The Sermons at Calvary
By Father Richard Humke
OUR DEBT TO THE FOUNDERS
July 4, 2004, Independence Day,
Calvary Church
Isaiah 66:10-16
Psalm 66:1-8
Galatians 6:1-18
Matthew 5:43-48
Only
once every seven years, and sometimes not that often, Independence Day falls on
a Sunday, and when it does, we take note of it in Scripture, prayer and music,
as we are doing today. We never turn
the day into a patriotic rally, for it is always The Lord's Day (as the first
day of the week is called in the New Testament), no matter what secular holiday
comes on a Sunday. But we do not turn
our backs on it either.
We
would be strange Anglicans if we were to ignore the day, for we know that many
who signed the Declaration of Independence were fellow Anglicans, spiritually
nourished by the Church of England and painfully called to oppose the policies
of that same England under which they lived.
But not all opposed those policies, as we know from reading our nation's
history; and just as it is today, families and friends were torn apart at the
time of our Revolution by differing views as to what should be done. Some were for revolution; others were for
accommodation.
Our
own Church particularly suffered during the Revolution and afterwards, despite
the large number of patriot leaders who claimed to be members of that
church. It saw some of its property
taken without compensation by the various states following the war; it found
greatly diminished membership as many of its members who were loyal to the Crown
fled to Canada or even to England; its leadership was reduced for the same
reason; and the morale of those who remained suffered for all those reasons, as
well as for their own sense of being adrift, now that the Mother Church was no
longer their church.
So
let us never forget that we as a nation come out of a Revolution. Let us never forget that we were not
satisfied until the last occupying British troops had gone from these shores
and had left us to figure out our own destiny.
Let us never forget that the men in red coats, sons and husbands and
fathers who were loved by someone back in England, were not hated for
themselves but because they were believed to represent an oppressive foreign
power. And most of all, we must
remember that, when our wars with Britain ended after 1814, there has been no
closer friend than that against whom we fought two wars but with whom we share
so much common history, as well as that marvelous language that is ours and
that almost the whole world has embraced in our time. So what Jesus said in today's Gospel is possible: to love our enemy.
We
celebrate this day with too little attention to the text itself which defines
this day, for this is the day that celebrates the adoption of the Declaration
of Independence. Let us at least hear
the words of the second paragraph of that great statement:
We hold
these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are
endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are
Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men,
deriving their just power from the consent of the governed, that whenever any
Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People
to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government...
We
look back on that significant day in 1776 and we see what was born from it: a
great nation, far from a perfect nation, but one, nonetheless, that has often
been a beacon for others. But they
did not have the benefit of hindsight as we do. They did not know how their defiant act would play itself
out.
Joseph
Ellis tells in his book, "Founding Fathers," that Benjamin Rush, a
Philadelphia physician and signer of the Declaration, overheard a conversation
between Benjamin Harrison of Virginia and Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts. Harrison said, "I shall have a great
advantage over you, Mr. Gerry, when we are all hung for what we are now doing. From the size and weight of my body I shall
die in a few minutes, but from the lightness of your body you will dance in the
air an hour or two before you are dead."
Rush recalled that the comment "procured a transient smile, but it
was soon succeeded by the solemnity with which the whole business was
conducted."
Among
our hot dogs and potato salads this evening we would do well to remember that
those who put their names to that document were exercising a defiant act
against authority that, for all they knew, would invite the gibbet. They could not know what we know: that those 13 colonies would some day stand
at the pinnacle of world power but would do so, unfortunately, with no small
amount of arrogance.
That
they defied authority with their rebellious act stands in great contrast to
those in our day who would define criticism of authority as unpatriotic and
un-American. It seems to me that this
day says the right to protest is at the heart of what it means to be an
American. It is a part of our liberty,
and it is a freedom we have, not given to us by the government and, therefore,
also to be taken away by the government whenever it chooses to do so, but an
"unalienable" Right, endowed by the Creator. If you will meekly allow yourself to be
silenced by the government -- or demand that others be silenced with their
criticism -- you have not begun to understand what this day means or the price
that Rush and Harrison and Gerry and Hancock and Jefferson and all the others
were willing to pay so that you and I could live, free from tyranny.
I
haven't said much, if anything, about God in this homily for two reasons. One is that the Founders themselves, while acknowledging the Deity and his
influence in what they were doing, seemed hesitant to claim his imprimatur upon
everything they did.
The
other reason I have not done so is that I believe that we and our politicians
would do well to emulate the Founders' reticence in such matters when speaking
about government. The line can be very
narrow between acknowledging God's presence and influence on one side and
co-opting God's approval for whatever the government wants to do on the other
side. Demagogues have always known
that the masses can be suckered with religious talk, and this is not the first
time in our history when such recklessness has been tried. As Ron Reagan said at his father's committal
in California, "(My father) never
made the fatal mistake of so many politicians wearing his faith on his sleeve
to gain political advantage."
I
think the Founders had it just about right.
They acknowledged in a general way the influence of a Deity (for few of
them, if any, were atheists, though many were skeptics), but they did not wrap
themselves or their documents in shallow religious rhetoric. Nor did they think that so great a matter as
the founding of this nation was an opportunity for "witnessing" to a personal religious faith.
This
is always a great day for our nation, a day when we are bid to recall the
struggles and the bravery that produced it.
And we must never forget how absolutely new and experimental this
undertaking was. As Ellis also says in
his book, "Though the republican paradigm -- representative government
bottomed on the principle of popular sovereignty -- has become the political
norm in the twentieth century, no...government prior to the American
Revolution, apart from a few Swiss cantons and Greek city-states, had ever
survived for long, and none had ever been tried over a land-mass as large as
the thirteen colonies."
But
today we are celebrating 228 years of that noble experiment. Think of that!
What
we need in this nation right now is a Bill Cosby who will speak truth to us,
whether we want to hear it or not. And
surely the truth he would speak is that those men, risking life and family and
possessions, on that hot day in Philadelphia in 1776 did not do that so that we
could be anesthetized by our TV sit coms or by religious talk that is as trite
and meaningless as those sit coms. They
did not do it so that we could stay home on election day because we don't care
what happens. They did not do it so
that we could enjoy the equivalent of the Roman circus while leaving the
government of this nation to those who would buy it. They did not do it so that we could become dumb, dumb, and dumber
as a nation.
They
did it so that we might have "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of
Happiness." And they did it at a
great price. That is what they have
given to us, and that is why we celebrate this wonderful day each year.
Richard
H. Humke