Broadway Christian Church ·Columbia, Missouri

Morning Worship ·July 3, 2005

Prayer of the Day

You gather us together in faith, O Lord, to remind us that to bring about your reign on earth, we must follow your way.  This hour and every hour, may your living Word speak afresh to this portion of your people.  Amen.

Scripture
Isaiah 61:1-6

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
Because the Lord has anointed me
To preach good news to the poor,
To bind up the brokenhearted,
To proclaim freedom to captives,
Release from darkness for the prisoners,
To proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor
And the day of vengeance of our God,
To comfort all who mourn,
And to provide for those who grieve…
To bestow on them the crown of beauty
  Instead of ashes,
The oil of gladness Instead of mourning,
The garment of praise
Instead of a spirit of despair.
They will be called oaks of righteousness,
A planting of the Lord
For the display of his splendor.
They will rebuild the ancient ruins 
And restore the places long devastated;
They will renew the ruined cities 
That have been devastated for generations.
Aliens will shepherd their flocks; 
Foreigners will work your fields and vineyards.
And you will be called priests of the Lord.

Message
Incite Hope
Rick Frost

You may have heard the one about the preacher who wanted to see what his son might become.  While the boy was at school, he went into the boy’s room, placed on that boy’s desk three objects – 1) a Bible, 2) a silver dollar, 3) a bottle of whiskey.   “Now then,” the preacher reasoned, “I’m just going to hide behind this door and see which object he picks up when he comes home from school.  If he picks up the Bible, he’s going to be a preacher.  If he picks up the silver dollar, he’ll go into business.  If he picks up the whiskey, he’s going down the path of chemical dependency, and it will break my heart.”

Soon the boy came home from school and did what boy’s do.  He went to his room, threw his books on the bed, and spotted the objects on the desk.  With a curious eye, he looked them over.  Then he picked up the Bible and put it under his arm.  He picked up the silver dollar and slipped it in his pocket.  He uncorked the bottle and had a nice big drink.  “Lord, have mercy,” whispered the father, “he’s going to become a politician.”

We’re going to have some fun today, I hope, because we’re going to talk about this weekend, of course, when North Americans celebrate our independence, and the incredible birth of this incredible country.  I’m going to invite you to spend a few minutes with me reflecting on a very hot topic that is getting hotter every day.  That is the relationship between religion and politics.

Some of you were around when this country went through its cultural wars in years gone by.  There are persons in this room who lived through being hammered by the economic depressions of the ’30s and ’40s.  Others of us have only heard about it.  You may remember the New Deal of the Roosevelt era, which brought salvation to literally millions of people in this country.  Others of you will remember, driven by the religious left, the cultural wars of the 1960s, centered around, among other things, the civil rights of all citizens, the role of women in society, the rejection of an unjust war in Southeast Asia – 58,000 Americans and 3,000,000 Vietnamese lives too late.

In America today, the cultural wars seem to be continuing, and they seem to be between the Christian Right and the great-unwashed masses known as the non-believers.  People are going around presenting themselves as having the one true authentic voice of Christ in the culture.  They are stereotyping all the rest of us as those who seem to be devoid of religious faith and moral convictions.

In his very powerful article written June 17, in “The New York Times,” Episcopal minister and former Republican Senator from Missouri, Jack Danforth, said that is simply not true.  It is simply an oversimplification.  Indeed, there are many of us in the country – he calls us moderates.  We are people who read our Bibles.  We say our prayers.  We go to our churches.  We believe in Christ.  We hold very strong religious convictions, and whose approach to the tough issues of our day are, at least, as faithful as our brothers and sisters who are more conservative.  The difference, he said, is that the Christian Right approaches the issues of the day with a sense of certainty.  They come across as if they know God’s truth.  They know God’s will.  And they have the belief that they can advance the kingdom of God on this earth through governmental actions.  And so, as you know, they have developed very clear, very strong, very-well organized, and very-well financed political agendas aimed at, in their own words, putting God back into the public square and even passing or considering the passage of constitutional amendments intended to protect the American family from a variety of threats.

Does that sound familiar to anybody else here besides me?  Advancing the kingdom of God through governmental action.  I remember.  I remember those very words; only they were from the religious left 40 years ago.  Do you remember those words?

So… What is the role of religion in the ongoing cultural wars of this country?  Did our founding mothers and fathers see the United States of America as, indeed, a Christian nation?  In an article entitled, “The Faith of the Framers,” in “The Week Magazine,” (June 10) I learned that most of the Framers of our Constitution were, indeed, sincere people who had sincere Protestant leanings and convictions, but, my goodness, their piety and their practices of their faith had wide variety.  George Washington, for instance, went to the Episcopal Church, but he would not kneel to pray, and he would not take communion.  Now, I was an Episcopalian, and those were two pretty big things, as I recall, in the Episcopal Church.  Thomas Jefferson called himself a Christian, but he disagreed with much that was in the Bible.  He rejected Jesus as the Son of God.  He wrote his own version of the New Testament, which was a very popular activity back in its day.  He cut out all the references to miracles, including the resurrection of Christ.  He called himself a Christian.  How do you do that?  Ben Franklin paid his pledge to a Presbyterian Church all his life, but rarely attended worship.  My goodness, you wouldn’t want somebody in that role being influenced by worship. “Too boring,” he said.

How in the world did these people believe that God blessed America?  Indeed, that’s what they did believe.  John Adams wrote, “The general principles on which the Framers achieved independence for this country were, in fact, the general principles of Christianity.”  What you need to understand is that Christianity was very different than the kind of Christianity most of us practice in this country today.  Indeed, for most of the Founders, like most of the people of their day, they embraced a philosophy called deism.  Do you remember learning about it in school?  It is the belief that the Creator of all that is cannot be defined, is completely unknowable, but somehow “reveals itself in immutable laws that can rationally explain all cosmic and human affairs.”

