A Reflection for the Sunday following the 4th
of July All Saints’, Southern
Shores, N.C. July 6, 2014 Thomas
E. Wilson, Rector
On
“Lives, fortunes and sacred honor”
A video version of thei sermon is on You tube: http://youtu.be/Fqw6Zc-q0OQ
Today we have moved the lessons for the 4th
of July to take the place of the lessons for this Sunday. The Episcopal Church
has had an ambivalent history with the 4th of July, that day in 1776
in which people pledged “with a firm reliance on the protection of divine
Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our
sacred Honor,” for this dream of a nation in which all are created equal. Not
all the people who make up the Episcopal Church pledged their “lives, their
fortunes and their sacred honor” for the cause of Independence. In 1775, when
the Revolution began, there were about 300 congregations of The Church of
England in the thirteen colonies. The Church of England was the established
church in six of the thirteen colonies: Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina,
South Carolina, Georgia and New York.
Establishment meant that they were
supported by taxes of all citizens; indeed, one of the contributing causes of
the Revolution was the idea that that taxes were going to pay for the Bishop of
London’s palace in England. We still have a remnant of the idea of the state as
controlling religious thought in Article VI, section 8, of our state constitution
which denies the ability to hold elected office to “any person who shall deny
the being of Almighty God.”
 | |
| Samuel Seabury |
The title “Episcopal” means having Bishops, and we started
off as a church with three Bishops.
The first, by order of consecration, the Bishop
of the American Episcopal Church, was Samuel Seabury who, as a loyal Priest in the
town of Jamaica, New York, a part of Queens, had written pamphlets opposing
disloyalty to the British Crown. When the war began, he was jailed by the
patriots for a while, and then when the British drove Washington’s Army out of
the New York City area, he was appointed Chaplain to a British regiment. After
the war he got out of town, moving to Connecticut, and finally swore loyalty to
the American side.
 |
| William White |
The second Bishop was William White of Philadelphia, who was
the only Anglican Priest in Pennsylvania to support the Patriots’ side, and he served
as Chaplain to the Continental Congress.
The third was Samuel Provoost of New
York, who decided that he could not remain as Assistant at Trinity, Wall Street,
and continue to pray for the King, so he stepped down for the duration of the
war. While he did not join the Patriot army, he did join an armed group that
chased a retreating British troop in retaliation when the British burned down a
town in which he was staying.
During the war, some states confiscated Church of
England buildings, turned them into state property, and sold off church lands,
and it took a while for them to be returned to use as worship spaces after the
Revolutionary War. By the end of the war, 40% of the Anglican ministers left
for Canada. The battered and divided remnants of the Church of England in His
Majesty’s Colonies under the authority of the Bishop of London, the Anglican
church, started making a slow and painful transition to the Protestant Episcopal
Church in the United States with a move to celebrate the 4th of July
in the lead up to the first Book of Common Prayer. The three Bishops decided
against this move since many of the Priests had been on the loyalist side, and
this would only rub salt in the wounds. So the Episcopal Church begins by
binding former enemies together. We can assume that the Priests, and
parishioners, didn’t always like each other, but they decided to love each
other because they believed as the lesson from the Book of Hebrews for today
tells us, that “they confessed that they were strangers and foreigners on the
earth”; our true homeland is not of this earth. However much we love this land
in which we live, no matter how long this earthly life, we are only passing
through, and our allegiance, our deepest commitment, our highest passion is to
a higher law than the Constitution and a higher Judge than the Supreme Court.
We may, some should, none must, have a passion for
our earthly country. Passion comes from the Latin “patere” which means “to suffer” and means having a very strong
commitment to a person, place, or thing and being willing to undergo suffering
for the commitment to that person, place, or thing. That suffering of the heart
and soul and mind in devotion to God’s Kingdom was the basis of Jesus’ earthly
mission and ministry, and it culminates in his last days during what we call
Passion Week.
There are two levels of passion - one for God and
the other for those people, places, and things that are in our lives. I
remember a conversation over our family supper table almost 50 years ago. I was
home from college and my older brother, Paul, was home from Marine Boot Camp.
Paul was talking about being a real “Gyrene” and going to Vietnam and “kill
some Cong”. I opined that I could never kill another human being. My father,
who had been a Major in the Marine Corps during World War II fighting in the
South Pacific turned to me and, pointing his finger at me, said, “If you don’t
want to kill someone - aim high; you don’t owe your country someone else’s life,
but you do owe your country your life.” Then turning and
pointing to Paul he said, “You owe your country your life, but not your mind.”
My father passed on that kind of passion where you
accept the person, place, or thing as the gift that they are, but then look
deeper than just the outside persona and see the potential in who or what they are
created to be. The saying is true - the opposite of love is not hate, it is
indifference. We can love someone but hate the things they do, whereas
indifference means that they are not worth expending the energy to feel
anything toward them. Love is the way I
look at my family, my country, my friends, my church, and myself. I love my
family, my country, my friends, my church and myself, but I do not see them as
perfect with a “My country right or wrong, love it or leave it” kind of
mindless mentality. I love these all, faults and all, as works in progress, and
I love them enough to stay and help. Our task for our country is to have
passion and spend time, energy, and money to help it grow into the dream which
called it into being. It means being honest about its failings when we as a
nation fall so short of the divine vision for us.
Today we remember this nation and, as we give thanks
for it, we also commit ourselves to be in the image of God who, as the reading
of Deuteronomy reflects, “is not partial and takes no bribe” (which suggests
that we may need to do better work about tax breaks, lobbying, and funding of
elections), “who executes justice for the orphan and the widow” (which suggests
that we have work to do on caring for the poor), “and who loves the strangers,
providing them food and clothing” (which suggests that we may need to do more
work on how we deal with immigrants). “You shall also love the stranger, for
you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (we here on the Outer Banks know more
than a little about being from somewhere else).
When I was growing up in the Episcopal Church, after
we shook people down for money with the offering plates, we would all sing the
doxology and then the organ would crank up for the last verse of “America”. I
used to harrumph about it because it seemed a response to the McCarthy era, but
it seems appropriate for us to go to the past and proclaim our passion for our
country with the greater passion for our God. Our country has a past and is
always in transition to the future, and while we are on this passionate road
committing “our lives, fortunes and sacred honor” to our country, we also are
in transition to a different homeland. Let’s sing the last verse of Hymn 717 as
a sung closing prayer, to be followed by a spoken prayer:
Our fathers' God to Thee,
Author of liberty,
To Thee we sing.
Long may our land be bright,
With freedom's holy light,
Protect us by Thy might,
Great God our King.
The spoken prayer was given to me by
one of our members who used it to open a meeting of the Worship Focus
Committee. It is by the Reverend Canon Kristi Philip of the Diocese of Spokane,
and it is called “A Prayer for Transition”:
Ever-present God,
You call us on a journey to a place we do not know.
We are not where we started.
We have not reached our destination.
We are not sure where we are or who we are.
This is not a comfortable place.
Be among us, we pray.
Calm our fears, save us from discouragement,
And help us to stay on course.
Open our hearts to your guidance so that our journey to this
Unknown place continues as a journey of trust.
Amen
No comments:
Post a Comment