Sweet Land of Liberty
A Sermon for Oakhurst Baptist Church
Religious Liberty Sunday
July 3, 2005
Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30; Galatians 5:1
Donna S. Mote
Prayer for the World by Walker Knight and Benediction by Donna S. Mote follows sermon.
In the year 2004 my Mom turned eighty, and I turned forty. It’s only once in your lifetime that your mother will be twice your age, and, feeling that these were pretty big milestones I proposed to my Mom that we do a big trip together to celebrate, an 80/40 trip. My Mom’s younger sister, my Aunt Betty, turned seventy-five that year, another milestone birthday, so we asked her to come along with us.
At first we planned to travel abroad, but various parental health issues led us to decide on a stateside venture. And this was, I think, a good thing for me. When I started planning this trip I had been back in the US not quite a year after living in Japan for over five years. I was still in the midst of reverse culture shock, finding it much harder coming back here than I had ever found it to be going there.
I laid out a plan for a westward journey, a sort of Lewis and Clark meet Thelma and Louise trip that would let us celebrate the beginning of the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition and take us to the Grand Canyon, which neither Mom nor I had ever seen. With the openness of Lewis and Clark and their Corps of Discovery to exploring the unknown and the determination of Thelma and Louise not to compromise their journey toward liberation as models, I believed this trip would do me much good.
Not long before we were to depart my Mom had to have some eye surgery which couldn’t be postponed and which caused us to alter our route and shorten our trip. Basically, we postponed the Lewis and Clark part and carried on with the Thelma and Louise part.
And so it was that on a fine morning last June at o’dark thirty we set out for points west with me driving, Aunt Betty riding shotgun, and my Mom navigating from the back seat. We traveled through thirteen states in sixteen days, logging a total of 5,360 miles. (Most of our time was spent in Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico as we visited all but one of the national and tribal parks that are part of what’s called the Grand Circle--Arches, Canyonlands, Capitol Reef, Grand Staircase/Escalante, Bryce, Zion, the north rim of the Grand Canyon, Monument Valley, Four Corners).
It was a wonderful and meaningful trip and did indeed do me good. It did us all good. All along the way Mom and Aunt Betty told me familiar stories at my request and volunteered stories new to me that they may have thought I was too young to hear before turning forty. I marveled at their life experiences; at how much sociological and technological change they and their generation have seen in their lifetimes.
Over and over on this journey I was moved by the beauty and power of creation and the expansiveness and diversity of this country: crepe myrtle in Alabama; rice fields in Arkansas; the hay fields of Missouri; a remnant of the original prairie in Kansas; the steep red rock cliffs of the Colorado River gorge; the brilliant stars above Zion Canyon; the howl of a far off coyote; a magnificent condor flying overhead at the Grand Canyon; the amazing ruins of Chaco Canyon; a fresh tamale in Santa Fe; the labyrinth at Ghost Ranch; the ancient and still occupied dwellings of Taos Pueblo; the pleasure of brief encounters with strangers; the stillness at the edges of places, maps, musings.
***
In May of this year we picked up the Lewis and Clark part of last year’s trip. This year I drove my Mom and my Dad, age 85. On the way to and from Nebraska to visit my niece and her family we logged many miles along the Missouri River, tracking Lewis and Clark from St. Louis where they set out in May 1804 to Council Bluffs, Iowa (where they met with delegations of two of the more than fifty native peoples they encountered on their journey to the Pacific and back, an odyssey of more than two years).
We stopped to read lots of historical markers, as we are wont to do. As we drove through beautiful farmland in the rolling hills of Missouri, I pondered the goodness, the freedom of being able to travel at will, safely, state to state, with no one’s permission needed but my own, and on good highways. High on this freedom and surrounded by beauty I was caught up in a kind of reverie: “My God,” I thought, “I love this country.”
Our travels took us through Independence, Missouri, home of Harry S. Truman; Atchison, Kansas, birthplace of Amelia Earhart; Leavenworth, Kansas, hometown of Melissa Etheridge; Omaha, Nebraska, birthplace of Malcolm X; and to a quiet little knoll near the Missouri River that is the final resting place of Daniel Boone. And before we got home, having driven by billboards, barn roofs, and birdhouses admonishing me to do so for most of my life, at last, atop Lookout Mountain I saw Rock City.
