can't duplicate right here and now the vision that Micah had of that kingdom and Jerusalem; 2,700 years have elapsed since then. But, we must take the lessons that we have learned with us as we go into the future. Indeed, in many ways Micah lived in a time of a theocracy - the rule of religious people over all others. Even the great king Hezekiah was still seen to rule on behalf of God. Micah was saying that this was the way things should be. The ruler should understand that God is sovereign.
Throughout 2,000 years of Christian history we have understood the same thing in the way that we look at Christendom and the way we look at theocracies. I was reading just recently the words of Joan of Ark who went so far as to say: “All those who fight against the holy kingdom of France fight against the Lord Jesus Christ.” In other words, the two were synonymous. The two kingdoms had become one. Even the great Milton, whose poetry was put to beautiful music this morning, went a little too far down that road and said: “The English are the ones who have been chosen before everyone else.” (Hardly something to which I should subscribe these days!) There has been a belief that there is a divine right of kings, a divine right of nations, to rule and that their rule is synonymous with the rule of God.
We saw the danger of this, did we not, just a decade ago with the Serbians who brought in some people from the Orthodox church to substantiate their oppression of the Bosnians and for the people of Kosovo. There is a sense in which religion and the nation are almost tied together and that the will of one is synonymous with the will of the other.
Micah wasn't actually saying that. He wasn't looking at a time when Israel, the nation, would subjugate all the other nations and force them to understand the will of God. What he was saying, and this is a clear distinction, was that God will still remain sovereign over all the nations even if all the nations don't realize it themselves. That God is sovereign, even if a nation that is deemed to represent that sovereign God is not in an absolute position of power. It is the sovereignty of God, then, not the sovereignty of the nation and God. Therein lies the difference.
If we understand that as the lesson we need to learn from the past, what do we learn from Micah in the present?
Micah looks at the state of his nation in his own time, and recognizes a number of things. First of all, he recognizes that all the nations that have preceded Israel have come and gone in their power. Whether it was the Canaanites, the power of Pharoah or the Egyptians, nations come and go. Their positions of ascendancy, their empires ebb and flow. What was the great Hapsburg Empire at one point is no more. The British Empire as it was at the time of Victoria is no more. Empires come and go, they ebb and flow, their power peaks and wanes. So too, does the influence of countries and nations. Nations will at one moment, or one decade, or one century, be powerful and all-consuming and then a wall will fall down, an empire will crumble or an ideology will be questioned, as happened with the Soviet Union.
We have seen this happen so many times and Micah understood that reality. All the prophets understood that reality. Even their own great nation, even this lion, Judah could someday, he saw, lose its power if it didn't recognize the sovereignty of God. And so, in this great prophecy, he looks at the nation around him and is upset and worried because it has become morally bankrupt. It has become soft and unjust in the way that it has treated its weakest and poorest. It is essentially in the process of turning its back on the one thing, the one God, who can protect and preserve it - the sovereign Lord of history. Micah's heart is torn because he knows that God's law is incontrovertible. He knows that God cannot be mocked and yet he loves his people and nation. He looks at what is taking place and his heart hurts.
The vision that he has of the future is that this nation that is currently in a state of decline will someday be a place where all nations will know God. He has a vision that peace will reign, that people will be able to put away the instruments of war, that God's justice and righteousness will prevail and the people will come to the land and know and love it. Even in the spirit of those who had lived in the exile and had been in foreign lands, his was a peaceful vision of all the nations living together equitably, fairly and with justice. Sometimes, my friends, even those who believe in the sovereignty of God and even those who love their land are deeply troubled by what they hear and see.
One of the poets who has influenced me so much is G.K. Chesterton. He was a man who loved God and loved his country. Oh, did he love his country. Almost obsessively so at times, but not uncritically. He looked at the state of people who were living in spiritual poverty in London, those who were living empty lives, even though they were accumulating great wealth, and he wrote this incredible poem, a judgement on England:
Ill fares the land to hastening woes of prey,
where wealth accumulates and men decay.
So rang of old a noble voice in vain,
Or the last peasants wandering on the plain.
