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 Sermon 07/04/10
Materna: America As Beautiful Mother ~ by Reverend Thomas
Cary Kinder
July 4, 2010 Sixth Sunday after Pentecost, Independence
Day
First Congregational Church in Thetford,
Vermont, UCC
Isaiah 66:10-14a; Galatians 6:1-10; Luke 10:1-11
The
historian Arnold J. Toynbee has a mixed reputation among fellow
historians, but he said some very profound things in his many
volumes. One of them was that
“Apathy can only be overcome by enthusiasm, and enthusiasm can
only be aroused by two things: first, an ideal, which takes the
imagination by storm, and second, a definite intelligible plan for
carrying that ideal into practice.”
This
sermon will look through the lens of today’s scripture readings
to envision an ideal and a plan that can arouse our enthusiasm for a
new revolution in America, the transforming of America into
God’s realm on earth.
The
last chapter of Isaiah calls on all to rejoice with Jerusalem and be
glad for her—including those who mourn over her. Isaiah calls on all to rejoice and
be glad, so “that you may nurse and be satisfied from her
consoling breast; that you may drink deeply with delight from her
glorious bosom.”
The
image is of children who love their mother, but feel estranged from
her, grieved by her. Isaiah
calls them to let go and allow themselves to feel good about her so
that they may be consoled and delighted by what she has to
offer—not so much what she has now, as what God promises that
she will have. The nation will
become a channel, like a mother, like a river, through which will
flow the abundance of God’s gifts. The people will flourish like grass
beside an overflowing stream.
Last
Sunday Nicky Corrao spoke during Joys and
Concerns in response to the extraordinary number of people in our
community who are facing serious illnesses and hardships and loss, at
the same time that the Gulf of Mexico and the Middle East are
suffering so much. My
understanding of what Nicky said was that we need to hold all these
in the light. We need to try
to bring positive energy to these situations, and not be overshadowed
by them ourselves. In that
spirit, I gave myself the challenge of talking today about an ideal
America, full of light. I had
no idea at the time what that would look like. I knew only one thing that we would
do, and that is sing “America the Beautiful,” or
variations on it.
Then
I read the scripture passages that churches all over the world are
reading today, and saw this mother Jerusalem image in Isaiah, and it
suddenly came back to me that the tune of “America the Beautiful”
is called Materna, from the Latin mater for Mother. That seemed like a curious
coincidence, so I did some research to find out why the tune has that
name.
I
discovered that the tune was not originally written for
“America the Beautiful.” Church organist Samuel A. Ward
wrote it for a popular reformation era hymn text entitled “O
Mother Dear, Jerusalem.”
That gave me goose bumps.
I
dug a little deeper and found that no one knows who wrote “O
Mother Dear, Jerusalem”—all we have are the initials
F.B.P. The most frequently
suggested author is a man named Francis Baker who was a priest, thus
F.B.P., but I suspect the author was really a woman. When Martin Luther’s
reformation first began, a woman named Elisabeth Cruciger
became the first female Lutheran hymn writer, and in the early days
she was fully credited with the hymn she wrote. But as time went on and the
apocalyptic fervor of the reformation died down, women were silenced
and banished to their former exclusion from church leadership, and
not only did Elisabeth Cruciger’s
name disappear from her hymn, but a man stole the credit. I suspect a similar thing happened
with F.B.P. and “O Mother Dear, Jerusalem.”
Much
had changed three hundred years later, when Katherine Lee Bates wrote
“America the Beautiful.”
Bates was the daughter of a Congregational minister, and
became an English professor at Wellesley College. “America the Beautiful”
was first published in 1895 in The
Congregationalist, a national publication of the Congregational
church.
It
was acceptable for Katherine Lee Bates to have written that hymn,
unlike Elisabeth Cruciger and perhaps
F.B.P., but some aspects of her life were not acceptable. Bates lived with another professor,
Katherine Coman, who was her beloved, to
whom she wrote volumes of poetry, but to this day many people who are
eager to praise “America the Beautiful” for its
patriotism refuse to accept that its author was a lesbian. They say there is no proof, which
of course, there isn’t, because if there had been, America and
the Congregational Church both would have condemned her, and
“America the Beautiful” would never have been published,
at least under her name.
So
to weave these threads together to create an ideal about which we can
feel enthusiasm, to envision an America of the future that is
God’s realm on earth, we can picture the feminine spirit freed
at last from its repression.
We can picture the ideal of America as a beautiful
mother.
America
as beautiful mother will always be widening its embrace until it
includes all God’s children.
Katherine Lee Bates will be able to marry Katherine Coman.
Christians and Muslims and Jews will live together in
peace. Immigrants driven here
by poverty and injustice will find a home.
America
as beautiful mother will make sure that all people are fed and
nurtured, that all have the sufficiency they need—and not just
all America’s people, but all people in all nations.
