Once upon a time, in a land far away, there were two priests.  One priest was wealthy and powerful, a friend of the emperor, with an audience of millions.  The other priest lived on a modest salary in a backwoods region, preaching to a congregation of 20 or 30 souls.

The emperor sent his armies to conquer a foreign land.  He expected his mighty army to prevail, but they did not win an easy victory.  The emperor grew furious with his generals, and he drafted more young men into the army to join the fight.

Then the rich powerful priest – the pal of the emperor, preached a sermon.  The priest called the war a holy and good thing.  He promised the soldiers that if they fought for 5their emperor and were killed in battle that their sacrifice (not the sacrifice of Jesus!) would wash away all their sins and they would be taken into heaven. 

This sermon made the emperor very happy.

The other priest, the nobody who lived in the backwoods who had a tiny congregation of poor working people, also preached a sermon.  He said the war was unjust – there was no good reason to be fighting.  He said that the soldiers were not following the way of Jesus, the Prince of Peace.  He said that in the war they would be killing fellow Christians – their own brothers and sisters.  He said they had to choose whether they would be faithful to the emperor or King Jesus.

This sermon resulted in the priest’s arrest and the loss of his job.

If you’ve seen the news, you know this is not a fairy tale.  It is the story of Vladimir Putin and Kirill, the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church.  The other priest, the Russian Orthodox priest who no one heard of before his arrest for preaching against the war, is Father Ioann Burdin.

This true story has a moral, just like fairy tales of old.  The moral is this: when the Church allies itself with political power it loses its ability to proclaim the truth of the Gospel.  It can fall into the kind of blasphemy that Kirill preached – that killing and dying for the state washes away sins, rendering the one sacrifice of Christ irrelevant.  The story brings to mind the Crusades and the abuses that caused Martin Luther to protest.

It’s a word of warning to those who would declare that God is allied with a nation or a party or an ideology. 

You will sometimes hear people say that the US is a Christian nation.  This is mistaken.  At its founding and to this day, it establishes no state religion, even though for most of its history the majority of citizens have been Christians. 

Christian churches have a great advantage in the US because they are not established by the state.  We have freedom of expression; we can, like the prophets of old, speak truth to power.

As Christians, our first allegiance is to Christ and his Kingdom.   It is the people of God, not any nation, who Jesus charged to be a shining “city on a hill.”  We are the ones called to be salt and light. 

From Constantine to Putin, when the church has yoked itself to an empire, it has perverted the Gospel, lost its voice, and abandoned its first allegiance to Christ.  That’s the consistent message of faithful pastors like St. Ambrose, Martin Niemöller, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Ioann Burdin.

Prayer: Keep me mindful that, “I am not my own, but belong—body and soul, in life and in death—to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.”^*  Let me have no other King.  Let me bow before no other throne.  Amen.

^*From the Heidelberg Catechism, Question 1.