Faith of our (Founding) Fathers

July 6, 2008

Ephesians 1: 15-23  and  Matthew 5:14-20 

  Religion and politics often make for odd bedfellows.  That became clear again just two weeks ago, when Dr. James Dobson, the Christian conservative, psychologist, and head of Focus on the Family condemned a speech that Barack Obama made two years earlier. 

  He accused Obama of “deliberately distorting the traditional view of the Bible … [offering] a fruitcake interpretation of the Constitution … [and appealing to] the lowest common denominator of morality.” 

  Well, no matter where you stand on Presidential politics, Dr. Dobson, or fruitcake, that incident shows how argumentative we can be about patriotism and piety. 

  So I imagine that as you and I come to worship on this Fourth of July weekend, we are not all on the same page about the proper balance between the two.  But I also imagine that we are alike in being somewhat uptight about how Christian faith and American history inform one another. 

* * 

  The first thing I’ll say is that Christian faith can be closely held and intensely personal;  but it is never private.  Faith is always communal, always lived out in relation to others and the world around us.  Jesus talked little about personal salvation, but much about the establishment of the kingdom of heaven. 

  And “kingdom” is an intrinsically political word.   

  In today’s Gospel, Jesus also compares his followers to a city on a hill which “cannot be hid,” meaning that our faith will be seen by people around us, even from a distance, based on what we do and say.  Faith cannot be hidden.  Thus, even when it is not partisan, it is (in the broadest sense) political.  It has to do with the way we conduct our lives in the company of others. 

  Furthermore, today’s readings assert that faith trumps politics.  We are not Christian because a government allows us to be, but because – as Ephesians 1 puts it – God has seated Christ “far above all rule and authority and power and dominion.” 

  To say that Christ is “above” those things is not to say that he is unconcerned about such matters.  Rather, it affirms that our sovereign Lord oversees and guides all the lords and sovereigns of the earth … including those we elect and send to Washington, D.C. 

  And because he is over and above them, it means our first and foremost loyalty is not to earthly politicians, or a flag, or our founding documents, but to God alone. 

* * 

  Surely, that is what Thomas Jefferson understood in writing the Declaration of Independence, and what the signers believed as they set their names to it 232 years ago. 

  Jefferson himself had some quirky beliefs, with which we might not accept. For instance, he basically rewrote the Bible to his own liking, taking out any reference to miracles, angels, and other matters he deemed supernatural.  In fact, Jefferson went so far as to omit the resurrection from his version of the Bible! 

  Likewise, the Founding Fathers, on the whole, practiced a brand of Christianity we would find odd or unacceptable – in their holding of slaves, killing of native peoples, and persecution of non-Protestants. 

  Yet because they believed that God set Jesus over all other rulers and authority, they were able to see that King George III was not all he claimed to be.  Making Jesus Christ supreme ruler over all creation relativized the power of the British monarch, and made possible the American Revolution. 

  Thus Jefferson was able to appeal, in the opening lines of the Declaration, not to personal rights, or rights conferred by a king, but to “certain unalienable rights” to which all people “are endowed by their Creator” … including “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” 

  But again: it was not the form of government but Christian faith that enabled this radical notion – Christian faith, grounded in obedience to One who was and is “above all rule and authority and power and dominion.” 

  Protestantism – which is the ability to protest the excesses of earthly powers – gave colonial Americans the courage to leave their ancestral homeland, resist tyranny, establish a daring new form of government (which had never been seen), and commit their lives and well-being to one another. 

* * 

  I’ll give three examples of how that occurred in our nation’s early days. 

  The first involves our Gospel reading about a city on a hill. 

  The Puritan governor John Winthrop used that image in a sermon he preached before the early settlers set foot on the new continent.  He declared that God had called New England to be a model society, one shaped by justice, compassion, and charity.  The test of American faithfulness, he said, would not be purity of doctrine or strict adherence to any one set of beliefs.  Rather, God (and the watching world) would judge them on how they cared for one another.  And the two rules for that caring, Winthrop stated, were “Justice and Mercy.” 

  Withrop reminded his boatmates that in the early church, believers shared everything in common, forgave debt, freed the oppressed, fed the hungry and clothed the naked.  By extension, he insisted, the only way … 

to provide for our posterity … is to follow the counsel of [the Old Testament prophet] Micah, to do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God … For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill.  The eyes of all people are upon us. 

* * 

  My second example of our early ancestors acting on faith comes from Friday’s newspaper, and an article by George Will. 

  He points out that the Declaration of Independence signed in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776 was preceded by another declaration a year earlier in Charlotte, NC.  Presbyterians, no less, “were incensed by … meddling from London … which imposed fines on Presbyterian ministers who conducted marriage ceremonies”!  So, on May 20, 1775, these Presbyterians declared their liberty from England: 

We the citizens of Mecklenburg County do hereby dissolve the political bands which have connected us to the mother country … We do hereby declare ourselves a free and independent people … to the maintenance of which … we solemnly pledge to each other our mutual cooperation, our lives, our fortunes and our most sacred honor. 

  Presbyterian rebels!  Can you believe it? 

  What strikes me, though, is not simply that they declared a separation from someone else, but that they simultaneously pledged their cooperation to one another. 

  They understood that their freedom was solely a freedom to seek the mutual good of all. 

* * 

  That is the theme of my third example too. 

  Christ Church (Episcopal) in Alexandria, Virginia, got its start in pre-revolutionary days.  George Washington owned a pew there.  A few generations later, Robert E. Lee was confirmed there.  To this day, the church still stands. 

  In some ways, the original building looked like the manor house of a country squire, or low-level nobility. 

  The difference, however, is that this was God’s house.  At a squire’s house, one had to wait to be invited in.  But at Christ Church, all were welcomed.  So, every Sunday,  

the rich and noble worshiped alongside the middling classes and the poor.  Slaves sat with their owners in the family pews (not in separate balconies).  It was not a perfect world … But it was symbolically and theologically structured [in a way that] tied people together through a shared way of life in community. 

* * 

  Those three examples help me appreciate how our forebears balanced politics and faith, in order to be “like a city on a hill,” doing what no one else in history had done. 

  I see that their faith treated church as a sacred space, where saints and sinners alike heard God’s word and were equipped to put it into action through prayer and service … a place where they themselves could be transformed, and the world with them, not torn apart by cultural extremism but united across economic classes and other divides. 

  Thus, it seems to me that the best way for us to honor that legacy today is for us not to grant any earthly government more than it deserves, but to recall that Christ himself has been seated by God “far above all [other] rule and authority and power and dominion.”  And it is to celebrate that from where he is seated, he calls us to feast at his table, and to declare our patriotism to him, and our ultimate citizenship to the kingdom of heaven. 

To the glory of God.

____

References Cited 

James Dobson –  “Dobson vs. Obama,” Peter Wehner, June 28, 2008, Washingtonpost.com.

Regarding John Winthrop and the Puritans – Diana Butler Bass, Christianity for the Rest of Us, HarperSanFrancisco, 2006, p. 162.

Article by George Will – “Our nation’s birth not merely a one-day declaration,” Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, July 4, 2008, page 13A.

Christ Church (Episcopal) – Bass, op. cit. Pages 29 and 37.