DESERT PALMS PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH

Sun City West, Arizona

Undeniable Connections

A Sermon Preached by the Rev. Dr. David S. Hodgson

July 4, 2010

Deuteronomy 8:6-9

Therefore keep the commandments of the LORD your God, by walking in his ways and by fearing him. 7 For the LORD your God is bringing you into a good land, a land with flowing streams, with springs and underground waters welling up in valleys and hills,

8 a land of wheat and barley, of vines and fig trees and pomegranates, a land of olive trees and honey, 9 a land where you may eat bread without scarcity, where you will lack nothing, a land whose stones are iron and from whose hills you may mine copper.

John 6:1-15

After this Jesus went to the other side of the Sea of Galilee, also called the Sea of Tiberias.  2 A large crowd kept following him, because they saw the signs that he was doing for the sick. 3 Jesus went up the mountain and sat down there with his disciples. 4 Now the Passover, the festival of the Jews, was near. 5 When he looked up and saw a large crowd coming toward him, Jesus said to Philip, “Where are we to buy bread for these people to eat?” 6 He said this to test him, for he himself knew what he was going to do. 7 Philip answered him, “Six months’ wages would not buy enough bread for each of them to get a little.” 8 One of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, said to him, 9 “There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish. But what are they among so many people?” 10 Jesus said, “Make the people sit down.” Now there was a great deal of grass in the place; so they sat down, about five thousand in all. 11 Then Jesus took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, he distributed them to those who were seated; so also the fish, as much as they wanted. 12 When they were satisfied, he told his disciples, “Gather up the fragments left over, so that nothing may be lost.” 13 So they gathered them up, and from the fragments of the five barley loaves, left by those who had eaten, they filled twelve baskets. 14 When the people saw the sign that he had done, they began to say, “This is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world.” 15 When Jesus realized that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, he withdrew again to the mountain by himself.

            My text is taken from the Gospel According to John, Chapter 6, Verse 18: “Perceiving then that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, Jesus withdrew again to the mountain by himself.” Let us pray. We pray for the depth of your solitude, O God, in our hearts. Accept our thoughts, our passions, our sacred purpose as we understand it, O God, and use us according to your will. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

            America deserves our love right now, not as patriotic duty or as religious requirement, but a love that is born of gratitude for the freedom that she provides for all of her citizens. That gift of freedom that she gives us does not come to us because of our deserving. It does not come to us because we as a people are more deserving of it than other people in other lands. It has come to us simply because we had the privilege of being born here. Nor does that gift come to us because we have earned it with our goodness or our diligence, as though some people are more entitled to that freedom than others. It has come to us because our founders fought and sacrificed and died to establish it, and in every generation our predecessors have fought to maintain and preserve it. It has come as gift from those who have gone before us. Freedom comes to us as gift, and America deserves our love because of it.

            Were we to count her years she would be two hundred and thirty-four years old today, a mere adolescent among the nations of history. Her spirit is still young—innocent, naïve, hopeful, courageous, idealistic—yet for all of her youthfulness the collective memory of America has more scars than her share. There are battle scars from revolution and civil war, because her birth and inevitable rebirth plunged her into violence. She has scars because every generation since has struggled with conflict to establish justice, to promote liberation of people at home and abroad by race, by gender, by class, by age. 

America is a work in progress, a dream longing for fulfillment, and every generation has struggled to improve her. The gift of freedom which she gives, I am absolutely convinced, she received first from God, because once upon a time the incarnate life of Christ gave the world its first glimpse of what a human life would look like lived under God, lived under the providence of God, lived with a clear understanding of the authority of God. It was a beautiful life and it was free. Free in the mind, free in the heart, free in the soul, and he lived under God. As the influence of that life began to impinge upon history it pressed against the walls of empires, regimes, governments, and parliaments. All of it was human pressure; people yearning to breathe free; people determined that the freedom they saw in the life of Christ was possible for all in a society that was free.

As the influence of that life spread across the developing world it picked up the intellectual creativity of the renaissance, the religious freedom of the reformation, the political passion of a revolution until at last it began to take on some form and function in this beautiful land between two shining seas where amber waves of grain are accentuated by the majesty of purple mountains. It was here a people began to strive for the chance to live as free men and women under God, with some notion of being able to be accountable to the authority of God and to strive after the providence of God. 

This is not to imply that everything America did in the name of God or strived to become under the providence of God was in fact the will of God. Yet for all of her fumbled attempts at glory, this is inevitably true: that the glimpse of freedom that she thought to reveal to the world and to guarantee for her people came from God. There is an undeniable connection between the life of Christ and the human liberty we enjoy in America. 

“We hold these truths to be self-evident,” declared our founders. The reason they were self-evident was simply because those truths that they went on to extol were part of the Hebrew-Christian tradition for centuries, sacred traditions that made those truths self-evident to the world. In my heart and in my eyes, the spread of democracy around the world today is not an expression of American imperialism. It is not the spread of an idealogy. It is the awakening of a spiritual rebirth for the peoples of the planet who are seeing their chance to live as free women and men under the purpose, grace and mercy of God.

