"Even the demons submit to us!"

Navy Admiral Hyman Rickover had to correct one of his junior officers, who had presumed to use the royal we in asserting his authority. The admiral reminded him that only three groups are permitted to use the royal we: pregnant women, royalty and schizophrenics. Mark Twain made the same point, but with slightly different groups. He asserted that only kings, editors and people with tapeworms have the right to use what he called the editorial “we”. In today’s gospel, seventy disciples returned with joy from their two-by-two, thirty-five town evangelistic mission, and reported that “even the demons submit to us!” Jesus responds to them, not like the admiral or the journalist, cautioning them not to presume an authority and a majesty that is not theirs and is reserved for others. In fact, he implies that the demons have submitted to their authority precisely because they share in the majesty of God, that they are entitled, by God’s grace, to use the royal we, to understand themselves as members of the ultimate royal family whose names have been written in heaven. This is what God will do in just a few minutes, when Emma Kathryn’s is added to the royal family. She too will be able and entitled to say, in fellowship with you and me, her brothers and sisters in Christ, we: you and me and her and God, together, without presumption, without overstepping our authority.

Saint Paul, in his final chapter to the Galatians, even goes so far as to promise and guarantee that if we live for the royal we, if we sow the Spirit which makes it possible for us to be us, to be God and you and me together as one family, then we shall surely enjoy a harvest of the Spirit. We will see God’s love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness faithfulness, generosity and self-control growing and coming to fruition in our lives and in the lives of those around us. We can be gentle with those who dishonor this royal we precisely because we know that when a person lives for himself or herself alone, which is what Paul means when he speaks of living according to the flesh and not the Spirit, it only leads to corruption, whereas if we live for us, for the good of all, and especially for those who are of the royal household of God, we will surely enjoy a life-giving harvest.

Isaiah describes this royal we in bold domestic terms. God is our Father. Jerusalem is our mother. God will defend his bride, our mother, against all their enemies, so that she might feed us, her royal children. For us as Christians, the Jerusalem that Isaiah speaks of is the New Jerusalem, the Church, the we, the you and I and Emma Kathryn, the household and family of God, the bride of Christ, united to God the Father through his Son, Jesus that we might participate in the majestic plurality of the divine we, leaving behind lives estranged and separated by sin, by seeking our own individual happiness rather than accepting the life that only God can give us together.

It’s easy for me, and it may be easy for you as well, to misread Jesus’ words to us in today’s gospel, because they are addressed, not to each of us as individuals, but to us in the royal sense that God is calling us to through Jesus. When he tells us to ask the Lord of the harvest to send forth laborers into his harvest, that is a command that is directed to us as thirty-five paired disciples, and not as individuals. You, Sam and Katie. You, Tom and Suzanne. You, Chelsey and Fisher. You, Rusty and Ed. You, Barrett, Ray, David, Dickie and Matt. You, the pair of you. You, the two or three of you gathered together in my Name: you ask together. You go together. You greet together. You eat together. You stay in the house together. You are accepted or rejected together. You proclaim the nearness of God’s kingdom as we, as one. You heal as a pair. You even cast out demons because I am with you as long as you are with me and with each other.

On this Fourth of July, we are reminded that earthly kings can abuse their own royal we. Half our Declaration of Independence is a catalog of all the ways in which King George III violated and finally destroyed the we that had once bound the thirteen colonies together. The Declaration asserted a new we, a we founded on republican and democratic principles because the royal we of King George III had proved to be a complete, irredeemable failure. The we we created is grounded in the realistic understanding that we often fail each other when we allow any earthly power to become tyrannical, to live only for itself and no longer for the common good. We are blessed to have a form of government that protects us from ourselves.

But we are infinitely more blessed to have a heavenly Father who will never fail us or become tyrannical like each of us is prone to become when we act in a fleshly, self-centered way. As Paul reminds us, the Cross of Christ has the power to attract every human heart into the glorious majesty of God’s royal we and to crucify every selfish and self-defeating impulse.

So even as we rejoice that fifty-six representatives from thirteen colonies signed the Declaration of Independence, creating a new we as they pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor to each other, trusting in God’s divine Providence to protect them in light of King George’s failure to do so, let us also rejoice and give thanks this morning that those thirty-five pairs of disciples in today's gospel discovered the wonder and the majesty of becoming a we with God to which even the demons submit, and let us welcome Emma Kathryn as she joins us in the household of God, and let us never forget that Jesus often sends us out in twos and threes to do his work, because one plus one with Jesus is infinitely more than two, now that our names have been written in heaven. AMEN.