Powers and Principalities
March 16, 2003
By: Kendall Brown

Jesus was not the only person to have hungered in the wilderness.  The Israelites, many years earlier, were not the only people to have had their wilderness experience.  We are in a wilderness today.
With alert levels for terrorist threats confronting us on the news, and more and more stories about our movement towards another war in distant deserts, we are left hungering and thirsting.

Preparing for today, I found myself reflecting on the question, “If I had the luxury of just being in church as a worshipper this morning, for what would I be hungering and thirsting?”  I add a footnote here -that I just used the words “hungering and thirsting” very intentionally, instead of, and in place of “what would I like to hear this morning.”   I fear the Gospel is too infrequently heard these days because we are too much in tune with what we would like to hear and not in touch enough with the deeper longings of the soul for which hunger and thirst are the more appropriate metaphors to articulate inner and spiritual realities.

If I were in the pew this morning, I would be hungering and thirsting that the reality that war is in the air in the world  be acknowledged from the pulpit, and addressed.  At the same time, I would want my soul, my inner being, to be fed by the Gospel.

There are two things that would leave me even more hungry at the conclusion of the benediction than I already am.  One of those things would be to hear a sermon with an extremely conservative bent that identifies our country’s military campaigns as God’s holy mission.  That type of message can be heard in many places in our land today, even in churches.  That message is not all that different, save a few dates, from the messages preached in medieval plazas and pulpits justifying the crusades a thousand years ago, and sending the knights forth to crush the infidels.  

Neither would my hungering and thirsting be quenched by a large dose of liberal anti-war arguments.  On that score, I can come up with a few of my own and once in a while in church, I would like to be in the presence of something larger than what my own mind can manufacture.

We live in a world that wants everything neatly wrapped up in simple packages and in our pursuit of pleasant packages we have limited our own options as to what might be true.  For most people, there are only two choices that can possibly be true, either for or against, pro or con.

Influenced by a 20th century theological giant named, Karl Barth, I am inclined to believe that the truth found in God’s revelation in Jesus Christ is too big to be confined by either conservative or liberal packaging.  I have been revisiting Barth lately and sharing some of his thinking with the Monday morning study group.  You are invited to join us at 10:15 on Monday mornings.

Barth would turn us back to the Scriptures to quench our wilderness thirst and to the story found therein.  So I take today’s anxieties to an ancient place of healing and redemption.  Today’s anxieties and fears for us come from our international experience.  We have become so accustomed to limiting the Gospel’s message to what it has to say about individual salvation that we have lost sight of the many ways that the Scriptures also tell the story of nations.

Gerhad von Rad is a teacher of Old Testament theology whose work is more familiar to seminary students than the general public.  Von Rad’s work, although not well known in the public arena, has provided the basis for Old Testament study for countless clergy today.  His books aren’t easily found at Books-a-Million but can be found collecting dust in many minister’s studies.

Von Rad is a good person to start with in an essay on the nations in the Scriptures.  He points out that the conclusion to the creation narrative is another step beyond the creation of Adam and Eve.  Von Rad points out that the creation cycle moves beyond Adam and Eve and has its dramatic climax in the creation of the nations.  In his treatment of Genesis, he also teaches that the story of the fall doesn’t conclude where we commonly think it does in the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden.

Von Rad teaches that the story of the expulsion continues beyond the first couple’s eviction from their first home by their angry landlord. The story of the fall’s conclusion is found, according to von Rad, in the story of the tower of Babel.  What is that story all about?  It is the creation of the nations.  You remember the story: the tower, all the workers, who speak one language, getting too close to God, and God’s putting an end to the tower by having all the workers wake up one morning speaking different languages – thus the birth of a new order on earth – the nations.

What von Rad is reminding us is that the Old Testament thinkers and storytellers understood the nations of the world to be a part of God’s order much as the birds of the air, the fish of the sea, the beasts of the field, the stars in the sky, and humanity itself, all are.

The Old Testament story tellers elaborated a little more on this theme.  In Deuteronomy 32:8,9, we read: “When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance, when he separated the sons of men, he fixed the bounds of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God.”

The sons of God (bene elohim) are the angels, one of which is assigned to each national grouping of the sons of Adam.  There are from the start 70 of these groupings, each one with a son of God assigned to it. 

These angels are encountered in a number of places in the Scriptures.  In Isaiah chapters 41and following, we learn about a heavenly council of angels litigating a divine lawsuit.   A vivid picture of the angels of the nations is drawn in Daniel 10.  Daniel, a Babylonian Jew has risen to a place of prominence in the court of Nebuchadnezzar, much like Joseph in Pharaoh’s Egyptian court.  Daniel prays and fasts for his threatened people.  After a 21 day delay, Michael, the angel who has been assigned to Israel finally appears in answer to Daniel’s prayer. Michael is quite out of breath and full of excuses – but they are good ones.  He explains his three week delay in answering Daniel’s prayer, which had been heard from the very beginning in Heaven.  He has been trying to get to Daniel but has been delayed all this time by having to fight a vicious fight with the angels of Babylon and their allies before finally breaking through to get to Daniel.  This was in 167BCE. Two thousand years ago, the angels of Persia did not appreciate Western angels invading their air space any more than they do today.  There might be something in that, but I am not into reading tea leaves this morning. 

