9B Church and State July 4, 2021
Mark 6:1-13. St. Mark’s, Little Rock
Here we are in church on the American holiday par excellence, the 4th of July. Today is the Lord’s Day and the Fourth of July. It happens like this every few years when the sound of firecrackers merges with the tones of the Gloria and the Sanctus.1 There is also something very moving about putting our hand over our heart and singing the national anthem and America the Beautiful. For the most part, we are proud of our country, birthed to us by the signers of the Declaration of Independence.
“America! America!
God shed his grace on thee,
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea.” 2
We do live with a healthy tension between our faith in God whose love transcends all borders and loyalties, and our loyalty to our country.3 If the early Christians had felt that Christianity should be connected to the love of their country, Christ’s message would never have left Israel’s borders.
Chris Keller reminds us that America was born from a religiously divided Christian Europe. Splits among Puritans, Baptists, Anglicans and Catholics are in our nation’s DNA.4 This country’s other DNA strand is the opposite of our religious pluralism. Men and women of different religions and political views come together to form a union of one against an overpowering force. They give up individual power to serve the common good.4 If each religious group or colony had confronted the British singularly, we would not be the United States but a stack of small countries as in Europe. Later, our government does split, with both sides quoting scripture as reasons to do so. Now we are back together, but sometimes only by a thin thread.
When our nation is formed, there is a clear majority of races surrounded by several minorities.5Today we are blessed by having so many races, cultures, religions, categories of people in our country that no longer can one group claim to be the majority. Our ability to live in community as minorities sharing power and speaking out for the common good is a blessing,/ and a curse.
Can the Episcopal three-legged stool of scripture, tradition, and reason help us find answers?
What can our Christian tradition from the past tell us?
When I was growing up, our country’s darkest enemy is the Soviet Union.1 In grammar school in the fifties, we regularly participate in air raid drills where we hide under our desks anticipating Russia’s impending atomic bomb attack. There is such hope for a new world when the old Soviet regime is torn apart in August 1991, giving way to a new social order with many independent countries struggling to stay that way. A former Librarian of Congress, James Billington, a student of Russian history, is in Moscow in 1991 giving us an eyewitness account. Boris Yeltsin and a small group of defenders occupies the Russian White House. They successfully manage to face off an enormous number of tanks and troops poised to attack, put down their rebellion, and restore the old guard in the Soviet Union.
A vital role in this successful resistance is played by the Babushkas, the “old women in the church,” and their courageous public Christian witness. These bandana-wearing older women, who keep the Orthodox Christian church alive for years during the Soviet period, are the butt of jokes over the years by Russians and Westerners. No persons seem more powerless or irrelevant than they. These grandmothers are widely regarded as evidence of the inevitable death of religion in the Soviet Union.
And yet, on the critical night of August 20, 1991, martial law is proclaimed. People are told to go home. These women disobey and feed the resisters in a public display of support. Some staff medical stations. Others pray for a miracle. Still, more astoundingly, others climb up onto tanks, peering through the slits at the crew-cut men inside, saying, “There are new orders from God: Thou shalt not kill.” The young men stop the tanks. “The attack,” says Billington, “never comes off, and by dawn of the third day, the tide has turned.”/
Do you remember the movie, The Pianist, about the Polish pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman who plays Chopin’s “Nocturne in C-sharp Minor” live over Radio Warsaw in its last broadcast in September 1939 as German shells explode all around him?1 He spends the war as a fugitive in hiding. Near the end of the war, he is discovered in the attic of an abandoned Warsaw home by Captain Wilm Hosenfeld, a Christian Austrian German officer. At great danger, Hosenfeld provides food, clothing, and protection to Szpilman. Earlier, Hosenfeld had helped other Jews, defying orders and risking execution himself. He releases prisoners from concentration camps and spares the lives of Jews slated for execution. Unfortunately, before he is found, he dies in a Russian prisoner of war camp. /
Let’s come closer to home to look for Christians using reason.6 Little Rock, summer of 1958. Governor Faubus invokes a hastily passed state law closing high schools rather than obeying federal orders to integrate after the 1957 Central High crisis. Three women, Adolphine Fletcher Terry, a prominent “old family” civic leader in her seventies, Vivion Brewer, and Velma Powell, meet while organizing a dinner party to honor Harry Ashmore, the Arkansas Gazette editor and recent recipient of the Pulitzer Prize. In addition,/ they organize the Women’s Emergency Committee to Open Our Schools (WEC). Episcopal women are very involved, including the leader, Adolphine Fletcher Terry. Much-loved Episcopalians Virginia Mitchell, Mary Wortham, Naomi May, Babs Penick, and Phyllis Brandon, and Bettie Ahrens, and Betty Rowland from St. Marks are at their first meeting. WEC becomes a highly effective organization that bombards the city with ads, fliers challenging Faubus’s actions. At peak membership, WEC musters 2000. Largely inexperienced in politics, these women become articulate, confident promoters of public schools and the integration of schools.