America
as beautiful mother will be rooted and grounded in the God who is the
ideal of motherhood as well as fatherhood, the God of nurturehood whose Spirit is manifested in healing
and compassion, lifting up the downtrodden and freeing the
oppressed. This God will have
many names, Adonai, Allah, Rama, Great Spirit, Higher Power, Ultimate
Reality, Righteous Babe—the differences of names of our various
faiths will not matter, what will matter is that we as a people will
look beyond our selfish, materialistic, violent culture to create a
counter-culture inspired by our spiritual understanding.
Abraham
Lincoln was convinced that the thing that held America to its ideals
was the Sabbath. He believed
that America needed that spiritual practice of a day of quieting and
turning to a higher power every week in order to keep its moral bearings. To fulfill its ideals, to be
God’s realm on earth, America needs to be guided and empowered
by the Spirit, not in the sense of having a state religion, but in
the sense of being a people rooted and grounded in love.
America
as beautiful mother will fulfill the ideal of self-giving, of serving
others, of sacrificing itself for the least of its citizens and for
other nations in need and even for its enemies. As Julia Ward Howe said in her
Mother’s Day Proclamation of 1870,
Our sons shall not be taken from us
to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach
them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country,
Will be too tender of those of
another country
To allow our sons
to be trained to injure theirs.
America
as beautiful mother will treat earth as a mother. It will take each challenge and
each new necessity as the mother of invention, applying its ingenuity
to safeguarding all life and providing a sustainable sufficiency for
all. It will be an America of
urban, suburban and rural gardens, of local landscapes beautifully
tended to supply the needs of the local population. It will be an America of pure
wildernesses, Edens where humans can go to
reconnect with our primal mother.
America
may seem more like an unrepentant prodigal son than a beautiful
mother sometimes, yet the vision of what it could be can arouse our
enthusiasm, as Toynbee said.
But we also need an intelligible plan for putting that ideal
into practice.
Fortunately
we do not have to design a plan from scratch. Jesus had the same ideal we do of
establishing God’s realm on earth, and so did Paul, and so did
Mahatma Gandhi and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. They have given us the key
ingredients of a plan.
In
today’s Gospel we see some of them. Jesus sent people out to spread the
word. They went out like
laborers into the midst of a harvest, but also like lambs into the
midst of wolves. Jesus
prepared them for rejection and suffering. He asked them to let go of material
things and trust in the power of the Spirit. He instructed them not to fight
with the opposition, but simply to shake its dust off their sandals,
and offer it one last chance to join the realm of God.
That
is a good beginning for our own plan.
We need to go out. We
can’t just sit here.
Many people in America today are ripe for the ideal we
envision. We need to rely on
the Holy Spirit’s power of peace within us, and trust in the
hospitality of those who will rejoice to hear what we have to
say. We need to let go of our
fear of those who will oppose us.
We need to pay no attention to them other than to share the
ideal with them as we go, in the hope that we may be planting a
seed. As in all nonviolent
movements, the goal is not to defeat people, but to turn them into
friends. That takes patience
in suffering and stubborn dedication to the way of love that Christ
has given us.
The
Apostle Paul offers a few more parts of a plan. He says, “If anyone is
detected in a transgression, you who have received the Spirit should
restore such a one in a spirit of gentleness.” Nonviolence and the goal of gentle
restoration need to guide everything we do in the revolution to
establish God’s realm in America.
Paul
says, “Take care that you yourselves are not
tempted.” As Gandhi
said, “We must be the change we wish to see in the
world.” We need to live
what we believe, as tempting as it is to compromise our ideals for
the sake of ease, or for the sake of vengeance.
Paul
said, “Bear one another’s burdens.” Just as Jesus sent people out two
by two, and then they returned to the full group, we need to work
together. We need to know that
whatever we do on our own is part of a greater movement. We each have to bear what we have
to bear, but not alone.
Paul
said, “So let us not grow weary in doing what is right, for we
will reap at harvest time, if we do not give up. So then, whenever we have an
opportunity, let us work for the good of all, and especially for
those of the family of faith.”
The plan is to take every opportunity to promote the vision of
the realm of God, doing every little thing we can to contribute our
small part to a culture of nonviolence and justice and mercy on earth
around us. The plan is to work
for the good of all, but it is important that we make our home
community as close to the ideal of God’s love as we can, to
refresh us, to make our hearts rejoice and to attract the enthusiasm
of others by the beauty of the ideal among us.
We
have all we need of a plan. We
have all we need of a vision of the ideal. We need just to choose to dedicate
our lives to it. We need to
give our lives as others have given their lives to win
America’s freedom and defend it. We have a plan and we have abundant
models of how to be brave and bold in carrying out a revolution. We need just to choose to do it.
Let us pray now our own declaration of
independence from the culture of materialism and violence. Let us pledge our lives, our
fortunes and our sacred honor to establish God’s realm on
earth, making America the beautiful mother it could be. Let us pray in silence…
Other words from Arnold J. Toynbee:
It is a paradoxical but
profoundly true and important principle of life that the most likely
way to reach a goal is to be aiming not at that goal itself but at
some more ambitious goal beyond it.
Of the twenty-two
civilizations that have appeared in history, nineteen of them
collapsed when they reached the moral state the United States is in
now.
Sooner or later, man has
always had to decide whether he worships his own power or the power
of God.
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