Doom has reversed the riddle and the rhyme,
While sinks the commerce reared upon that crime.
The thriftless towns little with lives undone,
To whom our madness left no joy but one.
An irony that glares like judgement day,
Sees men accumulate and wealth decay.
You see, even those who love their land, can still pray for it to be better, can still pray that the land, as great as it may be, remains accountable to God. Which leads us into the future. I've thought a great deal about the future recently, because in many ways the future for our nation is a drift away from what has historically been known as Christendom.
I recall a lecture by Alan MacEachern, the former Liberal finance minister. He was talking about the role between faith and politics. He said: “In Canada we have never had an amendment in our constitution that separates the church from the state. It has sort of been a given that the church and the state remain separate and that through our policies, through the way that we've governed ourselves, that is the way that it has been.” Now, not everyone has wanted that. Some have wanted religion to play no role in the thoughts and the minds of politicians, which of course is not true. Others have suggested that all politicians should be accountable to all religious leaders all the time - another extreme position that would really worry me, because I couldn't stand the pressure.
There is a sense in our country that the two have to a large extent been kept separate and that is the way that we move ahead. The danger, however, is that we forget that even if we separate them (which I believe we rightly should), and even if we are not ruling the nation with a theocracy (which we must never do), all nations are accountable to God. A lot of people, unfortunately, look at religious leaders, Christians and the Christian community as a whole as a nasty, judgemental group that are looking for sin under every bush and getting excited and angry about it.
It reminds me of the story about a Christian lady who bought a parrot because she was lonely. The store owner said: “The parrot has a bit of a history. He used to live in a bar, so there may be the odd word that will offend, but don't worry about it.”
So she brought the parrot home and they got along very well. The parrot expanded its vocabulary with words like: “Praise the Lord” and “Alleluia” and “amen.” This parrot was tremendous until one day the woman forgot to feed him. All of a sudden this string of expletives came out. The woman realized that she couldn't let this happen again, so she said to the parrot: “I'm sorry, but you're not allowed to do that again. I'm going to cool you off a little bit.” She put the parrot into the freezer for about two minutes.
She brought the chilled parrot out and it said: “I got the message, I got the message. Jesus loves me. Praise the Lord.”
On they went for another six months until she once again forgot to feed him. The parrot again spouted this long list of expletives. She said: “This is terrible! I'm putting you back in the freezer for a couple of minutes.”
She did. The doorbell rang, someone was trying to sell her something. After a while she realized she'd left the parrot in the freezer. She ran back saying, “Oh, Lord, forgive me” and pulled the parrot out of the freezer. The parrot was just shaking, absolutely shaking. She said: “Did you get the message?”
He said: “Yes, I got the message.”
She said: “Will you ever do that again?”
He said: “No, I'll never do that again. But what I want to know is what on earth did that turkey say to you?”
Our whole religious realm is seen to have that kind of nasty vindictive way of looking at things. That is not the vision that Micah had at all. He had a sense of judgement, yes, but he knew that for the nation to be great it must first of all understand and appreciate that it was under the sovereignty of God and ultimately accountable to God. As we move into the future that is something I believe that Christians can point to and point to vigorously, and like Micah, point to lovingly, but point to humbly as well. To do that we ourselves must know God's word. We ourselves must have a deep appreciation of God's word in our lives.
It's no good expecting nations to listen just for the sake of listening, if we ourselves haven't taken the time to listen. This summer take the time to read the Scriptures, immerse yourself in the Word. Know what it says. Know how the story unfolds, for indeed it might not dictate to us the state of our nation right now, but it is something that we will take with us into our future. Micah believed this with all his heart and at the end of his prophecy, in the final verses, he wrote these words in tribute to the God of the nations. These words I leave you, with for they are not mine: “Who is a God like you, who pardons sins and forgives the transgression of the remnant of His inheritance? You do not stay angry forever, but delight to show mercy. You will again have compassion on us, you will tread our sins underfoot and hurl our iniquities into the depths of the sea. But you will be true to Jacob and show mercy to Abraham as you pledged an oath to our forefathers in days long ago.” This is the God of the past and the present and the future. Amen.
This is a verbatim transcription of the original sermon.