If then, the purpose of the life of Christ was to have some political impact upon the transformation of the world, why did Jesus run away? Those are my words: “withdrew again”, John’s words. Why did he run away from the chance to be king when his followers wanted so desperately to make him king, to pay homage to him as king? I must admit this passage caused some problems for me for many seasons of my life. I could understand the passion of the people. They had seen him heal the sick and feed the multitudes simply by bringing life under the influence of God and calling upon the name of God. In a world where there was no national healthcare system and no social welfare system you can clearly understand why his leadership caught the imagination of the people. But when they wanted to make him their king, he ran away, again, implying they had tried to do that before.

I impose my words on it because, as one who chose the public option, who campaigned hard for the privilege of serving in public office and having at least the chance to translate my own values into community policy, I know how hard and difficult that is. You hold up your dreams and people say to you, then make them work. You extol your values and your virtues and people say, “Alright, if we give you a chance, prove to us that you can use them to make a difference.” You try and you struggle and you do something, and it’s good, but it doesn’t last. Whoever comes along after you changes everything. I wondered for a time why, when Jesus was given the chance to take the values of the kingdom of heaven and make them happen upon the earth, he ran away from that challenge.

Then one day when my service was over and I realized how temporary those changes were, I began to understand. His choice was this: to be king over a few people in one small place for a short period of time, or be faithful to the providence of God and allow God to use him as the inspiration for social and political change in every age among every people throughout time. I realized it took more courage for him to turn away from that call for kingship than it did to embrace it. Following that courage God used the spirit of that life to awaken the spirit of freedom in every age and to this day, it is the spirit of Christ that is stirring the people of this planet, I am convinced, to embrace their great destiny as human beings and to live as free women and men.

Having said that I need to remind us all, America is not a Christian nation, but if it were not for the spirit of the life of Christ we, the people, would never, ever, have dreamed of being free under the authority of God. America is not a Christian nation, but were it not for the spiritual maturity of that life, we never would have invited the religious traditions of the planet to these shores so they could explore their sacred trust, learn to get along with one another and share their insights of all that is sacred. 

America is not a Christian nation and in this present atmosphere of religious resentment there are many who delight in making the argument that the American flag does not belong in Christian churches. They make the same argument about the Christian flag, that it does not belong in public places, but I can tell you this: there is an undeniable connection between the faith represented by that one [indicating the Christian flag] and the freedom promised by that one [the American flag].

I’m sure most of you remember Viola Sorem, now confined to an adult care facility. She made a career of teaching children, specializing in fifth and sixth graders, and won the national teacher award. When she won that award she went to Washington D.C. where she received it in the Oval Office from President Ronald Reagan, who also gave her a beautiful gold-gilded flag that flew over the capitol for a day. I asked her last week what it felt like to receive that honor in that place. I asked her what that experience meant for her. She talked about freedom and how proud she was to be free, telling me that in the aftermath of that experience she wrote a poem about freedom. She looked and tried to find it. She has one little cupboard in which she has kept mementoes of a life well lived. She fumbled through a lot of things but couldn’t find it.

I said to her, let’s look for it in your memory. I began to take notes as she recited. She wasn’t sure she could do it because of her failing memory, but she began. “America is my country,” she said. “It’s the land of my birth. My freedoms are priceless … ,” and then she paused and searched her memory for more, raising the question, “How much are your freedoms worth?” She was trying so hard to look within. I could see it in her eyes. I felt a little awkward about putting pressure on her to remember, but she kept insisting she wanted to try. Then she began again. “Have you ever sat by a lake or a stream and thought about our country, an American dream?” She searched some more and then said, “Or do you nonchalantly meander along thinking our country will always be strong?”

I began to feel as though Vi had had enough pressure for one day and tried to stop but she insisted on finishing the last verse. The moment she did I understood why. She did not want her failing memory to be a paradigm, a metaphor, for the failing memory we have of America; you know, how we forget the virtues and values that made us great. She was determined to finish this poem, hoping it would be an inspiration to America as well. “Fellow Americans,” she blurted out, “remember it’s never too late to banish the feelings of fear and of hate.” Then a smile spread across her face the moment she knew she had the ending in sight: “So let’s stand united for what is right and just, keeping our motto in mind, ‘In God we Trust’.” 

America deserves our love for all that she had encouraged and enabled us to be. It is not her fault that sometimes her people grow self-centered and irresponsible. She is not to blame for the greed that corrupts her beauty or the compromise that undermines her virtue. And we cannot hold her accountable for the way her people use freedom of religion as freedom from religion. She deserves the love of faith-filled people because her vision of freedom is still worthy of our sacrifice and deserving of our devotion. Her vision of freedom is still able to inspire the peoples of the earth with a vision of what God intends for all.

I am persuaded, at least in the recesses of my own mind, that the future of America will not be determined by the competence of her leaders, nor will it be destroyed by the incompetence of her leaders. It will not be determined or measured by partisan victories or partisan defeats, but it will be determined by whether we, the people—we, who have been gifted with freedom—are ready, willing and able to love her and preserve her. Amen.