The
Fourth of July always conjures up very vivid images for me. Every year, when I was a kid, my family would
drive to Eisenhower State Park, watch the fireworks, and then try to get out of
the parking lot through a traffic jam so bad that people actually got out of
their cars and milled about while they waited to move forward. And every year, as we came to understand anew
why it’s called a parkway, the American humorist Jean Sheppard would come on
the radio, and every year he told the same wonderful story. So, for me, the Fourth is fireworks, crowds,
traffic jams, Jean Sheppard and the story of Ludlow Kissle.
For some of you it might be backyard
barbecues—hot dogs, hamburgers and charcoal briquettes. Or maybe it’s a trip to the beach, or a
picnic, with mountains of potato salad.
Or maybe it’s homemade ice cream.
An afternoon at Two Lights. A
trip to the Eastern Prom. I don’t know
what it is for you, but it seems that everyone has their own rituals for
celebrating the Fourth.
I
know of families who, at Christmastime, traditionally read the nativity story
from the Gospels of Matthew and Luke.
How many of us, on the Fourth of July, even consider reading the
Declaration of Independence, the nativity story of our nation? (Or, as my father does, get up early enough
to hear the good folks of NPR do it for us?)
I think that a lot of us forget that this day is more than just the last
holiday until the Labor Day weekend, that this day is, in a very real sense,
the birthday of our country. And
birthdays are a time for taking stock.
The Declaration
is, in the preamble at least, as much a theological document as it is a
political one. Hear those words
again: “We hold these truths to be self
evident: that all men [we’d now say,
“all people”] are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with
certain inherent and inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness.” What are
these but theological statements expressing beliefs about our place in, and
relationship to, the Universe? All human
beings are made by God, having certain rights—we are born with them, and no one
can separate us from them. Among these
are the right to live, the right to be free, and the right to pursue our
happiness. [Note that it doesn’t guarantee
happiness, just the right to pursue it.]
That, friends, is theology.
The Declaration, of course, is also a document of
political theory. Governments, we are
told, are created for the purpose of ensuring that these God-given rights are
secured, for this purpose and no other, and that the only power governments
have is the power given to them by the people governed. Governments do not exist in and of
themselves; they are created by people to serve people. When Walt Whitman wrote, “Those who govern
are there for you, it is not you who are there for them,” he was saying nothing
that the Founders of our nation hadn’t said themselves.
And that’s just what astonishes me most
when looking back over these words—how modern and radical they are. “[W]henever 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 . . .”
That’s really what the whole document is about. The colonists looked at their government, the
Monarchy of England, and declared that it no longer served them and that,
therefore, it was their right and their duty to abolish it and start on a new
path.
This is my next-to-last sermon for this
church season, my penultimate possibility for play in this free pulpit that you
so generously give me week after week.
It’s said that every preacher has, at most, a couple of sermons that she
or he keeps preaching over and over again in ever-so slightly different forms. That is certainly true of this preacher, and
today’s sermon is unquestionably one of my Top Two. You’ve heard it’s major themes before, yet I
feel compelled to repeat myself. I’ve
even found a way to put the whole thing into one sentence—the Chinese proverb
at the top of your Order of Service: “if
you do not change your direction, you will likely end up where you are headed.”
If Jefferson and the others in the
Continental Congress were right 225 years ago, if we are “endowed by our
Creator with certain inherent and inalienable rights among which are life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” then I think we’re in serious
trouble.
Read the paper, turn on the evening news
and it is painfully apparent that we live in violent times. And, while it’s clear that the media plays up
the violence and danger around us for the sake of ratings, it is also clear
that you can be killed simply because you were in the wrong place at the wrong
time. There is often a randomness to the
violence which defies our attempts to make sense of it. By the age of 18 most children will have seen
hundreds of killings and thousands of violent acts on TV and in the
movies. And there’s a growing chance
that they’ll have seen it firsthand, as kids shoot kids in classrooms. In the United States today our right to life
does not seem so secure.
What of our right to liberty? Well, it, too, seems to be on shaky
ground. There are more people imprisoned
in the United States today than in any other country. And what of the rest of us? When racism still runs rampant, when a woman
is more likely to be beaten or killed by a family member than by a stranger,
when homosexuals are forced to hide who they are because they fear reprisals .