In Kentucky we stopped at the birthplace of Jefferson Davis, first and only president of the Confederate States of America. I know, I know. But I was raised in Georgia hearing about the evils of slavery and the constitutionality of states’ rights. My great-grandfather and four of his brothers served in the Confederate Army; three of them were killed in the War Between the States, and the other two were wounded. I puzzle over what they and other small farmers like them thought their stake was in all that. I puzzle over the whole business in any century of romanticizing and glorifying and justifying war and rumors of war. Consequently, I look for clues, for possible keys to the resolution of some of that puzzlement. At the birthplace of Jefferson Davis I found such a clue, a sign that people can and do change their minds and learn from their own lives.
This clue was a quotation cast in bronze, at the base of an obelisk three hundred and something feet tall, a quotation Jeff Davis uttered at age 80 in a speech in Mississippi City, Mississippi. The year was 1888, twenty-three years after the Civil War ended and just eighteen months before he died. It says, “The past is dead; let it bury its dead, its hopes and its aspirations; before you lies the future—a future full of golden promise; a future of expanding national glory before which all the world shall stand amazed. Let me beseech you to lay aside all rancor, all bitter sectional feeling, and to take your places in the ranks of those who will bring about a consummation devoutly to be wished—a reunited country.” Are we not still looking for this consummation? We who now dwell in the twin confederacies of Red States and Blue States, do we not share this dream of a reunited country?
***
Soon after returning from following Lewis and Clark last month I watched the HBO screen adaptation of Tony Kushner’s award winning play “Angels in America.” Set in New York City in 1985 the story weaves together the lives, loves, trials, tribulations, delusions and angelic visitations of a multiply connected group of people. One of these is Norman Ariaga, “Belize” to his friends, a black Latino nurse who, just a few years into the AIDS pandemic, has seen enough death and dying and governmental apathy to last a lifetime. In one scene he responds to Lewis, the former partner of his good friend. Belize has tolerated Lewis for the sake of his friend Pryor, but in this particular scene, having listened to Lewis hold forth at some length about the grandeur of the American experiment, the wonder of this nation of laws, Belize has heard enough. His immediate personal and political situation does not square with the grandeur of these national ideals. He responds with a powerful soliloquy. With apologies as appropriate to Francis Scott Key, please hear Belize’s reply:
“I hate America, Lewis, I hate this country...nothing but a bunch of big ideas and stories and people dying and then people like you. The white cracker who wrote the national anthem knew what he was doing: he set the word ‘free’ to a note so high nobody could reach it. That was deliberate. Nothing on earth sounds less like freedom to me. You come with me to room 1013 over at the hospital, Lewis, and I’ll show you America: terminal, crazy, and mean. I live in America, Lewis; I don’t have to love it. You do that. Everybody’s gotta love something.”
***
Perhaps most of us live most days in a place somewhere between my highway reverie and Belize’s soliloquy. Our love of country is real and deep--as is our disappointment when our immediate personal and political circumstances do not square with our lofty national ideals. We know that our country is not the same as our government, that patriotism is not the same as nationalism, that our nation is not the same as whatever administration is in the White House, that our constitutional freedoms are not identical with current policy, that we ourselves are more than our nationality.
This past week the Alliance of Baptists’ license for travel to Cuba was suspended by the Treasury Department. This suspension means Lisset will most likely not be able to visit her family, that Karen’s sabbatical study plans will be altered, and that some of the rest of us will not be able to visit our sister congregation at Alamar later this year. News of this suspension provoked a range of emotions in me, from disbelief to sadness to frustration to anger. Isn’t forty years long enough to see that the embargo against Cuba is a failed policy?
There was good news for freedom-loving people this past week in a pair of rulings on the display of religious monuments in public places handed down by the Supreme Court. The decision on a Texas case allows the Ten Commandments to remain as one of seventeen monuments and twenty-one historical markers in a public park that surrounds the Texas State Capitol. The decision on a Kentucky case requires that displays of the Ten Commandments be removed from two Kentucky courthouses.
