Faith and the Nation

The Reverend Max Lynn, Pastor

Scripture Readings: Hebrews 11:1-16, Matthew 5:38-48

Have you ever had frozen feet? From many a youth snow trip, I have learned that when the kids feet are frozen, it is time to go home. It doesn’t take long with poor shoes in the snow until it is no longer fun. The Revolutionary Army’s crossing of the Potomac on Christmas Eve, 1776, to take Trenton, is an amazing story of faith and valor. The American forces had taken many serious defeats, and had been in retreat, running from British troops for months. Faith in General Washington was low after several mistakes and retreats. The army was battered and sick, many had deserted. Strangely, the thing that frightens me the most about the story, is the state of many of the soldier shoes. As a young person who liked to think of myself as brave, I imagined being one of those who dared to serve and stay on. But imagining sleet and snow and howling wind, blocks of ice in the river, marching in darkness through snow and freezing mud, without adequate boots…I just can’t imagine having that kind of courage or that kind of faith in the vision for a new nation.

Even before the horrible winter storms hit Thomas Paine, upon witnessing the grueling conditions of the army in retreat would write the opening lines of what he would later call the Crisis: “These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of men and women. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.” (McCullough, David. 1776. Simon and Schuster. 2005) Even as we give thanks for the sacrifice of so many for freedom and are inspired by them to hold fast through the hard work of achieving a worthy goal, we can also note as Lincoln did that longevity of battle does not in and of itself determine righteousness of cause. John Adams notes that what makes America great is not just freedom.

 “The Revolution was effected before the war commenced. [It] was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments of their duties and obligations… One great advantage of the Christian religion is that it brings the great principle of the law of nature and nations, love your neighbour as yourself, and do to others as you would that others do to you, to the knowledge, belief and veneration of the whole people.” http://www.firstthings.com/article/2007/03/an-almost-chosen-people-29

In Hebrews this morning, our author is asking his readers to hold strong in the faith, to rely on faith, despite the trials and tribulations of the early Christians, despite the rise into Christianity some who hold assurance and even arrogance of their own abilities and works. He has a laundry list of biblical figures who kept moving forward in faith, even though the goal to which they marched was beyond their ability to see and even beyond their physical individual life. Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.

⁸By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to set out for a place that he was to receive as an inheritance; and he set out, not knowing where he was going. ⁹By faith he stayed for a time in the land he had been promised, as in a foreign land, living in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise. ¹⁰For he looked forward to the city that has foundations, whose architect and builder is God…All of these,” he says of his examples, “died in faith without having received the promises, but from a distance they saw and greeted them.”

Like Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, the Puritans and Pilgrims who came to these shores as foreigners and strangers, sought out a home, “a city that has foundations, whose architect and builder is God.” But the problem that modern Israel and Modern America proves so plainly, the moral vision and self-sacrifice of individuals for a nation, too easily becomes collective egotism. We escape tyranny and slavery to create a nation with its own injustice and oppressive actions.

By faith the founders reached and fought for something grand, something divine. Against incredible odds, through incredible hardship, they started a nation. Of course, fighting tyranny is less morally ambiguous than trying to run our own nation. And after moving through a Civil War, two World Wars, and a Cold War, we have emerged a superpower. Faced with this new reality for America, some of us tend toward denouncing every exercise of power by our nation, while others prefer blind patriotism in which America, or at least the America of their political party, can do no wrong.

A while back a Facebook friend mentioned how he thought that since Americans were hurting so much at home, and our troops weren’t getting the funding they needed to protect themselves, that we should cut all the aid we give to other nations. I mentioned that foreign aid was less than 1% while our military budget including debt for past military expenditures is 54% of our total national budget. I said that we would be better off spending money on other countries to help develop them rather than kill them. And the same folks who think we don’t spend enough on wars and military are the ones who would cut services and assume all individuals should fend for themselves at home. Well several friends of this friend jumped in on the conversation and said that it was no surprise that those who have not fought to defend our nations freedom would sit in their ivory tower, take freedom for granted, and disrespect and fail to care for our military. If I hadn’t made the sacrifice, apparently, then I shouldn’t criticize our wars. I said, “I take the responsibility for sending our men and women to fight, and the sacrifices they make quite seriously, and for that reason think that we should be wise and frugal with their use. Besides the money, we have lost over 3,000 Americans and killed over 100,000 people in our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and we would ague that we have fewer enemies now than when we started. It is time to bring our boys and girls back home to be with their families, and cut the military budget so we can use some of that money here at home. Cutting that 1% of foreign aid wouldn’t make a dent. ” That was not the end of it of course, as I was still learning the rule of online arguments. If you have learned it, please let me know.

Reihold Neibuhr writing after WWII of the Irony of American History searches for the rational Christian middle for our nation:

We were not only innocent a half century ago with the innocence of irresponsibility; but we had a religious version of our national destiny which interpreted the meaning of our nationhood as God’s effort to make a new beginning in the history of mankind. Now we are immersed in worldwide responsibilities; and our weakness has grown into strength. Our culture knows little of the use and the abuse of power; but we have to use power in global terms. Our idealists are divided between those who would renounce the responsibilities of power for the sake of preserving the purity of our soul and those who are ready to cover every ambiguity of good and evil in our actions by the frantic insistence that any measure taken in a good cause must be unequivocally virtuous. We take, and must continue to take, morally hazardous actions to preserve our civilization. We must exercise our power. But we ought neither to believe that a nation is capable of perfect disinterestedness in its exercise, nor become complacent about particular degrees of interest and passion, which corrupt the justice by which the exercise of power is legitimatized. Communism is a vivid object lesson in the monstrous consequences of moral complacency about the relation of dubious means to supposedly good ends.” Niebuhr writes before the Russian war in Afghanistan, before our “War on Terror” and its justification of torture, but he works just the same. He goes onto talk about the irony of our national ideology of individualism:

“Many young men, who have been assured that only the individual counts among us, have died upon foreign battlefields. We have been subjected to this ironic refutation of our cherished creed because the creed is too individualistic to measure the social dimension of human existence and too optimistic to gauge the hazards to justice which exist in every community, particularly in the international one… On the one hand, our culture does not really value the individual as much as it pretends; on the other hand,” he concludes, “if justice is to be maintained and our survival assured, we cannot make individual liberty as unqualifiedly the end of life as our ideology asserts.”

We no longer live within a nation whose ignorance of collective power and pretension can be excused by its infancy. On the other hand the idealists on the left, the ivory tower folk, the New Agers or even Christian mystics, can too easily renounce the moral ambiguity inevitable in the responsibilities of power. We cannot hide from our sin because we wish we were not sinners. Another option is cynicism which figures there is no great meaning, nor great purpose, only fragmented, imagined individual and sectarian interest. Still the Bible gives us another option, which holds strong: faith and repentance. Christ sets the bar for which our individual and collective lives reach in faith. We trust in the mystery that somehow this chaotic, fragmentary world is imbued with divine providence and that history is moving toward a most beautiful end. Then it is in the assurance of grace, that we acknowledge our finitude and fallibility, repent, and get busy with the hard work and sacrifice needed to make ourselves, our “almost blessed” nation, and the whole real world reform to the architectural drawings of the loving and just God.

We are in some tough times, and there are tough times to come. But while researching for this sermon I was reminded of the toughness and sacrifice through wildernesses we have not known, and which brought us the luxury to doubt and complain, and a legacy of faith that has overcome challenges and obstacles and achieved goals which reason could not foresee. I close with one more quote from Reinhold Niebuhr:

Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore, we are saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we are saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own; therefore, we are saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.