Did the Founders oppose religion?  No.  Quite the contrary.  They considered religion absolutely essential to the health of the republic.  They believed it had the wonderful traits of teaching people values, like self-reliance, sacrifice, and compassion.  They were all very good ingredients that make for good citizenship.  James Madison wrote, “Before any man can be considered a member of Civil Society, he must be considered as a subject of the Governour of the Universe.”  Still, as you know, the Founders declined to give religion the official endorsement of their new form of government.

Why?  What were they afraid of?  You know darn well what they were afraid of.  The very same intolerance and bigotry and hatred and wars that have been fought for centuries and centuries and centuries and to this day in the name of God.  That’s why.  That same intolerance that drove our foremothers and forefathers from their wonderful homes across the seas to come to these shores and endure monumental hardships in search of peace and freedom – precious freedom – and opportunity.  The freedom from being coerced.  Freedom from having people decide for us what we should decide for ourselves.  Freedom to make choices.  When the Founders of the Constitution wrote it in 1787, they were determined not to make those mistakes of history again.

How did they do it?  Pretty simple.  By largely excluding God and religion from the national blueprint.  How did they do it?  They just wrote it out.  James Madison wrote, “The civil rights of none shall be abridged on account of religious belief or worship, nor shall any national religion be established, nor shall the full and equal rights of conscience be in any manner, or any pretense, infringed.”  With a little tweaking of that, that basically became the First Amendment that you and I know today.

Results?  Pretty straight forward.  Pretty simple.  For all practical purposes, the Constitution of the United States of America put this country on the road to secularism.  The position that says the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion or any other religion.  Indeed, Thomas Jefferson wrote the lines the secularists love to quote to us today, “Religion is a matter which lies solely between [a person] and their God.”

Well… that was a position that outraged the Christian Rights back then, and it still does to this day.  I don’t know what the future of the separation of church and state is going to be.  It will be interesting to see.  The fact is, it’s in a firm place right now.  So our question today is, “What is the task, then, of a Christian living in the United States of America today?”  What is our task?

Danforth says we should be moderators.  It is a carefully-chosen word.  Moderators.  I looked it up.  It’s a person who avoids extreme political and social measures.  “We believe,” he said, “it is God’s work to practice humility, to wear tolerance on our sleeves, to reach out to those with whom we disagree and to overcome the meanness we see in today’s politics.”  Later in the article he says,  “Religion should be inclusive, and it should seek to bridge the differences that separate people…  Following a Lord who cited love of God and love of neighbor as encompassing all the commandments, we reject a political agenda that displaces that love.  Christians who hold these convictions ought to add their clear voice of moderation to the debate on religion in politics.”

Well…  I don’t know where you are on that debate.  But I believe that our job as Christians, living in this country today is to incite hope.  Incite hope!  Usually the word “incite” is connected with inciting riots.  Our job is not to incite riots.  Our job is to incite hope.  It is to stir up, to move to action, to put in motion, to instigate hope. 

In our text today, the prophet Isaiah, who lived 600 years before Jesus, was walking the rubble and ashes of his own homeland.  The Babylonians, as you remember, had invaded and plundered his city.  Many people had died.  Those who had survived had given up any hope in God.  They had given up on each other.  They had given in to the powers that be.  Yet, there was Isaiah, the prophet of God, inciting hope, reminding the faithful that they will, in fact, rebuild the ruins.  They will overcome the devastations of the cities that had taken place for generations, that they will someday, in fact, be called “oaks of righteousness,” and they will wear the crown of salvation.  In so doing, they will be the living evidence of God’s reign, God’s kingdom, that will come on this earth as Jesus promised, “on earth, as it is in heaven.”

Now, let us not miss the fact that when Jesus preached his very first sermon in his little home church back in Nazareth, you will remember how he opened the Scriptures, the scrolls, to this passage, right out of Isaiah 61.  When he read it, Jesus, himself, announced to all the world his job description, which, of course, being a Christian, is our job description, too.  Isn’t it?  It doesn’t matter whether he read it in Israel, or Africa, or Iraq, or Uzbekistan, or Asia, or South America, or right here even in the good old U.S. of A.  Our job as Christians is to incite hope.  He spells it out.  Bring good news to the poor.  Bind up the brokenhearted.  Proclaim freedom to the captives.  Recovering of sight to the blind.  Release of the oppressed.  Proclaiming the year of the Lord’s favor – the year that the Lord, will, in fact, reign. 

Now folks, you know and I know for that to happen, we have to thirst more for righteousness than we do for blood.  We are going to have to use spiritual force in the face of physical force.  We need to use all of our resources that we have to build up and not to tear down.

Obviously that is something we cannot do on our own, but we are a people who have hope that there is something that God will do and can do through us if we will not surrender our souls.  We’re being called on constantly to surrender our souls.  Surrender our souls to fear.  Surrender our souls to power.  Surrender our souls to money, to liberalism, to conservatism, to materialism, to nationalism, and all the other isms under the sun.  So, if you are a Christian on this Fourth of July weekend, in this great country, I beg you, along with St. Paul, “To lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace, for there is one body, one Spirit, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of us all, who is above all, and through all, and in all.”

So let’s do our job.  Let’s do it where we can and as we can.  Let us incite hope and not hate.  Let us incite hope and not despair.  Let us incite hope and rebuild the ruins.  Let us incite hope and follow the way of Christ.

And we all say together… “Amen.”

Benediction

J esus, Righteous Prince,

U nite us as witnesses of your truth.

L ead us to the job we have to do.

Y ou will be our soul’s force.

4-ever, we will stand, proclaiming you.

   Amen.