Sermon for July 2, 2006

ONE NATION UNDER GOD

By

Rev. Dr. Harvey C. Martz

Scripture:   Romans 13:1-2

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.

We had a terrific week of Vacation Bible School this week, and one of the themes was to find the treasures of God’s word in our Bibles. What we need to also mention is that we United Methodists use our reason when we read our Bible and there are some things in the Bible that, through reason and experience, we have chosen not to follow.

One of those examples in is Psalm 137 which encourages God’s people to take the children of our enemies and kill them by throwing them against boulders. Most of us do not think that following God involves threatening or killing children although I did hear one report this week on NPR that in the torture of one of the Al Qaeda leaders, those who were torturing him for information did threaten to harm his children if he did not offer information.

The passage for today from the book of Romans is one that American Christians have been skeptical about particularly during the period of our history we are celebrating today on this long Independence Day weekend.

Paul is addressing an audience whom he hopes will not revolt against the Roman authorities and cause trouble for the early Jesus movement. He says that the people in power get their authority from God and that if someone is in power, the proper Christian attitude is to obey.

I want you to think about how the people in American history in the 1770’s like Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson and John Adams and Ben Franklin – all of these were people who trusted in God and in varying degrees honored the Bible (though Jefferson came up with a radically modified version of the New Testament). What if they had not used their reason and they just had blindly obeyed King George and been submissive to his terrible policies? They would have been following the letter of the verses from Romans but not the spirit of the rest of the Bible.

The document that we mark the signing of next Tuesday states that we are people who are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights (it is based in theology!) and when a government denies those rights, it is the right and duty of the people to replace and overthrow that government! The founders located the right to violent revolution in theology and Biblical faith.

And that was just one chapter in the very complex relationship in America between religion and politics or church and state. Other examples during the revolutionary period of the mix between faith and politics was when some ministers urged the men in their churches on Sunday morning to sign up for the revolutionary army or when those clergy took off their clerical robes and underneath them had on the uniform of a revolutionary soldier. How is that for mixing politics and religion!!

About twelve of us in our Monday night book group read through one of the best books I have seen on the American experiment separating church and state two weeks ago: historian Jon Meacham’s new book, American Gospel, traces the complicated relationship between church and state or religion and politics over the time from the 1600’s until today. He notes that most of the founders were deeply religious people whose faith was one of the motivators for their courage in signing the Declaration of Independence, but that they were not trying to create a Christian nation – contrary to the thinking of Jerry Falwell, and that they were very careful to not favor one religion or to allow the establishment of a mandated religion since they had seen what occurs in nations that do so.

There is a quote sheet in your bulletin that lists some of Meacham’s insights and that offers some quotes from another book called The Founders on Religion. I commend that to you as a resource over lunch or dinner today; let each person pick a quote and talk about why they think it is important.

Meacham has several significant points:

• We Americans are unique in our treatment of church and state. We open congress and court sessions with prayer and with references to God. We honor God with a statement on our money and in our pledge to the flag. We have chaplains in our military and in our congress. But we do not want to mandate or require religious beliefs or practices because that would interfere with freedom of conscience.

• We believe in a wall to separate church and state – a low wall, but we mean by that wall that the state is not to dictate to the church. We do want the church to speak to the state; we believe that spiritual insights and spiritual ethics should make a difference in our life together and in our public policies.

• Meacham says that there are many misconceptions about what the first amendment means. Kids can pray in school. It is organized and mandatory prayer that has been declared unconstitutional over the past few decades. I personally agree that governmental groups should not teach prayer; families or churches should do that. Kids can bring their Bibles to school and can gather to study and to pray if there are similar groups meeting on school property.

• In fact, the study of religion in public school is legal as well as long as it is study about religion or the Bible and not indoctrination, and there is an excellent new textbook in our library called, The Bible and Its Influence  that is being used by some school systems to teach about the Bible – in the assumption that if kids are not getting this in church, that it is important they get an exposure to what is in the Bible since so much of western culture and western literature and western civilization is based on it.

Meacham tells us the quote from the Bible that early American John Winthrop loved to cite about the vision of America as a city set on a hill to shine and to be a model for others, and in many ways the “American experiment” of a constitutional democracy and of the separation of church and state is working well – especially when we think of church buildings in Europe and England that have become mostly museums where people go to admire the art and architecture but very few people come to worship regularly and to connect with God.

That vision of our country as a shining city on a hill to be a shining model was often quoted by President Reagan as part of his vision for America. I want us to talk about what the founders vision was and what our vision is for America particularly from our perspective as Christians who are called to practice justice and mercy and compassion.

We United Methodists have always seen that there must be a relationship between the ethics and values of the Bible and what is happening in our country – not only in our personal lives but in our country. Methodist preachers in the early 1800’s were vocally opposed to slavery and that opposition stirred up much controversy many years before the civil war began. That was true of congregational ministers and Quaker leaders and Presbyterians as well. We cannot disconnect the Bible from the issues of our time. We saw the same advocacy from church leaders over the controversial question a hundred years ago of whether women should be allowed to vote or whether children should work in factories.

And since 1908, Methodists have offered a position document known as the Social Principles Statement to make this connection between social conflicts and the principles of Christian life. These documents are always available in this church. In this application of Christian ethics to social conflicts, we are right in line with those who wrote the Declaration and the Constitution.

The questions of our time are not any easier:

How do we maintain the constitutional checks and balances during war time when the power of the office of President has increased significantly over the past century and when we believe that absolute power can be corruptive of any person or any party?

What immigration policies can we institute that will teach a respect for law and order and will also be compassionate and realistic? What should that policy in Colorado say about whether we should vaccinate the children of undocumented workers in our state?

How do we apply the 14^th amendment of our national constitution to all people including gay persons who want the same rights and protection given to heterosexual couples; that is, what does Equal Protection under the law mean when applied to marriage rights?

While burning our flag is reprehensible to us, how do we balance that with the constitutional right to free speech?

How do we deal with our Bible’s concern that there not be a radical gap between haves and have nots - especially when we haves can become apathetic - when we see an ever widening gap in our country, a gap that has concerned many economists?

What should be the relationship between huge corporations and government when part of the purpose of government – according to founding father John Adams – is to support the “common good” and not just the good of the most powerful lobbyists?

These are difficult, ethical questions and people of faith need to apply the principles of scripture as we deliberate – principles of justice and uprightness and compassion just as the founders brought those principles to their own time.

And to make that application we need to know our scriptures well – they certainly did (that is why we emphasize the Disciple Bible study here: we have to dig it seriously as our VBS kids have been learning) and we need to read widely even in people we may disagree with. I wonder if the Americans of the 1770’s read more than we do. Newspapers and broadsides were much appreciated and little books like Tom Paine’s Common Sense were proportionately the best selling books in all of our history. I fear that we are lazier in our reading than they were.

What if we worked harder to live up to the words in the pledge and on our money, that we want to be “one nation under God”, that is living by God’s principles of justice and compassion and concern first for the least and the last and the vulnerable and the poor. What if we were concerned about the same things God is concerned about? What would our attitudes be toward immigration or poverty or the victims or natural disasters like Katrina?

The quote that we did not get into the quote sheet is from the President whom I believe is our greatest one, Abraham Lincoln. He was not only a great president but a good theologian as well. He said during the civil war that he did not think much about God being on our side but he was concerned that we act so that people will know we are on God’s side-the side of justice and mercy and upright living. I pray that will be our concern as well.

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