Before Michael leaves Daniel, he casually mentions that he must go back to do battle with the guardian angel of Greece.  Greece under the leadership of Alexander the Great was the next great invader of the Palestinian area. 

This story from Daniel reflects a very basic understanding in the Old Testament as to how things worked on earth, in Heaven, and between those two places.  The national struggles on earth reflected heavenly conflict and struggles amongst members of the council of angels.

The heavenly council of angels is found in the New Testament, but without all the graphics and visuals that the Old Testament provides.  Jesus sends out 70 disciples to the nations. Gee, whiz, I wonder where that number 70 came from?  There are 70 evangelist to go to the 70 nations and maybe even one disciple for each guardian angel!  The Scripture doesn’t specifically say that, but it is a point that wouldn’t have been missed by people in Jesus time. 

In Acts 16:9, it is reported that Paul in a vision saw a man from Macedonia asking him “to come over and help us.”  From the earliest times, that man has been understood as Macedonia’s guardian angel.

The nations’ guardian angels are treated by the earliest writers in the church.  Those writers, known as the Church Fathers, had different views about the angels, but all shared the common acceptance of the reality of the angels.

Over the years, the Biblical story of the guardian angels of the nations has disappeared.  Several things have worked to make this happen.  I will only mention a couple.

First, we have domesticated angels.  All I have to do to illustrate this is to ask you to picture all the angels that are for sale right out here in our narthex every fall.  Those angels are quite like angels for sale in Hallmark stores and countless other places where nick-knacks and mementos are sold.  They are cute, pretty, harmless and extremely fem.  On the contrary the Biblical angels are powerful, courageous, ornery, warlike don’t-mess-with-me kind of guys.  The Bible’s guardian angels of the nations have been turned into today’s angels of the fuzzy-feely nick-knack shelf! 

We have also lost sight of the Bible’s guardian angels by our relegating the purpose of our religion to the arena of personal salvation.  Our what’s-in-it-for-me and-I’m-out-of-here attitude has assisted in the abdication of our faith’s position of power in our society and lives.

A revisiting of the Scriptural story of the guardian angels of the nations presents challenges for both liberals and conservatives.  For the liberals, caught up in a zealous abhorrence of anything that smacks of flag-waving patriotism, the story calls for a new appreciation of the nations as a part of God’s order of things.  And indeed there is a need for human power to be invested in national groupings.  Bill Gates holds more personal wealth and worldly clout than many of the nations of this world.  If that is his personal wealth, the corporate power and clout of his company, Microsoft, is beyond imagination.  There are many corporations in today’s world that hold the power of many mid-sized nations and economic systems.  Living next door to Anheuser Busch for a few years deepened my appreciation for how that business is a mini-nation until itself. The only worldly power that can stand up for the individual and protect the individual against corporate invasiveness is the nation, with its laws and ability to contain corporate activity.  There are many reasons to appreciate the gift of nations to human life.

The Biblical story of the guardian angels also challenges those with more conservative leanings.  Looking closely at the story, one fact becomes very visible.  God plays no favorites among the angels and there is no favored nation.  That favored feeling becomes quickly a justification for making self-interest into national interest, which are then given a sacred status. That is idolatry.

When Spain started to lose its grip as a world empire, American business folk saw their opportunity to gain entrance to Asian markets through the Philippines.   The following is from a speech made by Pres. William McKinley to a group of American clergymen.  He was justifying his decision to take over the Philippines by force from Spain, and bring the island nation under American domination:

“I walked the floor night after night until midnight: and I am not ashamed to tell you gentlemen that I went down on my knees and prayed to Almighty God for light and guidance more than one night.  And one night it came to me this way – that there was nothing left for us to do but take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God’s grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellowmen for whom Christ also died; and then I went to bed and went to sleep and slept soundly.”

Walter Wink, a modern theologian, commented on this by saying: “It is not easy to argue against sound sleep and a clear conscious.”

McKinley’s fall into nationalistic arrogance is quite evident.  He justified the military take over of the Philippines by the people’s need to be educated, civilized and Christianized, in the process forgetting that most of the people of the Philippines were already bi-lingual which is more than what could be said for most Americans, were already quite civilized with ancestral roots in the world’s oldest civilizations, and forgetting that the people who needed to be Christianized had been quite Catholic for many generations.

 Today’s lesson from Mark contains the well known teachings about self denial and cross carrying.  A favorite text for cross-referencing to these Mark verses to draw out their meaning is Matthew 25.  Denying one’s self and cross-carrying means feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and welcoming the stranger as taught in Matthew.

Matthew 25 is a judgment story and begins with these words: “When the son of man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne.  Before him will be gathered all the nations and he will separate them one from the another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats…”

This is another of those passages that we have twisted to think it is only about personal salvation. So often when we hear this story about judgment, we quickly think about ourselves as individuals and whether or not Jesus will see me as a sheep or a goat.

The Bible says clearly that Jesus is judging nations, not individuals.  For anyone thinking that any nation stands as a favored nation, Matthew 25 serves as a stark reminder that the judge is yet to come.

With the stir of war drums in the air, and the nations of the world bracing for the clash of armies, we as Christians need to keep our sight on our citizenship in another dominion – that of God’s.  Today is a time for us to pray and to hope from humble hearts that the angels in heavenly councils will be reasoning together and that our earthly family of nations will be at peace.

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