Texts on Sunday, February 11, 2007
Psalm 1; Luke 6: 17-31
Jesus went down with them and stood on a level place. And from there, he spoke the words from what we usually call “the sermon on the mount.” Did you notice that? How can we explain that? First, you need to know that only Matthew says this is the sermon on the mount; Luke says it’s the sermon on the level. Who was right? One solution would be that they’re both right; that Jesus had a stump speech which he spoke five or seven or dozens of times, and we only have a record of a couple of them. But I don’t think that’s the story. I don’t think that either one of them is right in the sense of having grabbed a a fact by the tail. What we have here is a setting chosen by the author—Luke in this case, Matthew in the other—for well-beloved and meaningful sayings of Jesus. Nobody remembered where they were spoken; people have forgotten details like that, but remember the heart of the thing. Blessed are you who are hungry! Matthew is always putting his picture of Jesus up high. Luke is always bringing his image and his regard for Jesus down among the people. So we see again that Scripture does not give us facts about Jesus. It gives us already an interpretation of the transformation taking place inside the authors, who are sharing that with you and me. Luke was changed because he saw that God had come down in Christ to stand with us on a level place.
Tomorrow is the birthday of Abraham Lincoln. Now, this being also Black history month; and your church’s birthday, in that early nineteenth century period when Central Church was emerging from your side, about twenty-five years later, right in the midst of the thickening danger for America—there could hardly be a better occasion to think backward and forward about what it can mean that Jesus comes down to stand on a level place.
A little story came to my attention just recently. In March of 1850, William Seward, the former Governor of New York State and now the junior senator from this state, was offering his maiden speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate. He spoke a clarion call to bring slavery to an end in America—to set the captive free. The historian Doris Kearns Goodwin describes the speech in Team of Rivals.
As he moved into the second hour of his speech, his conviction gave him ease and confidence. Step by step, he laid the foundation for the . . . doctrine that would forever be associated with his name. Not only did the Constitution bind the American people to goals incompatible with slavery, he asserted, “but there is a higher law than the Constitution, which regulates our authority over the domain, and devotes it to the same noble purposes. The territory is a part . . . of the common heritage of mankind, bestowed upon them by the Creator of the universe. We are his stewards.” With this, his first national address, Seward became the principal anti-slavery voice in the Senate. (p. 146)
Another historian adds, “Those favoring compromise proposals [to keep slavery legal] rushed to attack Seward as a reckless enemy of the Constitution.” (http://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/generic/Speeches_Seward_NewTerritories.htm) One of his attackers was Rev. John C. Lord, first pastor of Central Church in Buffalo, New York. A little more than one year after Seward’s speech on the floor of the Senate, Lord delivered a sermon titled “The Higher Law.” There he took up the battle against Seward particularly and against all who would claim that obedience to some “higher law” required northerners to disobey the Fugitive Slave Law and its constitutional foundations, and refuse to return escaped slaves to their owners in the south. Lord argued that anyone who says there is a higher law than national laws is mistaken; that religious faith must not be imported into the laws of the government—an interesting and powerful idea—; because, he goes on to say, Scripture forbids it! Lord abhorred slavery, but he would not oppose it if opposition would cause a sundering of this nation. In his sermon of Thanksgiving Day sermon in 1851 he declared,
The existence of domestic Slavery was expressly allowed, sanctioned, and regulated by the Supreme Lawgiver in that divine economy which He gave the Hebrews . . . [Those who hold that] slavery is necessarily sinful now . . . must assume that [they] are wiser and better men than the Savior himself and the Apostles, and that the government of God and the Gospel need revision . . .
This is literalism with an iron grip on a bright man’s mind, and that of millions of fellow Christians of his day. The gospel needs revision? Yes, the gospel needs revision. To revise is to review—it’s the same word. To review is to re-see. To re-see is to say “I have new sight.” To have new sight is to say “I once was blind, but now I see,” just as John Newman said it in his beloved “Amazing Grace.” Is it not revision to experience grace? Lord would not see it.
