“A Better Country”
I
begin with a word of warning: this sermon is a bit thin in the joke department.
My assignment is to preach about Independence Day, and you can’t talk about the
Fourth of July at All Saints without at least mentioning our public life. Now
obviously, there is a lot of hilariously stupid stuff going on in American
politics right now, but it’s hard to think up a joke about the election that
won’t get All Saints Church back in trouble with the Internal Revenue Service. It
is nearly impossible to say anything sane and rational this year without making
it appear that you’re be taking sides. So: homiletical hands off the
presumptive nominees. Then again, I probably could make some fun of the UK’s
decision to leave the European Union, but since this is Independence Day we Americans
should probably not be too contemptuous of people who have followed our lead in
deciding, in the words of our own Declaration, to “dissolve the political bands
which have connected them with another”. So hands off Brexit as well.
Two weeks ago
today I had the opportunity to spend the day in Washington, D.C., the city from
which Kathy and I moved back to L.A. five months ago. It was a lovely, if
muggy, late spring day, and instead of going back up to the cathedral and
finding out how well they were getting along without me, I decided to walk from
Union Station over to the Capitol and then down the length of the mall—past the
museums, the Washington Monument, and the World War II Memorial--to the Lincoln
Memorial at the mall’s west end. I wasn’t really sure what was drawing me
there, but I knew that given everything that is going on in America these days,
I needed a good dose of Abraham Lincoln if I was going to make it to November.
When you climb the
steps and enter the Lincoln Memorial, you see before you a giant statue of a
seated President Lincoln. On the north wall to your right is inscribed the full
text of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address. On the south wall to your left you
can read the Gettysburg Address. You turn around facing east and remember that
on the steps of this building Martin Luther King gave his “I Have a Dream”
speech in 1963.
Having
lived and worked in Washington D.C. and hung around our government for a while,
I am pretty jaded about America’s displays of civic piety. But on this Sunday
morning in June I was surprised and moved to feel myself caught up in what the
Lincoln Memorial embodies about America and its aspirations.
And maybe because we have spent the last several months
subjected to so much xenophobia and race-baiting by political figures both here
and abroad, it was the composition of the people gathered in the Lincoln
Memorial itself that most impressed me. On that Sunday morning I found myself
one of the very few white people in the building. The group gathered that day
was a tapestry of the makeup of the American nation: African Americans,
Latinos, Asian-Americans, Whites, and even some Native Americans all mingling
together and paying tribute not only to our greatest president but also to the
vision of America he lived and died to advance.
I spent many
years before coming to All Saints in the 1990s teaching American literature to
high school and college students. In those years of living with American texts,
it always struck me as pretty obvious that from its colonial beginnings our
nation has lived with two visions of itself: one exclusive, the other
expansive. For some, like Benjamin Franklin or Jay Gatsby, the “American Dream”
is the possibility to make it big in terms of money, fame, and what we
otherwise label “success”. For others, like Walt Whitman or Frederick Douglass,
the “American Dream” is the opposite: a communal vision of shared hope and
mutual accountability. Is America about Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous or the
Social Safety Net? Yes generally to
both, but only to one for those of us who follow Jesus.
I have
never been one of those who want to to talk about America as a “Christian
nation” or of the Founders as Christian people. Please. The Declaration doesn’t
mention Jesus at all. It talks about a vaguely defined “Creator” as “Nature’s
God”, and in the excerpt we read together, “Divine Providence”. Half of those
guys gathered in Philadelphia were Deists, and Deism isn’t even really a
religion. It’s a philosophy. So don’t go looking to the Declaration of
Independence for religious advice on personal or social issues. Nevertheless, from
the beginning in America there has always been an interfaith religious
community surrounding the world of politics, and up until the 1980s these faith
voices consistently pressed for communitarian values and social change. Think
of the 18th century preaching that advocated revolution, the 19th
century Abolitionism stoked by Christian preachers, the 20th century
vision of a Social Gospel that did so much for workers and children and women’s
rights. And then of course there was the Civil Rights Movement and Martin
Luther King.