Each of these was a 5-4 decision by the justices, and each of them illustrates an important aspect of the separation of church and state. Writing in support of the majority opinion in the Texas case, Chief Justice William Rehnquist stated, “Of course, the Ten Commandments are religious. Simply having religious content or promoting a message consistent with a religious doctrine does not run afoul of the Establishment Clause” [of the First Amendment]. As David Batstone noted in Sojourners magazine online this past week (SojoMail, June 29, 2005), the point in the Texas case is that religion, of all kinds, does indeed have a role in American civic life. So, the Ten Commandments have a place among a collection of monuments commemorating various contributions to civic life. The point in the Kentucky case is that the state cannot identify itself with a particular religion or faith tradition. To do this is to run afoul of the Establishment Clause. So, the Ten Commandments cannot be displayed alone as if they were the only religious influence on civic life.
***
As US citizens and residents both native-born and immigrant, and as Baptist Christians and people of faith, on this Religious Liberty Sunday we celebrate all of our constitutionally guaranteed freedoms and religious freedom in particular. This religious freedom is not mere toleration but true religious liberty for all persons, of all faiths and no faith. It is freedom from other people’s religion, freedom from an established state religion (or state church), and freedom of one’s own religion—freedom to believe or not believe whatever one believes or doesn’t believe, as one’s own conscience dictates.
A number of Baptist notables from Thomas Helwys to Roger Williams to John Leland to George W. Truett to Louie D. Newton to Stan Hastey to Robert Maddox to Walker Knight have eloquently and passionately made the case that religious liberty is a spiritual principle, something given to all human beings by God and (from the constitutional period onward) that, in the United States, the political principle that undergirds the free and full expression of that religious liberty is the separation of church and state.
A frighteningly large and apparently growing segment of the US population is possessed of the notion that the separation of church and state is the invention of rabid secularists. And many of the folks who think this are Christians. But it just ain’t so. People of faith primarily led the effort to secure constitutional guarantees regarding religious liberty and the separation of church and state. And in the vanguard of this effort were Baptists.
Some of us learned this part of Baptist history growing up, and some are growing up learning it now. But lots of people, including lots of Baptists, have no idea about Baptists’ contributions to religious liberty in the colonial and constitutional periods of our country much less their insistence on the separation of church and state to guarantee that liberty.
So I believe we need to come out about this part of our Baptist heritage. God knows we’ve been saddled with enough things in our Baptist heritage that we often feel we should keep quiet about. Here is a bright shining jewel amidst other rather tarnished heirlooms. Let’s bring it out and look at it.
***
My first up-close and personal acquaintance with the reality of the separation of church and state came at around age ten. One night during church conference in late summer at my then little Baptist home church in Henry County my Mom stood to her feet when new business was called for to inquire, “Why is the flag of our government still in our church sanctuary now that Vacation Bible School is over?” Now we could ask any number of questions about why all that pledging of flags and Bibles was going on during Vacation Bible School, but that’s a sermon on creeping creedalism that’s best left for another day. The point of this to my ten-year-old mind was clear: my church is separate from my state, and that’s a good thing.
An important part of the Baptist legacy of church-state separation and the demand for religious liberty has come down to us through the life and work of the Baptist preacher John Leland. I first learned about Leland in detail in a Baptist history class at Shorter College. He piqued my interest because of a story about him from just after the constitutional era that my professor told. It seems that John Leland, a great fan of Thomas Jefferson, decided to travel from his home in Massachusetts down to Washington City to present President Jefferson with this enormous cheese that Leland had produced.
A wooly mammoth had been discovered in Siberia in 1804, and the word “mammoth” had entered everyday language to describe something or someone unusually large or impressive. Leland put what he called his “mammoth cheese” on a wagon and headed south to Washington. All along the way when Leland would make a stop, people would gather to see this “mammoth cheese.” And while there was a crowd gathered, Leland would hop up into the bed of his wagon, preaching the good news of religious liberty and the separation of church and state. This was needful because, even though the federal constitution guaranteed a free church in a free state by 1791, a number of state constitutions did not, including Leland’s home state of Massachusetts. Some New England states maintained their established state churches for over forty more years.