Seward and Lord were enemies, politically speaking. Lord was a classic Old School Presbyterian. He believed that the fallen state of humanity was absolute. It tainted everything humans undertook. As a consequence, the spheres of public policy and private religion had to be absolutely separated, for in no way can sinful man advance the Kingdom of God on earth. Slavery is simply one of God’s punishments for the evils of humanity. There is nothing to be done. This, incidentall, was also the view of the Democratic Party of those days. Seward was a Whig. Whigs believed in using taxes to build up canals and roads; they believed in supporting small industry and free labor by means of import tariffs. This was in line with the thinking of New School Presbyterians. Their theology, coming from the city of New Haven where one Nathaniel Taylor had been teaching it, animated the people and leadership of your own First Presbyterian Church of Buffalo. Central and First split over these kinds of issues: how shall Christians interpret the meaning of the law and will of God. The more literal interpreters were the early Centralites, who left. But something new was astir among the members of First, as well as Presbyterian churches all over central New York State.
In 1837, having just called John Lord, Central Church sent their new pastor down to Pittsburgh, where the General Assembly mustered a majority of Old School Presbyterians to kick all those Central New York presbyteries out of the denomination, because of the way that they had begun to experience a revising—a renewing—of the gospel. Scripture was standing in the way of freedom for the black man and the black woman. Or we should rephrase that: a specific way of interpreting scripture was standing in the way of freedom. Though leaders like Rev. Lord loathed slavery, they argued that nothing could be done against it. Leaders of New School Presbyterians, like First Church, like Seward, and a throng of abolitionists throughout the country (then called “radical Republicans”) argued that Christians had been reading their Good Book too narrowly, if they supposed that it prohibited believers from committing their lives and their government to see that all people are created equal. No! A Christian must be willing to go out of bounds with the gospel, lest she become a slave to merely human ways of thinking.
And yet neither Seward nor Lord nor radical nor conservative nor Democrat nor Republican—no one could carry the day and lead this nation forward. For that reason, a man was elected to preside over this nation who simply did not claim to know the will of God. Abraham Lincoln knew he was not first in the hearts of his countrymen. He was not first in the hearts of anyone at the Chicago convention of 1860. Indeed, Seward was generally expected to receive the vote of the convention. One hundred seventy of about 230 needed delegates were already supporting him as the convention began. But through intelligence, magnanimity, generosity, peace, patience—all the fruits of the Spirit—Abraham Lincoln had made himself known as the second in the hearts of those countrymen. So when that convention collided in disagreement, and none of the great men could prevail as the candidate, Lincoln was chosen. The national media of the day thought it was a bizarre accident that this prairie lawyer Lincoln had been chosen over Seward! But they did not yet see what Lincoln saw: the ways of domination and contention could never select the one most powerful candidate. Because he was committed to high goals of compassion, he was present and ready to serve when all the giants had fallen.
Now, some of his beliefs were not unlike John Lord’s. He would keep slavery from spreading into the Western territories, but he would not interfere with it in the South. Yet he guarded his uncertainty as to God’s purpose in this terrible condition and the war that followed it. Many people are disappointed whey they learn that the hero Abraham Lincoln was not well out in front of the public with the intention to abolish slavery immediately. Many radical Republicans in that day held this against him. Many people are troubled when they learn that he did not intend to give the vote to freed slaves after the war, but rather favored sending them to Liberia in Africa as the solution to the problem of perceived racial inequality. Ah, how we want to have our heroes appear to us so clearly. We want them like Psalm 1, knowing the way of the wicked and knowing the way of the righteous. It is disturbing to learn that Lincoln wasn’t where we are or where we think he should have been.