Bill O’Reilly
once interviewed Michael Moore and asked him, given all the social positions
his films advocate, if he was a socialist. Moore replied, “I’m a Christian.” For
those of us who follow Jesus, there can only be one version of the American
Dream—a dream of racial, social, economic, political justice. That dream has
been articulated not by fast-buck entrepreneurs or evangelists with French
cuffs and razor cut hair, but by women and men who have felt the call of allegiance
to something bigger than themselves. These Christian change agents have steadfastly
looked to the example of Jesus and the way he lived—saying “No” to imperial
pomp and oppression, saying “Yes” to compassion and liberation—and they have
brought those values right squarely into our political discourse. Doing this is
hard work. They held to a vision of America that was not universally held or
admired. Remember that we killed runaway slaves, beat striking miners, murdered
Civil Rights workers, and burned crosses on integrationists’ lawns. What kept
these visionaries going?
I think
what kept them going was the Christian hope we heard articulated in our reading
from Hebrews this morning. The eleventh chapter of the Letter to the Hebrews
tells the story of Abraham and Sarah who left their home for a new country, and
they did so without any guarantees, only with the divine promise of a place “whose
designer and maker is God”. It’s a hard thing to leave your homeland. You only
do so in hopes of finding a better one. The
author of Hebrews spiritualizes the journey and makes it a pilgrimage. To Sarah
and Abraham, this new country was not an imperial dream of colonialism in
Palestine. It was a pilgrimage toward a
place in the imagination, in the mind of God and in the hearts of humanity. It
was a better country, a heavenly one. As the Letter to the Hebrews says:
All of them died in
faith. They did not obtain what had been promised, but saw and welcomed
it from afar. By acknowledging themselves to be strangers and exiles on
the earth, they showed that they were looking for a country of their own.
If they had been thinking of the country from which they had come, they would
have been able to return to it. But they were searching for a better
country, a heavenly one. So God is not ashamed of them, or ashamed to be
called their God. That is why God has prepared a city for them. [Hebrews 11: 8-16]
Those of us who follow Jesus will always
be, like Sarah and Abraham, “strangers and exiles on earth”. Like them, we will
always be divinely discontented in a social order that fosters or even allows
social, racial, gender, sexual, or economic injustice and inequality. Like our
biblical forbears, we 21st century followers of Jesus will ever be
restless to establish what the author of Hebrews calls “a better country”, that
is “a heavenly one”. This divine restlessness doesn’t mean that we’re going to
try to put the Ten Commandments on courthouse lawns or have kids say the Lord’s
Prayer in our classrooms. It does mean that, together, we who follow Jesus will
work to have America resemble the inclusive and egalitarian community that
Jesus established in the face of the Roman Empire. That is the same vision that our
communitarian precursors in America have always envisioned: a nation not of power but compassion; a
politics not of advantage but of justice;
a social order not of privilege but equality; and a society where there are no
insiders and everyone knows what it means to be valued and at home.
To my mind, Abraham Lincoln was America’s greatest
president. He was also the least conventionally religious of our leaders. But
he did know something about God, about politics, and about history. As I stood
in his Memorial two weeks ago, I took the time to read again these words from
his Second Inaugural inscribed on the north wall:
With malice toward
none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see
the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the
nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his
widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and
lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
What is this but the articulated vision of that better
country toward which Sarah and Abraham yearned? You and I will always be
strangers and exiles in any society that falls short of the vision of justice
and peace the gospel holds out for us. On Independence Day—especially one in
the middle of an election year--we who yearn for a better country do not have
the luxury of wallowing in our shared alienation. “Let us strive,” as Lincoln
said, “to finish the work we are in.” Let us not just look toward that better
country. Let us walk toward it and build it here and now.
We will not see or achieve that better country by looking
back to some imagined time of privileged greatness. We will achieve it in walking
toward the better country, by making common cause with all those who are
inspired by the dream of a place where God’s priorities and ours just might resemble
each other.
So let us look, and let us walk, and let us build. Let us
welcome that country from afar and bring it nearer with our prayer and faithful
action. Together we can achieve Lincoln’s dream of “a just and lasting peace
among ourselves and with all nations”. Walking there won’t be easy, but it can
be fun. And as we go there together we will come to know in our hearts and in
our lives that the country we build and inhabit is being achieved for us, for
our sisters and brothers, and for God. Amen.
