A NEW BIRTH OF FREEDOM
A sermon preached by
Rev. Dr. Randle R. (Rick) Mixon
First Baptist Church, Palo Alto, CA
Sunday, July 6, 2008
Text: Habakkuk 2:2-14
My fellow Americans…living here in this first decade of the 21st century, I come before you today to announce my candidacy. Now I’m sure you’re wondering why another candidate is needed in an already full field, but I believe we are facing a crisis of conscience in our country that is being ignored or even fostered by the other candidates. It seems only fitting on this weekend when we celebrate the 232nd anniversary of the birth of this nation, that someone step forward in favor of a new birth of freedom, that someone speak up for the wise principles on which our country is based, that someone say “the emperor wears no clothes,” and so I humbly offer myself as your next candidate.
The call is clear to return to those values on which this great nation was founded, on which we have relied in our finest hours. Our foremothers and forefathers came to the shores of this wide and fertile continent in search of an enduring freedom from the tyranny of imperial rule and state-run churches that had little respect for individual conscience, no use for personal freedom and too little concern for the well-being of the common people. The brave souls who faced hardship and suffering to bring this great nation into being saw themselves as a chosen people. Following the best in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, they founded this nation on what they believed to be a covenant between themselves and their Creator, a covenant that both celebrated the bounty of a land “flowing with milk and honey” and took seriously their responsibility to care for the land and one another as they looked to a bright future of peace and prosperity.
John Winthrop, the first leader of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, exhorted his fledgling flock,
“Now the only way to avoid the shipwreck [of God’s righteous wrath] and to provide for our posterity is to follow the Counsel of Micah, to do Justly, to have mercy, to walk humbly with our God. For this end,” he said, “we must be knit together in this work as one man, we must entertain each other in brotherly Affection, we must be willing to abridge our selves of our superfluities, for the supply of others necessities, we must uphold a familiar Commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality, we must delight in each other, makes others Conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our Commission and Community in the work, our Community as members of the same body, so shall we keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace, the Lord will be our God and delight to dwell among us as his own people and will command a blessing upon us in all our ways, so that we shall see much more of his wisdom, power, goodness and truth than formerly we have been acquainted with” (John Winthrop, “A Model of Christian Charity” quoted in Robert Bellah, The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in Time of Trial, p. 14.)
This is a vision of community that promised for those pilgrims a new birth of freedom and a way of life that held potential benefit for all involved. The notion that we are a covenant people has infused our culture and, at its best, has enhanced our sense of community. It has served us well when we have adhered to Winthrop’s exhortation, when we have truly lived justly and loved mercy and walked in humility with God. When we have been self-absorbed and self-centered, when we have focused exclusively on individual freedom and self-interest at the expense of the common welfare, when we have risen to our most arrogant and rattled our sabres and made ourselves the self-proclaimed police force for the world, what George Washington characterized as the great “experiment” on which the fate of the world depends, has floundered, faltered and failed.
“We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity…” Clearly, what is meant by the “general welfare” has evolved throughout our first two and one third centuries of existence. We have wrestled with and made some amends for our treatment of Native Americans, whose ancient civilizations we devalued and demolished; of African Americans, whose ancestors we brought here as slaves; of women, who were long disenfranchised and too often treated as property rather than human beings; of Japanese and Mexican and Irish and Italian and Arab Americans, who we have treated as alien enemies and second-class citizens. Still, there is much to be done to rectify the injustices perpetrated on these people and others. These are some of the reasons I ask for your support in leading us to look toward “a new birth of freedom.”
It was Abraham Lincoln, a man who was characterized by one writer as the “first American” – our earlier progenitors being too closely linked to European thought and fashion – who turned this phrase in his Gettysburg Address. From that bloody battlefield, he urged the citizens of another era to dedicate themselves to “a new birth of freedom.” Each crisis we face as a people calls us to rededicate ourselves to this “new birth of freedom” in our own time. As the world grows smaller, we are faced with the challenging choice to reserve the blessings of liberty and the fruits of that freedom selfishly and exclusively for ourselves or to find ways to share our riches with all the noble generosity we are capable of at our best.
