Sermon for Sunday,  June 26, 2005  

A VISIT FROM SAM ADAMS

By

Rev. Dr. Harvey C. Martz

Scripture:  Romans 13:1-2; 6-7

1 Let every person be subject to the governing authorities; for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God. 2 Therefore whoever resists authority resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment.

6 For the same reason you also pay taxes, for the authorities are God's servants, busy with this very thing. 7 Pay to all what is due them—taxes to whom taxes are due, revenue to whom revenue is due, respect to whom respect is due, honor to whom honor is due.

 It is likely you have heard much more about my famous cousin John Adams than you have about me. It is not surprising because he was the more polished of the two of us, though some historians have said that my influence on the events around the American Revolution were more important that his.

 And it is likely that all you know of me is that my family owned a brewery in Boston, one that is still famous. I want to let you know a bit more about me today than just those brief facts about my cousin and my family’s brewery. After all there is a statue of me in the center city of Boston and books have called me the grandfather of our country.

 Ahh-Boston! Our city was the cradle of the revolution. So many important things happened there: the conflict known as the Boston massacre between frightened, young British soldiers and a mob; The battles of Lexington and Concord nearby and the important battles of Breeds Hill and Bunker Hill; The Boston Tea Party that was the catalyst for King George really cracking down on us rabble rousers and closing the Boston Harbor.

But I get ahead of myself.

 I was born in Boston and my father not only owned a brewery but he was also a deacon in Old South Church where I was baptized. Our church was a very important meeting place for the few years before the Revolutionary War actually began. It became a place for debate and dissent and for making plans against tyranny. It was a sign of the importance of our faith that under girded the entire revolutionary effort. In fact, Jefferson referred to that spiritual foundation when he wrote those famous words: we believe that human beings are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights!! Endowed by their creator! And the place of a government is to insure those rights. And when that government fails to do that it is the duty of the people to abolish that government.

 You have heard those words so often but let me assure you they were treasonous and volatile words that we signed our names to in that Declaration.

 I grew up in Boston close to Harvard University, a school with roots in the church again—

established by a minister. I attended Harvard—graduated sixth in my class—with the idea at first of becoming a minister in my congregational faith but did not find that was the best fit, though I had much training in religion there and even attended Saturday classes all day in Greek and Latin and Bible. By the way, we did not subscribe to those verses from Romans that Paul wrote about all governing authorities being instituted by God. We believed that if the ruler failed to act for the common good of the people, the ruler could not be from God and needed to be replaced.

In fact, that is what my masters’ thesis from Harvard was about. I argued that people could revolt against their rulers if the rulers ignored the rights of the people and failed to honor the idea from John Locke that every ruler gains his authority only from the consent of the governed!

After I graduated I worked in the family business for a while and then became a tax collector for the government. I was never very good at that. I found it hard to collect taxes I thought were unfair on behalf of an unjust government. And I found it hard to collect taxes from poor people. I felt myself at home with common people more than the aristocrats and the powerful. I was so ineffective in my tax collecting that the people I was to collect taxes from owed over $7000 when I finally gave up my job!

 I was married in 1749 to the daughter of the minister at Old South Church who baptized me. Elizabeth and I knew some of the hardship and tragedy that others of you parents have experienced: we lost three babies in infancy and only one, our son Samuel, survived childhood. Later she delivered a stillborn child and she died herself in that childbirth. I learned then as in the later dangers of the revolution to rely on God for strength and comfort in all the difficulties of life.

 Before Elizabeth’s death we would read the Bible daily in our family. But when I saw the government abusing the God given right of people, I had to apply the Bible and get involved in changing that government. I was the organizer of the Sons of Liberty in Boston, the group that began to make trouble for the abusive government officials. The tensions between the British officials and the colonists got worse and worse and in 1770 the event known as the Boston Massacre happened because of a mob that confronted some young and inexperienced soldiers.

 It was a tragedy and one that I had mixed feelings about—even though I supported the role my cousin John Adams took in that controversy. John did something that made him extremely unpopular with the masses—he agreed to be the defense attorney for the British soldiers who were on trial for murder and ensure that the rule of law and justice prevailed instead of mob mentality.

 I continued to speak out against the practices of the king, especially his unfair tax policies and his attempts to control and grind down us Americans. I wrote many letters to the newspapers stirring up people’s sense of justice and economic fairness.

