Texts on Sunday, May 29, 2005 — prior to Memorial Day
Luke 7: 1-10; Acts 15: 6-15, 19
One of “Robert’s Rules” was very much in the news this week, though I heard no newscaster make the connection. Can a simple majority stop debate and press its will on a large minority? No! Not according to Robert’s Rules: two thirds of a body must agree to stop debate. For well over a hundred years, that was the practice in the United States Senate, too. About thirty years ago, they reduced the fraction needed to stop debate from two thirds to three fifths. That’s what a “filibuster” is about, as I’m sure you know. In spite of its ugly name, the filibuster was a piece of the American genius for government. It confers upon a sizeable minority (forty percent or larger) the power to prevent action on a matter that disturbs them. In this past week, that power was almost gutted from the practices of the United States Senate. A compromise was reached to prevent the formal elimination of the rule–which is to say, a handful of Republican senators moved their votes into the column with the minority of Democrats in order to preserve this odd power of the minority. Lindsay Graham, Republican of South Carolina, believes his vote to preserve the filibuster could lose him his seat in the Senate, but he has no regrets. Most of the Senators in the majority party were apparently ready to rule from the power of a slim majority alone, ready to end this aspect of two hundred yeas of parliamentary habits. What is going on here? And how can it possibly be a concern for a gospel sermon this Sunday?
On this Memorial Day weekend, I invite you to consider the deepest of reasons for which this nation stands, one nation, indivisible. Not every war in which our sons, and now daughters, have died, was wise. Not every death purchased a measure of liberty and justice. Nor can we say that every soldier had high motives in taking up arms. But these facts about ambiguous and sometimes corrupt motives behind the violence of war apply to every nation and its people. Here is something that does not apply to every land and people. Alone among the commonwealth of nations, America was formed as an idea. It was, and still is, an experiment in how humans can live together. In his book The American Soul, Jacob Needleman frames the matter this way:
To put it another way, to be American was an idea, not an inescapable, organic given. America is a nation formed by philosophical ideals that have been thought through by human beings–it is the only nation in the world that is so constituted. America is not a tribal, ethnic, or racial identity. It is a philosophical identity composed of ideas of freedom, liberty, independent thought, independent conscience, self-reliance, hard work, justice . . . This is both the weakness and strength of America. To love America is not to love one’s roots– it is to love the flower that has not yet blossomed, the fruit as yet unripened. (p. 39)
This is what is worth fighting for. When we understand that, we will understand that America has many soldiers defending her. Not only do we honor those whose lives were given, or taken, in war. Because America is not an ethnic clan, because the glory of America has nothing to do with pure blood–we have none!– but is rather about an idea of humanity, our Memorial Day will be deep enough if in our hearts we honor the dead not for their blood, but for the superb idea of this nation, and for all its idealists who give their life’s energy to prosper its genius.
Needleman writes, “To be American was not ethnic. To be American was not to be born anything at all.” (p. 39) In the margins of my copy of this book, I wrote, “So also: Christian.” Here is the bridge, crossing over from Christian gospel to America. Sadly, it is a bridge little trod by many Christians in America today–but it is a bridge worth defending in these troubled times. In Acts, Luke preserves an account of a meeting of the earliest fathers of the church. The setting was this. In the early years after Jesus’ crucifixion-resurrection, Christians were a sect of Judaism. The majority of the leaders in Jerusalem were pleased to see the numbers of adherents swelling, but they were not pleased that Paul and Peter were converting Gentiles to Christian-Judaism without demanding circumcision of the men. At this meeting of the leaders, there has already been much debate, Luke tells us. The majority are adamant: the Jewish laws must be obeyed. Do you see what was at stake? Now, we make a quite a celebration over Pentecost, but if you trace the arc of the Pentecost speeches, you see that only Jews heard the gospel that day; only Jews benefitted. In Acts 15, at least a dozen years have passed since Pentecost, and still the majority want to keep the good news about Christ to themselves. If they insist on their way right now, Christianity will never be born into the world. It will be a thing done in a corner. Jesus Christ will have died in vain, like a soldier in a forlorn and foreign war, for this majority is about to vote the whole world of Gentiles out of their joy, if they won’t submit to the cutting ritual.
Now, after there had been much debate, Peter stood up. Right here is the mystery, the wonder, and the power of the Holy Spirit alive in their midst. Why let him stand again? Why let this minority go on? And yet they did. How shall we account for the strange wisdom of a majority to refrain from using their power, but to let the voice of the few and the powerless be heard? This is a marvelous thing. When Peter was done, Luke tells us, “the whole assembly kept silence.” Afterward, they heard Paul and Barnabas as well. Then James, the leader of the conservatives, rose to say, “I have reached the decision that we should not trouble those Gentiles who are turning to God.” From that moment when power and tradition laid down its big head, Christian faith has sprung. You yourself are sprung from this fountain! Was the Spirit of God in it? Why, if we rule God out of that assembly, we might as well drop the idea of God altogether.
The great movement of God’s Word in the world has always this shape: that the powerful let go of their power so that something greater than themselves come to birth. When we say with the apostle that “we love because God loved us first,” (1 John 4:19) we can only mean that God has gone first in giving up God’s power, so that greater love be borne into this cosmos. The Christian gospel declares the mystery revealed from long ages: God arises within wherever the wall of power and privilege and security is broken down to make a greater city and a greater citizenship. The amazing thing about America is that for so many generations, we have managed, however imperfectly, to practice this good news, assured of its root in God’s soil, without requiring anyone who benefits from it to be like ourselves–except in this one core value: open your mind to the other.
