Will We Be Christians (or Romans)? A sermon preached by the Rev. Michael W. Caine; Leviticus 19: 2, 9-13, 33-36 Sunday, September 13, 2026; Old First Reformed Church, Philadelphia
Literary trick or Prophetic inversion I’ve been planning this sermon since last Spring. All it took, finally, was to find the right illustrations, just two illustrations AND the three promises I need to preach:
- first, even when politicians and moneyed interests are stealing people’s power (to prevent us from challenging them or stopping them), you CAN still take action:
AND
- second. Even in the face of all the cruelty, corruption, incompetence, lies and malfeasance of our own government, you can still work effectively for justice;
AND
- third, even in this national disaster where too much of our reality has been “there’s nothing we can do,” you can still make a difference.
Beloved, we begin this morning with a movie I’ve not yet seen, but many of you have. Christopher Nolan made a film out of Homer’s Odyssey. Odysseus, the great trickster whose own failure of character, his pride, kept him from getting home for 10 years after the Trojan War.
But it’s a review of the movie really that is my illustration. I learned from Ezra Klein’s review of the movie that Nolan pulled off his own cultural slight of hand with the story.
In the Odessey, the Law of Zeus IS Homer’s plot device; his story is structured as a series of tests to determine who obeys the Law of Zeus and who breaks it. This law then is the engine of the narrative but also its moral compass. It’s that law that Odysseus keeps breaking — that law he keeps getting punished for breaking. And in Nolan’s film that law goes something like this: “treat the beggar and the stranger as you want to be treated.”
Treat the beggar and the stranger as you want to be treated.
Here’s the trick, church – That’s not the law of Zeus. The scholars and classicists have been screaming about this since they first saw Nolan’s movie. The Greek law of hospitality was narrower, colder, more hierarchical and more calculating. You welcomed the stranger at your gate – not because once you were an stranger, and you were welcomed – BUT because the stranger might be a god in disguise, and gods take revenge. Zeus’ law was not about respect, compassion, or anyone’s inherent worth. It was about limiting risk, self-protection, insurance.
What Nolan actually did – his moviemaker’s Trojan horse – was to smuggle Leviticus into Homer. He took a line out of the Torah, dressed it in a Greek robe, set it on top of Olympus, and handed it back to us in the movie theater. Presenting us with one of the world’s oldest challenges as if it were something new.
Nolan hijacked Homer with a Judeo-Christian assumption and expectation: universal concern / compassion for the other. And in so doing he used his movie (and engaged us) in a profound and currently relevant socio-political debate. In a political struggle that is playing itself out in our world in real time.
Church, with the switch he makes, Nolan upgrades his argument to, “in this world of ours, who’s going to have the upper hand; what’s going to be the determining factor,
Let me explain, the filmmaker is asking as pointedly as politically what kind of world we are creating. Where do you want to live? Where do you want your children’s children to live? He’s asking right out, imperial domination or justice for the people. The law of force or the force of love? I am suggesting our faith always asks the same question.
Odysseus eventually recognizes his failures in order to get back home… But this cultural inversion presented in the movie runs even deeper: because, it turns out. Leviticus, it seems, got there first… Leviticus runs almost the same ‘SNEAK SOMETHING IN ON US” play. Think about it. If you were God and wanted to introduce some world-changing expectation, where nobody would ever expect it or even look for it, where would you put it?
I’m not sure why, but God seems to hide the command that makes the greatest material difference in our world and the profoundest difference in our lives RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF LEVITICUS. God buried it in the middle of a book chock full of exacting details on religious ritual, in a section called the Holiness Code (in chapters 17 to 26). Buried between instructions on your haircut and the acceptable material blends for your clothing’s fabric, there, there are these quiet, but revolutionary lines snuck in. Instruction about how we are to treat others No, not just others, how we are to care for the most vulnerable and least powerful among us.
Really, it’s deeper than that – about how we must recognize those most easy to overlook and disregard. Instructions that if we listen to… follow turn us and our world upside down, or right side up.
But we don’t read Leviticus! Beloved, it’s the rule book we skip AND the book where God gets specific …about paychecks and borders left overs and undocumented folks, food recovery and day workers – labor practices and immigration laws.
Grant, will you please read for us today’s lesson, the lines we so often skip:
READ Leviticus 19: 2, 9-13, 33-36
…Leave the edges of your field unharvested. Don’t go back for the fallen grapes. Don’t rig the scale. Pay the workers their due and on time. Treat the immigrants like one of your own because you were once slaves in Egypt.
This secret to life – HOLINESS in the idiom of Leviticus – the secret Leviticus sneaks in, it’s not self-protection, but memory, self-recognition and solidarity. …How you too have known suffering such that you must do whatever you can to alleviate others’ suffering. The lesson it took Nolan’s Odysseus a decade and thousands of sea miles to learn. .
Something we’re going to practice again in a few minutes when we turn to our neighbors and share how our world’s current crises are affecting our lives, particularly how Philly’s affordability crisis is affecting us or people we love…
Church, set God’s covenant expectations beside the other law codes of that time and place and the difference is sharp. Hammurabi’s code, the great legal monument of the ancient world, scales its penalties to rank — injure a nobleman and you pay dearly, injure a commoner and you pay less. Leviticus 19:15 forbids that outright: neither partiality nor deference to people with higher or lower standing.
But the deepest difference is the one underneath the Greek comparison. The stranger at the Greek gate was protected by fear. He might be a god. The stranger in Leviticus is protected by memory, self-recognition, solidarity. “For you were aliens in the land of Egypt.” God does not warn the immigrant might secretly be somebody important, or some undercover threat. God says: the immigrant is you. You know the hurt and pain.