Seward had that kind of certainty; John Lord had that kind of certainty. But they could not lead the whole nation. Our desire to have leaders, or heroes, or ourselves completely clear about what is good and what is evil is a static desire. There is no possibility of growth within it. But Lincoln’s way was dynamic. He was open to something. He did not know God’s will. His theology was in many respects that of an old school Presbyterian, just like his father. Like Lord, he rejected Seward’s “higher law” doctrine. But he did know God’s will. Thus was he able to move up a ladder of change, and to grow, and to allow the events that unfolded before him to revise his understanding of what he was called to do for this nation as the conflict grew darker. An aspect of his radical openness was manifest in his inability to simply believe the Christian religion. This too makes some Christians nervous about Lincoln. He didn’t fail to enjoy conversation with the Presbyterian pastors who served his family’s churches in both Washington and Springfield, but he did not join a church, and he did not find a resolution to his many difficulties with church doctrine. In this reluctance to know “what is so” about God, he gave expression to something high and subtle in the possibility and vision of America. Jacob Needleman writes about it in this way.
. . . at its origin, American individualism is a spiritual ideal, not primarily social or economic or psychological. [However], one tends to hear that word “spiritual’ and associate it with . . . belief systems, theology, doctrine or forms of behavior. But to believe a religious doctrine in itself implies little or nothing about the state of the soul. It depends on how a belief is held. Inwardly, one can believe in a religious doctrine in such a way that it serves the ego. Conversely, it is possible to turn away from all religious doctrine, yet inwardly be freer and more open to experiential contact with the actuality that is called God . . . It may seem paradoxical, but the study of the great teachers and guides of the world often reveals an individual’s spiritual force manifesting as a rejection of “religion.”
Needleman, The American Soul, p. 180-181
On the occasion of Lincoln’s hundredth birthday, Woodrow Wilson would say of him, “Lincoln saw things always with his own eyes. Most men see things with other men’s eyes, and that is the pity of whole business of the world.” Lincoln saw things with his own eyes. He could not see conventional religion as it was handed down to him. He went out of bounds. What can we say, but that because Lincoln could not accept the ordinary platitudes of the old-school religion in which he was raised, and yet could not reject the possibility of God’s truly having a divine will, Lincoln was able to listen to people? He was able to let go and to grow and to change and to revise what he had seen. He was able at length in the midst of a terrible war to go down with his people, all of them, to a level place, to the field at a Gettysburg, there to lay claim to a vision of the United States as dedicated to the proposition that all are created equal. He became dedicated to the proposition that this is the higher law—the very heart of the Constitution—and the fundamental reason for the war. He went out of bounds. He set the captive free, because he did not claim to know what is the will of God.
Now you may think that we are preaching Lincoln and not Christ this morning, but I don’t intend to preach anything but Christ. The history of the people of God and Christ cannot be so casually dissected. If the resurrection of Jesus Christ is real, then Christ will appear—in the form of Lincoln, in the form of Martin Luther King, of Gandhi, of you. Reading Lincoln’s life right is a way of reading Scripture right, and revising, and letting ourselves be revised by an amazing grace. For reading Lincoln’s life shows us that this very nation, at the precipice of its greatest peril, was led by a man who did not teach fear. He did not teach hatred, but “malice toward none and charity for all.” He did not pretend to know God’s will, but he humbled himself to the idea that it is possible to serve God “with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, and that we all might do now all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
When I was in seminary, I was told that a great homiletics professor of that seminary, Halford Luckock, believed that Psalm 1 cannot be used fruitfully in Christian worship because it divides too rigidly the righteous from the wicked. Well, today we have heard how Psalm 1 must be read in order that we grow by means of it. For with Lincoln’s own voice declaring that “God gave this terrible war to both North and South as the woe due to those by whom the offense [of slavery] came,” we see that we are the wicked, and we are the righteous. There is no separation, but the wicked and the righteous are one—one in nation, one in this world. Not just we who go to church, not just we who say our prayers, not just we who wave the beautiful stars and stripes. It is the prisoner, and the criminal, and the terrorist, and that enemy last named by our government, and the capitalist who pays evil wages. It is the Muslim, and the Hindu, and the Christian you can’t agree with and the Buddhist . . . and there is no end of these names. We are one. How urgent it is that you and I, who think we have no power and no influence over this dark and darkening world, let slip the chains of ordinary religious thinking, of fear of rejection, of desire for things, and comfort, and inclusion—and move out of bounds where the blessing is. Where the blessing is. Where the blessing is.
delivered at Central Presbyterian Church, Buffalo, New York
© Stephen H Phelps, 2007
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