. . how free are we? To paraphrase the
Rev. Dr. King, “Oppression anywhere is a threat to freedom everywhere.”
And as to our freedom to pursue our
happiness . . . ? For many of us life
consists of going back and forth from work, work that far too often does little
to feed the soul. When we come home we
turn on the television or the radio. We
settle for giving, and getting, “quality time,” as if the best we could hope
for is a taste of it now and then.
Sadly, for many of us, it is.
Let me ask you: did you pass any flowers on your way here
this morning? What was the last thing
you said to your loved ones last night?
What did you have for lunch on Friday and how did it taste? Our fast-food, fast-lane,
fax-it-to-me-yesterday lifestyle is not conducive to being present to our lives. We’re told that we must keep moving onwards
and upwards, that more is always better and new is always best. We’re told to pursue the trappings of
success, to pursue the accumulation of things, but where in all of this is our
happiness? Where is the time to really
be with our children and others that we love; where is the freedom to be with
them when they need us, not only when we can fit them it? Where, in our consumer oriented society is
the freedom to pursue the things which really fulfill us, which feed our souls
and help us to grow deeper, more loving, more alive, more free, more joyful?
If the United States really is based on
documents like the Declaration, then it is based on thoughts like this: “Whenever
any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of
the people to alter or to abolish it . . .”
I would go further to say that whenever any social structures become destructive of these ends, then it is
our right and obligation to change them.
Now it’s true, Jefferson did include
this caveat: “Prudence, indeed, will
dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and
transient causes . . .” Yet I
recently saw a paleontologist explain that if you plot the history of the earth
on your outstretched arm, the history of humanity would begin here, at the tip
of your fingernail. If we then charted
the history of human existence on our outstretched arms—expanded the fingernail
if you will—our modern so-called “civilized” societies would start at about our
wrists. July 4, 1776 would be somewhere
around our fingers. This particular experiment in human community is relatively
new. The course we are on is not
inevitable. We chose it. We can change it.
The Wampanoag elder and lore keeper
Medicine Story wrote in his book Return
to Creation, a book I highly recommend,
“It is time for
us to go beyond where we have been.
It is time for
us to transform ourselves, transform our relationships, transform our
communities, and transform our society and all its institutions. It is time for us to go beyond power over and power against, and discover power with
each other and all Creation. . .
It is time for
us to go beyond.”
I believe that we can. I believe that we can wake up from our deep
sleep behind the wheel and change our suicide course. I believe that we all are born equal, and that each and every one of us—here and around
the globe—has the right to live a life which empowers rather than pacifies,
that fulfills rather than deadens; I believe that each and every one of us has
the right to be free to be who we are and to follow all of the potential within
our souls; I believe that each and every one of us has the right to pursue our
dreams and our destiny, to pursue that which brings joy to our hearts and
through us to the world.
What’s stopping us? A Lie.
A Lie that tells us that we are independent of each other and separated
from the world in which we live; a Lie that tells us that we are all
essentially alone in the Universe and that we must struggle against one another
for our very survival; a Lie that tells us that there isn’t enough to go around
and that whatever someone else gets means less for me; a Lie that tells us that
what I have determines who I am; a Lie that tells us that the world’s problems
are too big and that we are too weak and powerless to make any real changes.
225 years ago Thomas Jefferson wrote,“All experience hath shown that mankind are
more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by
abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.” We, today, can decide that our patriarchal consumeristic
society is insufferable; we can decide that we will no longer live according to
the Lie. Once we see that the
predominant culture in which we live is destructive of our “inherent and
inalienable” rights, then it becomes not only our right but our duty to work
toward its abolition.
And we can. There is within each of us infinite capacity
for beauty and creativity; there is within each of us the power of all
Creation. We can declare today
“Inter-dependence Day” recognizing that, contrary to the Lie, we are part of
one family, and we are all in this together—what harms you, what harms a
homeless woman in New York City, what harms a farmer in China harms me. If we were to act on this belief, if we were
to live our lives from trust rather than fear, if we were to believe in
ourselves and our ability to make an impact, we could change the world. We have within us and around us all that we
need; we’re not alone, and we don’t have to do it all ourselves, or overnight. But if we each took responsibility to make
the part of the Universe we inhabit more joyful and loving, there is no telling
what we could accomplish together.
May it be so.
In Gassho,
RevWik
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