 One of my most famous efforts against the abuses of the British was when they had wanted to make us pay a tea tax and they left the loaded ship in the Boston harbor with its 342 crates of tea. That was their mistake because after a spirited meeting of 5000 of us Bostonians in Old South Church on December 16, 1773, a large group of our Sons of Liberty dressed as Natives took pleasure in off loading that tea into the harbor while several hundred citizens watched from the shore.

 The pressure from the king just got worse when he saw he could not stamp out our hunger for freedom; he kept trying to control us and squash our dissenting views. In fact, General Gage threatened to capture and kill me unless I backed down from my vocal opposition to the king. He promised to reward me if I would back down—a bribe in other words. Here is what I told him; I have long made my peace with the king of kings and no personal considerations shall cause me to abandon the righteous cause of my country.

 Well, if you have studied your history—you have, have you not?—you will know the rest. I was elected delegate along with cousin John Adams to the first Continental Congress. On the second day, I urged an Anglican minister from Philadelphia to say prayers over us each day of that gathering.

 We made plans to stop all imports and exports with Britain. The Tory newspapers in the colonies predicted that John Hancock and I would soon be hanged for our unpatriotic and treasonous activities. We took those predictions very seriously. In April 1775 when the British soldiers were approaching Boston, John and I were hiding in Lexington in the home of The Rev. Jonas Clarke, another patriot, when Paul Revere came to warn all of us. We fled just in time to save our lives.

 The movement for independence mounted even more after Lexington and Concord that April though many colonials still wanted to compromise with the king and try to make nice with him. It was those of us from New England who were seen as the firebrands in the Second Continental Congress. The southern delegates were a little frightened of us. It was we New Englanders who urged us to move toward war. I advocated that year for us to establish a standing army and seconded the nomination after my cousin John nominated George Washington to be the new Commander in Chief.

 You must remember that in 1775 and even until the time we declared our independence, about a third of the colonists were still Tories—sympathizers with the king—and another almost third were neutral and still hoping for some peaceful way of accommodation. Not me.

 One of the catalysts for a change was the publication in January 1776 of the book that has been the most widely read book in all of American history besides our beloved Bible. It was Thomas Paine’s little monograph Common Sense that got read by 400,000 of the two and a half million residents of our young country.

 We actually became a country in July 1776 when over 40 of us congressional delegates risked our lives by affixing our names to a document written by a team of persons including Jefferson and Franklin. They used some phrases that they had modified from my writing a few years earlier about the rights to life and liberty and—I said property, they said the pursuit of happiness.

 I was the ninth person to sign that sacred page; my friend Hancock signed at the top in a large hand, so, he said, King George would not have to put on his spectacles to read the name.

 We did not know how this would all turn out. We knew we were risking our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor in this dangerous new experiment call The United States of America. And we did not laugh much when Franklin said that day that now we must all hang together or we will surely hang separately.

 If you want to know more detail you have the chance now to read the excellent new book by David McCulloch about the happenings. He gets it right pretty well. He documents how often we were just protected in our military adventures by the providence of God. He tells about the courage and commitment of this poorly clothed rabble of an army that defeated the mighty British. He tells about General Washington’s mistakes but also how he was learning from his mistakes and always becoming better as a leader—an excellent role model for each of us today. He says on your front page something that is true: “These revolutionary leaders and people discovered the power of thinking for yourself. They had a love for learning.” Yes, we did!

 It is a vital and crucial characteristic for us today and one that I fear is being lost by you 21^st century citizens. Again, I get ahead of myself.

 I returned to Boston from Philadelphia in 1777 to find my house ransacked by the British. Our Old South Church had been desecrated also with all the pews taken out and the sanctuary used as a stable for British horses.  In that year I agreed to write with my cousin John Adams the constitution for Massachusetts that contained a version of what 10 years later became the Bill of Rights for our federal constitution. I was something of a forward thinker. I advocated that every citizen should have the right to vote in a time when only white, Protestant, male, property owners had that right. And I believed that the state should provide for a free public education for every child.

 I had a chance to advocate for those ideas when I was honored by being elected as a senator to the Massachusetts legislature in 1781.  I was elected Lt. Governor in our state along with Governor John Hancock and then served as Governor after his death, being elected each year from 1793-97. My health had held up enough for me to be able to work 12-hour days as governor even into my seventies.

