...And Not Caesar

...And Not Caesar--May 28, 2018

"Therefore I want you to understand that no one speaking by the Spirit of God ever says, 'Let Jesus be cursed!' and no one can say 'Jesus is Lord!' except by the Holy Spirit." [1 Corinthians 12:3]

It's not that the words are hard to say.  

At least, not the physical mouth movements required to form the syllables and make the sounds.  It is not physically difficult to utter the three words, "Jesus is Lord!" (two in Greek, which can get the same meaning across with simply, "Iesous Kyrios").  And it's not like this is a tongue-twister--there are no pecks of pickled peppers or woodchucks chucking wood to be found here.

So at first blush, this might seem like the apostle Paul is being a bit melodramatic when he declares that "No one can say 'Jesus is Lord!' except by the Holy Spirit."  We might think he should tone it down, because, after all, to us, it seems easy to string those words together and equate "Jesus" with "Lord."

And that is probably a sign of how comfortable we are, or of being unaware of just how big a deal those words are.  We hear "Lord" and tend to assume it is a strictly religious term--calling someone your "Lord," we have been told, is just a way of saying "whoever you accept as your personal savior to get you into heaven after you die."  We are used to being the dominant religious group in our communities, too, so it's not even all that brave a thing for us to say that we name Jesus as our Lord.  And for that matter, we are still getting over an era in which people were just born into families that went to church, where the name "Jesus" was said next to "Lord" without much thought at all about what it meant or was claiming, and where the assumption was that everybody went to church somewhere, if just in order to be a good respectable citizen, regardless of whether you really had any interest in this Jesus fellow.  There was a certain peer pressure for a long time in our communities and towns, with the expectation that everybody would be saying "Jesus is Lord," and so it almost ran the risk of becoming one of those empty stock phrases that people throw around to make others think they are nice and respectable religious folks.

But in Paul's day, it was a dangerous--even subversive--thing to call Jesus "Lord."  Naming Jesus as Lord demanded a courage that nobody had on their own, because calling Jesus "Lord" meant also saying that Caesar was not.  And that was a big deal, because in the Empire, the Romans insisted that their subjects all pledge allegiance to Caesar with the simple three-word declaration, "Caesar is Lord" (or, you guessed it, in the Greek-speaking part of the empire, the two words "Kaesar Kyrios").  Calling Caesar "Lord" wasn't a term of quiet personal piety and private devotion; it was as much a political claim as anything else. To call Caesar "Lord" meant accepting the way Caesar ruled, and accepting a view of the world where more armies made you right, where wealth went to Rome and its armies while the people were distracted by bread and circuses, and where dissent was crushed or crucified.  And to call Caesar "Lord" was to accept that this was the way things were--that victory was determined by who killed more than who, and greatness was determined by hoisting yourself to the top of the pyramid.  All of that, along with the fact that by the time Paul was writing, the Caesars of the day called themselves divine and insisted on being worshiped, too.  Official Roman policy said you could worship whatever other gods or goddesses you wanted on the side, but Caesar had to get his due--a pinch of incense offered on the altar, and the coveted confession, "Caesar is Lord."

The scary thing about all that was that Rome could threaten you with punishment, prison, or torture if you didn't pledge your allegiance to Caesar... and there was tremendous peer pressure for the first Christians to do it, because all their neighbors, friends, and acquaintances, and often other members of their own families, were all giving in and doing it.  The way to make sure you kept your head (literally) and kept your reputation as a respectable, rule-following subject of the Empire was simply to bow your head, do what Caesar demanded (it only took just a few minutes after all), and to mouth the words, "Caesar is Lord."  And as long as you didn't muck it all up by then following it up with "But not really, because Jesus is Lord!" you were... safe.  Sold out, but safe.