In his elegant treatise, The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in Time of Trial, sociologist and man of faith, Robert Bellah, points out that “Significant accomplishments in building a just society have alternated with corruption and despair in America, as in other lands, because the struggle to institutionalize humane values is endless on this earth. But at times,” he goes on, “the issue grows acute. A period of history hangs in the balance. A people finds that it must decide whether its immediate future will be better or worse, or sometimes whether it will have a future at all” (Bellah, p.2.) We are face to face with one of those times when the issues have grown acute and history hangs in the balance. The gulf between the rich and the poor widens daily while the middle class shrinks toward oblivion. AIDS and other health crises threaten millions. Our cavalier treatment of the earth has brought it to the brink of disaster as species and forests and oceans disappear daily.
Four years ago, during the last presidential election, gadfly Roger Moore produced an eloquent and powerful propaganda piece entitled “Fahrenheit 9/11” that gave profound insight into the ways in which we have failed to keep our covenant with God, with one another and with creation. We watched corporate executives strategize how to profit from the Iraq invasion, which in itself was an unwarranted act of aggression. We watched Marine recruiters target those at the bottom of the socio-economic scale, and then watched Roger himself try, unsuccessfully, to recruit the children of members of Congress who had voted to support the war. We saw how the horrors of war scar young men and women and destroy the lives of innocent people.
From a different perspective, writing about the parable of the Good Samaritan in the light of 9/11, David Bartlett offers this wisdom: “Need we say that in this time when we have seen our immediate neighborhood violated and our national neighborhood threatened, the Christian call reminds us that the neighborhood is bigger than America the beautiful, much as we may love this land – that to be a believer in Allah is just to be an Arabic-speaking believer in God. We who have been victims of terrible, rude violence are sometimes implicated in terrible, polite violence, or at the very least avert our eyes and march quickly by on the other side” (David Bartlett, What’s Good about This News: Preaching from the Gospels and Galatians, p. 81.) This is an indictment of the ways in which we have failed to be good neighbors. There is also good news here in that it may not be too late to be neighborly. It enlarges our world view to a wider vision of our founding covenant. It offers us the opportunity to engage in a new birth of freedom.
Unlike Habakkuk, the ancient prophet of Israel’s exile, I do not believe that God will send Chaldeans or Klingons or other evil empires to conquer us if we fail to keep the covenant. However, I do believe that we run the risk of collapsing under the weight of our own immorality if we continue on our present path. I do join Habakkuk in his cry against injustice and am left to worry about whether or not we ourselves have become marauding Chaldeans, wreaking havoc and destroying God’s people. Where is God in all this chaos? She is waiting for us to stand up and step forward on her behalf. She is watching for us to speak truth to power, justice to the unjust, hope to despair, and love to hate. This is central to any new birth of freedom for our time, that we take the risk to be the best people, the best Americans, the best Christians that we know how to be. “Write the vision, make it plain…”
Thomas Jefferson said it long ago, “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.” Now I know that, when the patrician Jefferson wrote these words, he did not mean all people. He really meant men, and only certain educated and propertied men at that, but I also know that whenever most of us have heard or said or thought these words, we have imagined them on a much grander scale. Some school teacher, Mrs. McClintock or Miss Frossard or Mr. Bender, taught me to believe that this phrase meant everybody and that definition of everybody keeps growing – red and yellow, black and white; female and male; gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, intersex, queer and questioning; Christian, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, Taoist and Wiccan; poor, middle-classed, maybe even some rich folk; people from every corner of the earth. Somehow, in my mind, it’s gotten all mixed up with that old Christian notion that “whosoever will may come.” Each time my consciousness expands to take in someone I somehow missed before, there is a new birth of freedom, for them and for me. There is a shift in relationship. There is growth in the human community. The covenant beliefs of our forebears are expanded and enhanced and we come closer to the Promised Land, the realm of God on earth. This, my friends, is the vision for my campaign; this is the noble task in which I invite you to participate. Come, join me as we midwife a new birth of freedom. Thank you.