Early in the summer of 1787, the great minds who would fashion this core value into the Constitution of the United States of America had been meeting for some weeks, yet without success of any kind. On a day in June, Benjamin Franklin suggested that prayer was in order.
The small progress we have made after four or five weeks’ close attendance and continual reasonings with each other, our different sentiments on almost every question… is, methinks, a melancholy proof of the imperfection of the human understanding. . . . We indeed seem to feel our own want for political wisdom, since we have been running all about in search of it. We have gone back to ancient history for models of government, and examined the different forms of these republics, which, having originally formed with the seeds of their own dissolution, now no longer exist; and we have viewed modern states all around Europe, but find none of their constitutions suitable to our circumstances.
In this situation of this assembly, groping, as it were, in the dark to find political truth, and scarce able to distinguish it when presented to us, how has it happened, Sir, that we have not hitherto once thought of humbly applying to the Father of Lights to illuminate our understanding? In the beginning of the contest with Britain, when we were sensible of danger, we had daily prayers in this room for the divine protection. Our prayers, Sir, were heard, and they were graciously answered. All of us, who were engaged in the struggle, must have observed frequent instances of a superintending Providence in our favor. To that kind of Providence we owe this happy opportunity of consulting in peace on the means of establishing our future national felicity. And have we now forgotten that powerful Friend? Or do we imagine we no longer need its assistance? (Cited in Needleman, p. 62-63)
When Franklin was done, his motion was defeated with hardly a vote in its favor. But it did not matter; Franklin’s prayer was already invoked over the congress in a classic American way. The delegates stayed together through that sweltering June and July and August and September of 1787 and forged together a constitution upon which a nation has grown into this remarkable, huge, sheltering tree. Needleman calls this genius for government “the American art form.”
The great art form of America is government and especially the Constitution. Other nations and cultures have produced cathedrals, epics, poems, music, systems of philosophy that far surpass what America has brought forth. But let those who ask what of transcending stature our nation has created turn their eyes to our form and structure of government. That is the American art, a work of human hands and minds that can stand, in a certain way, alongside many of the greatest achievements in the history of the world . . . And in this art form, it seems to me, America is pointing to the most essential art form of the future–the art of human association, the art of working together as individuals in groups and communities. This is the essential art form of coming humanity. Without it, nothing else can help us. It is through the group, the community, that moral power and a higher level of intelligence can be sought, if only we can discover the way of constructing association with others in communities, groups and combinations of men and women. (Needleman, p. 61)
This work is an idea worth dying for, an idea worth living for: to let the future–yes, even God’s future–come into being, especially through the vision of “the least of these” when it may, that we together find how to live. In this hour, there are many signs that the American art work is neglected. It is in danger of becoming a dusty museum piece, an object politicians worship on Memorial Days but practice not at all. A president comes to power promising to be a “uniter, not a divider,” yet one after another after another, his decisions create divisions, advancing only the interests of the extreme wing of his party. It is as if the 49% of Americans who sought leadership of a different kind than his do not exist. Be that as it may, a president is one person; he decides according to his lights. What power can possibly bring a president toward the center, to unite us? By the wisdom of generations, the American Senate has been accorded precisely that power. And in the Senate this week, a few moderates of that majority party acted as if inspired by what we might call “the Wholly American Spirit” to preserve that power. They adopted a fragile truce to continue to allow a substantial minority to stop action on what they deem extreme cases–so that we might continue the American experiment, learning how humans can live together. Apparently, the leadership of the majority party feel wounded and angry at the moderates’ compromise, and are eager to pounce on more power. May they be moved to a deeper memorial of what America is about. May they see the very future of humanity tethered to reason as “a spiritualizing force within ourselves [which] can only arise in us through the struggle to listen to our neighbor.” (Needleman, p. 61)
May the spirit of the soldier whose slave was close to death come to us American Christians, who, like the Roman soldier, have so much power and so little need to listen to the rest of the world. Yet of that centurion, Jesus said “Not even in Israel have I found such faith.” What had Jesus heard in this soldier? Two things: First, he confessed “I am not worthy of your attention, O Lord.” For those who know they are powerful, this is a great beginning in wisdom and humility. Second, Jesus heard the soldier say, “I also am a man set under authority.” This little word “also” means: I know how orders work–how my subordinates obey me, and I obey my superiors. But I see that you also, O Lord, are under authority. I see that all things work according to your Father’s will, who gives up even himself that the least might leap to life. So, to you who stand at the door of all reality and knock, I, a mere captain of the army, now open. At your command, I trust you. I trust that my sick servant should leap to life again, and live, at your command. Yours is power, and kingdom, and the glory. I am not worthy.
In Spirit like this, ready that God renew the life of the least through the struggle of the powerful to listen to their neighbor, our nation was founded. In a memorial like this, we can come to ourselves once more, and return to our home.
1. During that same interval, Elder Bill Schulz was the Moderator of the Presbytery of Western New York.
delivered at Central Presbyterian Church, Buffalo, New York
©Stephen H. Phelps, May 2005
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