 I had a vision for our country that has come from our Bible and from my reading of the history of western civilization that America would be a sort of Christian Sparta, embodying the Biblical virtues of charity and humility with the Greek virtues of discipline and austerity. I worry about the absence of that vision when I look around these few days of being back with you and see luxury and materialism instead. I know that our Puritan ancestor John Winthrop would hate this new devotion to pomp and wealth and greed. It was Winthrop that your President Reagan liked to quote about his vision of America as a city set on a hill to be a shining example to the world of virtue and justice and liberty.

I remind each of you of what I learned as I saw General Washington grow into his role as father of our country: he was able to learn from his mistakes. He was not defensive about his errors hut used them to make himself a better leader. He still gives us a good example of continuing to improve ourselves and not being afraid to admit when we are wrong. I believe your Methodist leader John Wesley talked about this as growth in grace or being on a journey toward wholeness and perfection and not thinking we had arrived yet.

 That reminds me of the importance of our faith as the foundation for what is good about our country. We early patriots were sure that we could see the hand of God at work in our work and we saw the scriptures as the source for our belief that God endows each of us with certain rights that any government exists to ensure and not to trample on.

 Our churches were crucial in all of our discussion about the purpose of any government and in our political debates. I hope your church and your churches are like that as well—places of dialogue and discourse and civil debate and opportunity for dissent instead of places where you must conform to a certain theology or polity. I told you about how Old South Church was that place of dialogue and debate for us; I have learned these past few days on being back with you that this church served in the same way a few years after me when it became the hotbed for the abolitionist movement in the 1840s and the congregation was a catalyst to be sure that all Americans, regardless of race or color, could enjoy freedom. That is what our churches should be doing—applying our scriptures to the debates of our times.

 And do not be afraid of controversy in your church or in your political discussions. Do not give in to pressure to conform to the thinking of others. That is how we puritans got our start—by refusing to conform to the religious ideal of the Anglicans and by being different from them. Do not be afraid to dissent and be different, no matter how risky that may seem. If you believe you are right, then speak out as we did. In fact, one member of the British parliament who was somewhat sympathetic to our cause, gave us a memorable quote:

Edmund Burke said, “All it takes for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing.”

 And I was skeptical of government. I was initially opposed to the newly written American constitution because I was afraid that the big government was going to be too far removed from the common people and from the states themselves. That is why I was so passionate about including in it the Bill of Rights that protects us from the abuses of government. And I have been disturbed the past few days to read that many 21^st century Americans when asked in opinion surveys about some of the basic rights such as freedom of the press and speech and religion would be willing to give those up.

The press was a very important vehicle for us to use to get to the truth in our times. Our Lord told us that if we know the truth that it shall make us free.  We read widely and voraciously and our system of government depends on an informed citizenry and not on people who only get news from TV and bloggers, whatever those are, as some of your young people are reported to be doing. In one of the papers I saw this week I read that the CEO of FedEx—whatever that is— has a habit of reading five newspapers a day.

 Are you informed? Do you read? Are you committed to learning and improving? One of your cultural observers says that there are four deficits now in our country: not only the budget deficit but an energy deficit, and education deficit and an ambition deficit!! He cites the poor performance of the US Olympic Basketball team last year as a sign of that ambition deficit and the aggressive commitment to education in other countries as a sign of our education deficit. Is he right? I am worried.

 I must leave you with a word from one of my contemporaries, another giant from those times named Ben Franklin. He had just finished writing and approving with others this marvelous, precious Constitution and he was being carried out of the hall because he was unable to walk by that time in his life.

A woman stopped him and asked him Dr. Franklin, what have you wrought?

Here is what he said that we need to remember every day as American patriots: “You have a republic now madam—if you can keep it.”

We cannot keep it by being uninformed and uninvolved. We gave our lives so this republic would exist and thrive and be strong. Can you keep it? Will you, with God’s help, do what it takes to keep it?

 Sources for this monologue include::

 “1776” by David McCulloch; Simon and Schuster, 2005

 “Samuel Adams: Son of Liberty, Father of Revolution” by Benjamin H.Irvin; Oxford University Press, 2002

 “Samuel Adams” by Karin Clafford Farley; Raintree Steck Vaughn, 1995.

 “John Adams’ by David McCulloch

  Sermon Library