And at the same time, there was a whole other group of people who would have been furious at the mere suggestion of putting "Jesus" and "Lord" in the same sentence--the religious leadership in Jerusalem.  The title "Lord" had become a substitute for the ancient divine name, "Yahweh," the name, "I AM WHO I AM" that God had spoken to Moses out of the burning bush all those centuries before.  To claim the title "Lord," then was to dance around equating someone with the one true living God... and the one central, undisputable rule of 1st century Judaism was, "There's only one God; so don't equate the majesty and glory of God with any one or anything else!"  Many in the early Christian movemenet were themselves Jewish and had grown up reciting the ancient Hebrew creed called the Shema: "Hear, O Israel, the LORD your God, the LORD is one.  You shall love the Lord will all your heart and all your mind and all your strength."  They had all learned not to put any one or any thing on the same level as God, and therefore, you weren't supposed to call anybody but God "Lord."  And yet, here came the early church all insisting that none other than a crucified rabbi named Jesus was "Lord," even though they had largely grown up in Jewish backgrounds and knew not to call anybody "Lord" but the real living God.

That makes a clearer picture for why Paul could say, "No one can say Jesus is Lord except by the Holy Spirit."  It was just too risky a thing to go around saying casually.  To call Jesus Lord required greater courage than we chicken-hearts could muster on our own.  To call Jesus Lord, Paul is saying, requires the Spirit to be the one giving us the guts to say that Caesar is NOT Lord, that the emperor is wearing no clothes, and that a homeless rabbi who washed feet and ate with outcasts was the very presence of the Creator of the universe.  To call Jesus "Lord" was to make enemies out of all the respectable religious crowd and all the powerful political leaders, because it meant lifting this sinner-loving, party-crashing, cross-carrying criminal above every other name and saying that he was in fact the Sovereign over all the universe.  And saying that sort of thing didn't just get you laughed out of town--it got you stoned to death or crucified, depending on which group got to you first.

All of this is to say that if, despite all that danger, all that risk, and all the power of peer pressure from everyone else telling you to just go along and pledge your allegiance to Caesar, if you still went ahead and refused the Empire and the Temple by insisting that Jesus is Lord, well, the only explanation, Paul says, is that the Spirit must have been behind it, giving you the courage and the clarity to say what nobody else wanted you to say.

We use different titles for our leaders these days, perhaps, and we have given up on the burning of incense by and large.  But this is one of those points where we should be at least willing to ask the difficult question: "Just what am I committing to when I confess that Jesus is Lord?"  For a long time in our recent history, we might not have thought we were committing to much of anything when we mouthed those words.  We have for a long time, relatively speaking, figured that saying "Jesus is Lord" is just more religious gobbledygook we are supposed to memorize from the hymnal, and that as long as we said the pre-printed words in the service book, we had earned ourselves a spot in heaven.  

But if we take Paul seriously, then saying Jesus is Lord also means denying that anybody or anything else in our lives gets our highest allegiance.  It means that we will not burn incense to Rome, but neither will we give our deepest loyalty to donkeys or elephants, to Facebook or Apple or Amazon, to the money in our bank accounts, or to our ethnic group, country, or nationality.  And that's a scary thing to do, especially for a chicken-heart like me.  That's why Paul says if we dare confess Jesus as Lord, it's got to be because the Spirit stirred up the courage in us to speak those words.

In this day, we will constantly be asked about our allegiances--who and what matters most to us.  Is it the job?  The paycheck and the bank account?  Is it to a political party that talks big and then lets you down?  Is it to the stuff you own, the technology you are tethered to, the pleasure you get from buying more and more and more?  Is it to any one of those idols, or the whole pantheon, or additional ones you have added yourself to worship?  In the end, it comes down to asking, "To whom do I give my deepest self, my time, my love, and my devotion?"  Who is worth risking it all for by naming them "Lord"?

I will confess, I am a coward on a lot of days.  I would chicken out if it were just left up to me.  But it isn't... it isn't left up just to me. None of us are left to ourselves--the Spirit is stirring in us now, right this very second.  The Spirit is pushing us to see and to think about what it really means to confess Jesus as Lord and to take up his way of living in the world as our own... and then the Spirit is leading us to risk it all and confess it all the same.  

Jesus is Lord.  Yes.  Not Caesar.  

Jesus is Lord.  Yes.  Equal with the living God of all creation. 

Now, we have said it.  Dare we live like it is true in this day?

Lord Jesus, we thank you for your Spirit who has given us the courage to see you as you are and call on you as you truly are--Lord of heaven and earth, and Lord of our lives.