I have always loved this story and feel it to be an American classic, combining effective use of popular culture, a good marketing strategy, powerful preaching, and dairy products of great magnitude.
No doubt this “mammoth cheese” made a big impression on President Jefferson. But Leland himself had already both impressed and influenced Jefferson and James Madison. Though John Leland was a Massachusetts native and lived there most of his life, he spent fifteen years in Virginia. He was arguably the most influential (though not the only) Baptist spokesperson for religious liberty in the South during those years, which just happened to be 1776-1791. His influence on James Madison and Madison’s championing of a bill of rights that spelled out a guarantee of religious liberty and the separation of church and state was profound.
Madison and others felt that religious liberty was implicit in the US Constitution and that there was no need to spell it out. Leland and others demanded that the freedom some held to be implicit be made explicit in a bill of rights that spelled it out clearly and guaranteed it. “People forget,” they argued. “Others may not understand what we understand. Write it down and make it clear,” they insisted. The historian Joseph Dawson concluded, “If the researchers of the world were to be asked who was most responsible for the American guarantee for religious liberty, their prompt reply would be ‘James Madison.’ If James Madison might answer, he would as quickly reply, ‘John Leland and the Baptists”” (Joseph M. Dawson, Baptists and the American Republic. Nashville: Broadman Press, 1956, p. 117).
In fact, though his essential ideas were retained in the committee process, James Madison himself had been so thoroughly converted by Leland that he wanted an even stronger wording than we have in the First Amendment with regard to religious freedom. The version we have had, guaranteeing religious liberty for more than 200 years, goes like this: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press: or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” That’s it: forty-five words enumerating five freedoms—freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom to assemble, and freedom to petition the government. These are our first freedoms under the Bill of Rights, and freedom of religion, religious liberty, is the very first one of these: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
***
Brent Walker, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee on Religious Freedom, has said recently that if the First Amendment were put to a vote today in the United States it would not pass. This sends chills down my spine, but, scarily, he may not be far off the mark.
In January of this year an Associated Press story conveyed the results of an opinion poll among US high school students. Some 100,000 students were surveyed as to their opinions on various constitutional freedoms. One in three said that the First Amendment goes too far in the rights it guarantees to citizens! Goes too far. (Almost three out of four said they don’t know how they feel about the First Amendment or that they take it for granted. And perhaps even more shocking, only half the students surveyed said newspapers should be allowed to publish freely without government approval of stories) (“Study Shows American Teenagers Indifferent to Freedoms,” Associated Press [January 31, 2005], cited by Walter B. Shurden, “Becoming a Revolutionary,” in Baptist Studies Bulletin Vol. 4, No. 4 [April 2005]).
I’m confident that the results of this survey are not representative of Oakhurst youth. But I’m afraid that they may be more representative than we’d like to think of young people generally in this post-9/11 US context with its perhaps too easy tradeoffs of real freedom for a false sense of security.
***
Now, I’ve suggested that we need to come out about the Baptist legacy concerning religious liberty and the separation of church and state. As with most cases of coming out, it will have to be done many times, over and over, in a variety of contexts. Sometimes it will feel liberating, and sometimes it will seem a less than inspiring obligation, if not downright scary. But if the national climate regarding the First Amendment and the five freedoms it guarantees is anything close to the picture presented by the survey I mentioned, it’s crucial that we channel the spirit of our Baptist forebear John Leland among others and tell the good news of religious freedom and church-state separation.
If we declare that absolute religious liberty is the birthright of every human being and that the separation of church and state guarantees it in our country, it appears that we will be taking a minority position. It appears that we will be in a minority among contemporary Baptists, among Christians, among US citizens generally. But be of good cheer. Our Baptist forebears and their allies were in the minority, too, when they campaigned for constitutional guarantees of freedom of religious expression. And in the words of Margaret Mead, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
***
Today’s Gospel reading gives us a portrait of Jesus in a minority position. There’s a surprise. He is not conforming to majority expectations, and the religious leaders and many of the people are confused and upset. Jesus has just about had enough. “Nothing pleases you all,” Jesus says. “John the Baptizer came and didn’t eat and drink, and you said he had a demon. Now here I am, I eat and drink and you call me a glutton and a drunkard.”
