Sermon: Phoenix Affirmation 7
|
EHCC Home |
Sermon: Phoenix Affirmation 7: Fear and Honor
Date: February 18, 2007 Rev. Dee Eisenhauer, Eagle Harbor Congregational Church
Phoenix Affirmation #7: Christian love of neighbors includes preserving religious freedom and the Church’s ability to speak prophetically to government by resisting the commingling of Church and State.
I wonder if any of you can recite the First Amendment to the Constitution. (I’m just curious.) The First Amendment and the seventh Phoenix affirmation are based on the same principle. So has anyone learned the First Amendment by heart? Here it is: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people to peaceably assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” Powerful words. I believe that it is this First Amendment that is, in large part, responsible for making the United States of America a great nation. I am profoundly grateful to live in a country that values and safeguards liberty. Of the several liberties that are mentioned in the First Amendment, I am most grateful for the free exercise of religion. It’s a privilege we often take for granted, this ability to get together on a Sunday morning to worship God as we see fit, without having to get permission or be monitored or follow a particular set of directions. There are an awful lot of people in the world who do not share this privilege. It is one quality of our life together that I believe we should “go to the mat” to protect. I feel so strongly about this that I always find it shocking to hear an American citizen seeming to promote the restriction of religious liberty. You might remember that in January Representative Keith Ellison, the first Muslim member of Congress, took the oath of office on the Quran. You are probably aware that most (all?) members up to that point who have taken the oath of office have sworn on the Bible. Anyway, his decision led one of his colleagues, Representative Virgil Goode, a Virginia Republican, to call for immigration restrictions, “so that we don’t have a majority of Muslims elected to the United States House of Representatives.” (The first two Buddhists being sworn in at the same time apparently escaped his notice.) His reaction seemed to imply that he wants religious freedom to apply to only some of us. But as Clarence Darrow once noted, “You can only protect your liberties in this world by protecting the other man’s freedom. You can only be free if I am free.”[1] The American religious landscape has changed pretty dramatically in the last 50 years or so. Used to be that Protestant churches, Catholic cathedrals and Jewish synagogues were the only show in town. In 2007, America has become the world’s most religiously diverse nation. Muslims, Buddhists, Sikhs and other religious traditions that used to be considered “world” religions are now American religions. While it’s hard to pin down an exact number, the number of Muslims in America is equal to or greater than the number of American Jews or Episcopalians or Presbyterians—and there are more of any of them than there are U.C.C.ers. If we love our neighbors, we will want to preserve religious freedom for this diverse group of worshipers and practitioners as well as our own religious freedom—even if we don’t understand the others’ beliefs and practices. I think this protection of freedom is especially incumbent on our denomination because some of our forbears, namely the Pilgrims (who were Congregationalists), came to this country seeking religious freedom. It’s always fun to brag on the freedom-seeking Pilgrims as we tell the story of our ancestors. In the interest of fair disclosure, I should probably also point out that those same Congregationalists, before many years had elapsed, were experimenting with an established church in a similar vein to the one they had left. That is, they set up their little Congregationalist empire in New England and started kicking out Quakers and Catholics and anybody else who wasn’t wise enough to choose the Congregational way. I’m not a great historian, so I don’t know to what extent their experiment influenced the way the First Amendment was written. But I have an inkling that there is a connection. I don’t think it was because those Congregationalists wanted to be exclusive so much as they dreamed of a kind of utopia in which the church and the government were perfectly aligned in their goals. They brought with them a longing for an ideal society, a new Promised Land that they would settle after their Exodus from a place that had kept them in bondage. And it wasn’t just the Congregationalists; many people that came here as settlers brought their faith-inspired dreams to create a Holy Land here. Those faith-fueled ideas very definitely colored our beginnings as a nation. G.K. Chesterton once described America as “a nation with the soul of a church.” You can see some graphic evidence of this on a dollar bill, if you happen to have one with you. Look at the picture of the unfinished pyramid, which represents the American national enterprise. Hovering over the pyramid is the all-seeing eye of God. There are two mottoes in Latin: “Annuit Coeptis,” “He (God) has smiled upon our beginnings”; and “Novus Ordo Seclorum,” “A New Order of the Ages.” As Will Herberg writes, “That is America in America’s civil religion: a new order, initiated under God, and flourishing under his benevolent providence. Could the national and the religious be any more combined; is it at all possible to separate the religious and the national in this civil religion, any more than it was in ancient Greece or Rome?”