Little Rock 1963. White, African American, Asian American, Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish mothers come together and initiate public discussion about diversity. Overcoming fears for their safety, they carry that message to civic groups across the state. They confront public opinion as well as their own stereotypes and perceptions and found “The Little Rock Panel of American Women.” /
Finally, our scripture today from Mark’s gospel reminds us that Christ goes about “among the villages” of Soviet Russia, Poland, Arkansas sending out people to cast out demons and cure the sick. Today, at this very moment, Christ is visiting the village of St. Mark’s, sending us out beyond these walls to heal the sick and cast out demons by caring for our environment and immigrants, feeding the hungry, visiting prisoners, the homebound, the sick, and those seeking recovery from addiction.////
When I am growing up, the 4th of July is a family event where my grandmother’s relatives come out of the woodwork, joining us on my grandfather’s farm for a picnic like none other. We churn ice cream freezers until they wouldn’t move and feast on fried chicken, potato salad, deviled eggs, and watermelon/ on picnic tables by the river. Later in my medical practice, the 4th of July becomes the most unpopular holiday to be on call because we are working with new residents and interns just out of medical school. A warning. Do not get sick on July 4th weekend.
Now, as I am aging, I think more of the sacrifices made to form our country and then keep it together as a democracy. I also honor those who spoke out and tried to heal our country. There are ways to do this individually, like Captain Wilm Hosenfeld or in groups like the Russian grandmothers and the Little Rock women. They are our mentors of how to heal our country when it becomes sick. I know many learned about healing in congregations just like ours./ My prayer on this July 4th is that St. Mark’s will continue to be a sacred space where soldiers, grandmothers, mothers, men, children come to learn about God’s healing love as Jesus sends us out into other villages to make our country a caring community.
Today is the Fourth of July. Today is the Lord’s Day. Enjoy.
But remember if we want our lives to count as did our ancestors’, we have orders from a commander who sent out so many BEFORE us during the heat of the summer. We carry with us this heritage with only ONE thing, Jesus’ gospel of peace, to cure the sick and cast out demons./
“America! America!
God shed his grace on thee,
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea.”2
In years to come, when our great-grandchildren sing “America the Beautiful,” will they be as proud of these United States as we are. It all depends on us/ and our ability to love and heal each other.5 /
1Thomas Long, “’ Today is….’ A Sermon for Sunday, July 4” in Journal for Preachers, Vol 27, no 4, Pentecost 2004, pp. 40-46.
2Katherine Lee Bates, Congregationalist, July 5, 1895.
3Samuel T. Lloyd III, “A Humble Patriotism” in Sermons from the National Cathedral (Rowman and Littlefield 2013) pp. 189-193.
4Keller, Christoph III, “July 4, Out of Many, One,” sermon Trinity Cathedral, Little Rock, July 5, 2015.
5Wade, Francis, “An American Agenda” in Rites of Our Passage (Posterity Press 2002), pp. 82-85.
6Sara Alderman Murphy in Breaking the Silence (University of Arkansas Press, Fayetteville, 1997).
Joanna Seibert