The identity of everybody in the passage is called into question—John’s identity, Jesus’ identity, the identities of the religious leaders and of the people in the crowd. This passage presents freedom as an identity issue. And it concludes with an invitation from Jesus—not an invitation to believe things about him but an invitation to live his life. “Are you worn out; are you carrying a load that’s too heavy? Come on,” Jesus says, “I’ll show you the way to rest, to freedom. It’s a gentle way, an humble way, a way purged of ego; a way of peace, a way to peace. You’re gonna be hitched up to something; hitch yourself to a yoke that fits, to the work that’s right for you; not to somebody else’s life, not to somebody else’s work, not to somebody else’s faith, not to some addiction, not to some ideology, not to any form of slavery, not to any form of tyranny. Come walk this way; be free and rest.”
We are free to accept this invitation and free to decline it, free to choose life or to choose death, free to choose the things that make for war or the things that make for peace, free to choose. Free. We have absolute religious and spiritual freedom. It is our inalienable right as human beings. Religious liberty is a spiritual reality before it is a political one; a state of mind and heart before it is a temporal reality. In biblical imagery, this spiritual reality is Beulah Land, that place of freedom, balance, harmony, and rest. It is this interior spiritual reality of liberty that allows people to survive in situations of oppression and repression until their exterior liberation is achieved. And it is this spiritual reality that fuels whatever political work we undertake. God give us grace, wisdom and courage to live in this land of liberty, the land within and the land without. So be it.
Prayer for the World -- July 3, 2005
By Walker Knight
God of love, of mercy and of peace,
On this national holiday weekend in which we celebrate our freedoms,
We approach You today on our knees.
We come asking forgiveness for the many ways in which
We have failed to be the peaceful disciples
You have called us to be. May we.
--be able to replace our anger with love
--be able to replace our confusion with wisdom
--be able to replace our inaction with deeds;
And forgive us when we lose sight
Of Your desire for us to be peacemakers.
God of peace,
We feel overwhelmed by the endless streams of information
That flood our minds each day.
We are aware of the on-going crises with which Your world must cope.
We search for understanding of how Your Spirit
Brings meaning to existence
and how we can find Your will for our lives.
As Baptists we have been a freedom-loving people,
Not only for ourselves but for all people.
We are grateful for the religious freedom
That characterizes our nation.
We truly believe that faith coerced is no faith at all.
Many would curtain that freedom in Your name
So we pray for direction and strength to follow Your will.
We realize that with freedom we are obliged to assume responsibility.
May we become Peacemakers with the will
to act where action is demanded.
May we become Peacemakers who are able to love,
Not just one another,
But those who war against us.
You have taught us that it is in self-sacrificing love
That we are truly Your Peacemakers.
Dear God, who loves all Your children,
May we learn from Your Spirit that alone
We do not have the capacity
To accomplish what needs to be done,
So we pray for a firmer grasp of Your wisdom and direction.
May we join with others everywhere who also seek Peace.
We thank You for the models-even within our own community-
Models that energize us and show us what can be accomplished
When faithful, sensitive persons avoid being paralyzed by this flooding of information.
May we then follow where You are leading.
We pray today for our national leaders
That they too may know Your will
Amid the pressures of conflict,
And give them the wisdom and strength
To act on that knowledge.
Great God of peace-we pray for all
On every side of every conflict for their safety,
Their healing, and their well being.
We pray in the name of the Prince of Peace,
AMEN.
Benediction
Now go in peace to love and serve and enjoy God by loving and serving and enjoying God’s world;
in the name of God our Creator who is the Author of Liberty;
God our Redeemer who points the way to liberation;
and God our Sustainer who reminds us what freedom is for. AMEN.