[2] I really appreciate the 7th Phoenix Affirmation’s call to resist the commingling of Church and State, but at the same time I think we do well to recognize that as far as the commingling of religion and nationalism is concerned, that ship has sailed. They’re commingled, baby. Our national character and our national life together has all kinds of religious themes and practices. We have frequently read ultimate meaning into accounts of our history and destiny. In one of my books on American civil religion Will Herberg includes a paragraph from Herman Melville that typifies the messianic themes that have cropped up in our self-descriptions: “God has predestined, mankind expects, great things from our race; and great things we feel in our souls. The rest of the nations must soon be in our rear. We are the pioneers of the world, the advance guard, sent on through the wilderness of untried things to break a new path in the New World that is ours…Long enough have we debated whether, indeed, the political Messiah has come. But he has come in us.” Herberg goes on to point out that to go along with our redemptive history and messianism, America’s civil religion has its liturgy and its liturgical year, a yearly round of holidays and holy days. Christmas, New Years, Presidents Day, Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, Thanksgiving…they allow Americans come together, minimizing their differences, to express common sentiments and share their feelings on set days established by the society. We have our saints, like Washington and Lincoln; and our shrines, like those in Washington D.C. There is a lot about our national life that has a very religious flavor. I’m pointing this out because while American civil religion and Christianity are not one and the same, they have enough common themes and practices that sometimes people get confused about whether we are a Christian nation. I don’t know the full story behind Rep. Virgil Goode’s kerfuffle about his colleague being sworn into Congress using a Quran, but I’m speculating that if you asked him if this is a Christian nation, he’d say that it is. With great conviction, and probably with colorful phrases added to underline his fervor. We’ve all heard such convictions expressed. Well, we are a Christian nation…and a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, a Sikh nation, a Hindu nation, a Wiccan nation, a Native American spiritual nation, a Unitarian Universalist nation, an atheist nation. We borrowed more of our religious themes in our public talk from Christianity and Judaism than from other faiths, but that doesn’t make us a Christian nation. Our civil religion’s themes makes it a little more challenging to preserve religious freedom than it would have been if we’d had purely secular beginnings. Perhaps it was our Founding Fathers’ understanding of this potential for confusion that got them to write the First Amendment the way they did. You might have noticed that the “Wall of Separation” is not named in the amendment; that was Thomas Jefferson’s phrase that was quickly adopted as people discussed the principle of the free exercise of religion. It’s rather an unfortunate phrase, as ethicist John Bennett points out, because you can’t really have a wall between Church and State when they have, to so large an extent, the same constituency and share many of the same concerns for the same national community. To truly have a wall of separation between church and state, you’d have to build a wall down the middle of every soul who values both her faith and her citizenship. Bennett suggests that it would have been better for the word “independence” to be used rather than “separation.”[3] That’s what we are really after: the independence of each institution. It’s not that the State won’t seek to influence the Church or that the Church won’t seek to influence the State, but that they will in essence be independent of each other so that they can each carry out their proper functions. The church and the state have some common interests and some common goals. They both, for example, will have an interest in feeding the hungry, and they will both have an interest in seeing to it that people are not randomly murdered, though their motivations may not be expressed the same way. They may even have common strategies for reaching such shared goals; but they will still be healthier if they are essentially independent. Martin Luther King, Jr. put it succinctly: “The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state.” The value of the separation of Church and State as far as the Church is concerned is that it assures the freedom of the church, a freedom the 7th Affirmation names as preserving “the Church’s ability to speak prophetically to the government.” One of the finest examples of this in our U.S. history was the civil rights movement of the 50’s and 60’s. The foundation of that movement was in large part in the church. Training in non-violence was done in churches; organizational meetings took place in churches; what Ghandi called “soul force” was awakened and strengthened in the churches. The movement became the conscience of the nation, and the government eventually responded. I don’t know that the church or the members of the church use this freedom to speak prophetically as often as we could or perhaps should. I’m convinced that one of the reasons we don’t rises out