Remember the bricks. Remember the straw they stopped giving you while the quota stayed exactly the same. The people of God are – incredibly – created through injustice – unpaid, coerced, inhumane work. “What makes my people distinct, different, holy” God says, “is not so much their vestments or their diet. It’s what happens to the person among them who owns nothing. It’s how they care for the most vulnerable.” .
* * *
Unbending Economics or Spiritual Collision My second illustration showed up just last week, in the run-up to Labor Day. It’s not so ancient, a piece of American history.
On September 5th, 1882, a quiet disaster was unfolding on the streets of lower Manhattan. Between ten and twenty thousand workers had gathered to march, to raise their voices, to magnify their visibility, to declare they were more than the invisible, silent machinery of an industrializing empire. They meant to say, to shout, to show that they were the very backbone of our republic. It was the first Labor Day Parade, but the historian Heather Cox Richardson tells us, it very nearly didn’t happen – because they were, of all things, lacking a band! No one could imagine marching right into the teeth of Gilded Age. robber baron power and hostility without music… So there they were left standing….
[PAUSE]
…Until the Jewelers Union from Newark showed up, with Musicians. The band struck up the music and off marched the jubilant, protesting crowd.
They carried banners that day too. One of them read: “The Laborer Must Receive and Enjoy the Full Fruit of His Labor.” Church, that is Leviticus 19:13. Though they may not have known they were quoting Scripture, they were. Another read, “Labor Built This Republic and Labor Shall Rule It,” And another: “The True Remedy is Organization and the Ballot”*
The New York Times published a condescendingly patient if chiding editorial the next day, clarifying for the ‘confused, mistaken workers’ that the men who direct the operations of industry – the bosses – are every bit as much laboring men as the ones who toil with their hands and the sweat of their bodies;
AND
… the editorial continued, the widening gap between workers and bosses’ lives – their pay – merely reflected the greater social value of the latters’ service,
AND
..the editorial concluded that the government could not possibly adjust the equation. Another paper scolded the workers for daring to be too political. Sound familiar? Haven’t we heard every one of those ideas again recently? In only slightly different words?
The bosses’ argument of 1882 and the argument of Project 2025 are the same. The political theory behind their desire to dominate, the political picture governing them, is the same: the oppressive power of a few over the powerless masses. Thuycides, the ancient Greek historian of the Spartan war, said it straight out: The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.
But, church, underneath all the economics, warfare, politics… the real argument is always theological. It is the argument between empire and covenant.
Empire says what Stephen Miller blurted out in a television interview last year: “…that we live in a world governed by strength, governed by force, governed by power, these are the laws of the world since the beginning of time.” He is not wrong about Empire –Egypt, Ancient Greecs, Rome. contemporary America. Miller is describing Empire accurately.
What he has somehow missed, but those workers in 1882 did not: the powerless and oppressed are humans too, whose suffering matters eternally, in heaven even when not on earth. That’s theological.
The workers marched because the Robber Barons of the Gilded Age and their pet politicians were transforming the halls of power as much as the modes of production. Less than two decades after a bloody Civil War fought to defend an economy and culture based on “free labor,” the rapid rise of factories AND colossal fortunes had swung… had enlisted the government in the interests of elite capital. The Senate had become what Harper’s Weekly described as “a club of rich men,” with the outline of some self-interested corporation visible behind almost every senator
The working class saw the emerging threat clearly: it wasn’t just changes they didn’t like in their workplaces. Or even unwelcome changes in society as a whole. The workers took to protesting because they recognized they were being transformed from free human beings into lifeless commodities pushed this way or that, or discarded for the immense profits of a few. Commodities no one paid any attention to, or cared about while their bosses and the corporate press defended the growing income inequality as natural, inevitable, a sign of progress. A symptom of success. A booming economy. An incomparable manufacturing engine. A growing nation. An emerging industrial empire..
Miller and his ilk – thinking its all about power – almost always miss that our entire Judeo-Christian religious tradition is a 2000-year rebuttal to this kind of imperial arrangement We also too often fail to perceive how our spiritual tradition undercuts the imperial lies of Pharoah, Ancient Greece, Rome and our current President. None of this is merely economics, or politics. It’s a spiritual collision. An ongoing war. A religious test. that has haunted humanity since the dawn of time:
Here we are again: our political leaders mocking vulnerability as weakness… empathy is derided as ‘suicidal’ and cruelty toward the poor, the refuge, the outsider is brandished as political courage. Brave realism. The immigrant becomes a scapegoat. The worker becomes a line item. The vulnerasble become punchlines. We’re left to believe (and act) as though the ultimate goal of human life is to become Caesar instead of the neighbor.
Church, we’re living in an era dominated by Tricksters. Strongmen and Thieves — figures who gain influence by tearing down civic taboos, dismantling social safety nets, and convincing us that solidarity is dead. We witness economic systems that concentrate unimaginable wealth into fewer and fewer hands while millions work full-time jobs yet struggle to pay their bills… to afford housing, healthcare, and basic necessities. We watch as political movements form around resentment, cruelty and harm.
What the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari says about Jews applies as well to us Christians too:
“For 2,000 years, Jews all over the world saw studying and learning as the highest spiritual activity. After 2,000 years, you ask them: What have you learned? You have studied for 2,000 years. What have you learned?
And then people like Netanyahu tell you: ‘Oh, we have learned that you need to be a Roman, that you need to be strong, that you need to build legions, that you need to destroy cities. This is the only thing that matters in life.’”
Rome and the currency of power it was built on may have its usefulness, church. But if after 2,000 years, Jews and Christians simply become the Romans, what was the point? Why did you waste 2,000 years reading the Bible, praying, serving then? We could have just become Roman back then.
For us, God says, for Christians and Jews, it is never to be the law of force, but the force of love, for we were once foreigners in the land of Egypt. Amen.