of the fog of confusion around American civil religion. That is, confusion takes at least two forms. One form of confusion I’ve already mentioned, that some get confused into thinking we are a Christian nation. Another form of confusion is the muddle of loyalties we experience when we have two systems of values vying for our devotion. There are the values of our nation, and the values of our faith. As I’ve been saying, there is enough crossover between them because of our history that it’s not always clear when they are in conflict; or if they are in conflict, it’s not always clear which set of values should have higher priority. Especially since the State has a lot of coercive power at its disposal that God either does not have or chooses not to use. Stephen Soderland gave us a real-life example of this. He used to refuse to pay the proportion of his taxes that went to support the military as a matter of Christian conscience. But the government could seize it from his bank account anyway, and after a while he gave it up, particularly since the IRS smudge on his record was making it hard to find a job. God is not similarly reaching into our bank accounts when we are disobedient. Sometimes we restrict our impulse to speak or act prophetically because of the consequences. That’s life. Yet when the stakes are high—and that may occur for different people over different matters of the soul—it’s important that we keep our priorities and loyalties sorted out. I chose the scriptures you heard this morning because I liked the way they each expressed ascending loyalties. The little tale of intrigue from Acts reminded me that it was, is, and ever shall be potentially disruptive to name Jesus as king when the State wants our loyalty and obedience. Jesus does indeed turn the world upside down, as Paul’s accusers claimed. We just have to be prepared for it. Don’t be surprised to find that sometimes chaos ensues in the wake of discipleship, and sometimes we are called to disturb the peace. Jesus’ familiar verbal skirmish with the Pharisees about whether it is proper to pay taxes is a great reminder to whom we ultimately belong. Jesus says, “Render unto God the things that are God’s”: since all of our souls are stamped with the image of God just as the coins were stamped with Caesar’s image, we recall that when push comes to shove we belong to God even as we stand under a red, white, and blue flag. The text from 1 Peter is never assigned to the lectionary: imagine that! The author was writing to a group of Christians who were in the minority in their community and were constantly under attack for, among other things, being unpatriotic. Keep in mind that these believers thought they were living in the last days; all his instructions were for the short time they believed they would be on earth before Christ returned. The author teaches them that the emperor and the governor have a legitimate function that is not necessarily out of line with what God would want in human society. They keep order and punish those who do wrong. So although the Christians were free, there was no reason to be anarchists; they could be obedient to the governing authorities while they waited for the kingdom to be fulfilled. And then the author lays out a very helpful hierarchy of responses to their neighbors and God. The Christians are to honor the emperor; love the family of believers; and fear God. Modern ears don’t hear that word fear the same way as our forbears heard it. Fear of God is not being afraid of God, which is the way we tend to interpret it. Fear has to do with wonder, awe, reverence, and obedience to a Being wiser and larger than ourselves. Do you hear how this schema can help us sort out a confusion of loyalties if we are ever mixed up about whose rule to follow? Have you ever asked someone who provided a service, “What do I owe you?” I believe as thoughtful believers we should keep this question on our horizon as we consider how to respond to our neighbors and to God. What do I owe you? What do we owe the governing authorities? Honor. A measure of respect. Support, as far as Christian conscience allows. What do we owe our neighbors in the church? Love, as completely as we can render it, frequent forgiveness included. What do we owe God? Fear; that is, reverence, awe, wonder, humility, and obedience. We owe God our very souls; we belong to God. We do not owe reverence or awe or ultimate obedience to anyone or anything else besides God. The church is not the master of the state or the servant of the state, it is the conscience of the state. It is imperative that we preserve this freedom and that we use it. William Sloane Coffin put it this way: “How do you love America? Don’t say, ‘My country, right or wrong.’ That’s like saying, ‘My grandmother, drunk or sober’; it doesn’t get you anywhere. Don’t just salute the flag, and don’t burn it either. Wash it. Make it clean.”[4] [1] Darrow, Clarence quoted in American Values and Virtues: Our Tradition of Freedom, Liberty, and Tolerance Erik Braun and Robin Getzen, ed. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, 1996, p. 288 [2] Herberg, Will “America’s Civil Religion: What It Is and Whence It Comes” American Civil Religion Russell E. Richey and Donald G. Jones, ed. New York: Harper & Row, 1974, p. 80 [3] Bennett, John C. Christians and the State New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958, p. 210 [4] Coffin, William Sloane Credo Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004, p. 83 |