Pentecost V, Year C

Isaiah 66:10-16
Galatians 6:1-10,14-18
Luke 10:1-12,16-20

I have two sermons today both inspired by reflecting on our country, one coming from grateful for her and the other from wanting to learn more from her. First, I have a prayer for our country, and second, I recognize something we have to strive to emulate in what may be our country's quintessential religious expression.

I begin my prayer acknowledging a nasty irony which has been eating away at me for months, maybe years now. Our country has declared a war on terror, and yet at as nation we probably feel more fearful than at any time in my lifetime. We're fighting terror with fear. Succumbing to fear is self-defeating, self-crippling. It's a victory for our enemies, and we should have no illusions about having enemies who need to be confronted and neutralized. How we accomplish this is up for debate - cool, sober, critical, even solemn public discussion, but as we do this, we must be strong, creative, resourceful, vigilant, determined, sacrificing, not fearful. When fear influences our decisions and actions, we often regret the consequences. ⁽¹⁾

At his first inaugural address, President Franklin Roosevelt said, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." He was speaking specifically about the Depression, but as a general statement it's true. Shortly before the United States entered the Second World War, President Roosevelt told Congress that the world should be founded upon four essential human freedoms: freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. It's a vision that seems compatible with, even supportive of the gospel, and it's a vision that in 1941 could probably only have come from an American. Today as we celebrate the birth of our nation, we can be proud to have made great progress over the decades in realizing that vision. Our prayer is that we'll continue to do so. Our prayer is that as a nation we are doing, and will continue to do, God's work. Certainly we don't do it perfectly. We make mistakes. But we pray our efforts do work to his glory.

In his last public communication, President Reagan wrote, "I know that for America there will always be a bright dawn ahead." He appealed to our common hope, our potential. He understood the promise that our nation holds for so much of the world when we live up to our values such as freedom and equality, honoring civil liberties and showing respect for the dignity of every human being regardless of his circumstances. Our love for our nation, and our pride in her, is that she has been and can be that shining city on the hill when we accept the responsibilities of freedom and power and when we live up to the best of our values: hope, openness, generosity, tolerance, opportunity, equality. As a people, this is what we need to show the world, and I believe the best American values and qualities are informed, encouraged by the gospel.

However, unlike our Lord, our founding fathers were not perfect. Like each of us, they each had vanities, moral shortcomings, character failings. The more I learn and reflect about our founders, the more I admire their brave creativity and their bold courage to do something new in history. They recast the shape of public authority and governance, the purpose of worldly power and dominion. They created the great "democratic experiment" that we still engage in today. Bernard Bailyn put it this way:

Again and again [our founding fathers] were warned of the folly of defying the received tradition, the sheer unlikelihood that they, obscure people on the outer borderlands of European civilization, knew better than the established authorities that had ruled them; that they could create something freer, ultimately more enduring than what was then known in the centers of metropolitan life. ⁽²⁾

Again, our prayer today and always is thanksgiving for our country and that our national life pleases and serves God.

My second sermon begins in wondering if there is a quintessential American religion. Ultimately, I think that it's a bit foolish to talk about a quintessentially American religion because we are such a diverse nation, but it's arguable that if we were forced to identify one it would be evangelical Christianity, which began to thrive in our country in the decades just before we sought our independence.

What we instinctively and conventionally think of as evangelical Christianity is not my thing. It's about all I was exposed to until I was well into college, and that's probably why I didn't get baptized until after college. But there's no reason to be fearful of it, there's no good in being haughty about it, and there's a whole lot to embrace in it. When I cooly consider what are considered to be its defining characteristics, it suggests that we might well fashion ourselves as evangelical catholics.

What is evangelical Christianty? I don't want it to be confused with fundamentalism. Fundamentalism may be best understood as a sub-category of evangelicalism or, perhaps better yet, an "interlude in the history of evangelicalism." ⁽³⁾ Evangelical Christianity is a bigger movement. Some scholars have identified four features that characterize American evangelical Christianity. ⁽⁴⁾

The first essential feature is an emphasis on conversion. The so-called natural state of humanity needs improving; our lives need to be changed. What catholic can't agree? Different types of evangelicals, be they charismatics, Baptist, or confessional, quibble about their understanding of conversion, and I do too. Catholics stress that conversion is not a one off event, but a lifelong process, a growing and deepening sanctification, largely nourished through the sacraments. I am not concerned whether or not the beginning of our conversion be accompanied by strong emotion, by a dramatic religious experience. That seems to me mostly a matter of aesthetic taste, not a matter of authenticity, not a matter of spiritual maturity.

Second, evangelicals emphasize the authority of the Bible. Catholics are Bible Christians too, although it is not our only source of authority. Our other sources of authority, however, must all act in dialogue with the Bible and respect and honor the Bible. The Anglican tradition holds that the Bible contains all things necessary to salvation. The Roman Catechism says, "'The Church has always venerated the divine Scriptures as she venerated the Body of the Lord' (Dei Verbum 21): both nourish and govern the whole Christian life." Through the Bible, God speaks to us, shows his love for us, and so it is essential in guiding us to truth, informing our prayer, providing spiritual nourishment. We, however, do not worship the Bible. We use the Bible to point us to God, to nurture our relationship with Christ. The Bible is not our beginning and end. Jesus is. The Bible helps us to experience and know the risen Christ.

Third, evangelical Christianity focuses on the cross of Christ as the means God reconciled humanity with himself. All Christians believe that. Catholic Christians emphasize how we receive the benefits of the cross at mass in the Blessed Sacrament. We become one with Christ - he in us and we in him - through the mass, which re-presents Christ's death and sacrifice on the cross.

The reconciling work of the cross is one of S. Paul's themes in today's epistle: "God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ." Paul thinks that it's folly to rely upon our own efforts to set ourselves right with God. It's not what we do, but what God has done on the cross, that gives us strength and life. Having a relationship with God should not make us swell with pride and be triumphal, but rather we grow in faith and humility and gratitude.

Today's gospel concludes with Jesus saying in effect: "Rejoice not that you have powers, but that God gives you eternal life." We have not earned eternal life, but God gives it to us through the cross. Since the cross has been the means to spread life and love through the world, we can overcome the hurts and disappointments and despairs and terrors of life. Christ's suffering had meaning, and so does ours. Our suffering is a way we can know God and grow to greater trust. And the cross not only helps us make sense of our own suffering, but it should help us to identify with other suffering people. ⁽⁵⁾ The cross is essential to all Christianity and should shape our hearts.

Fourth, evangelical Christianity stresses the importance of having our faith shape our lives and dedicating our lives to service of God, especially in spreading the good news of Christ. The word 'evangelical' comes from the Greek word meaning 'good news' or 'good message.' While Catholic Christians make decisions informed by their faith and do good works, we need to become better evangelists. Like evangelical Christians, we need to see active evangelism as one of our Christian duties, just as is praying, attending mass, giving to the Church, reading the Bible. We have a lot to learn here.

I'm not going to feel like a duck in water at a Billy Graham Crusade or a Bible church auditorium, but I am going to understand and support their basic purpose: introducing people to God and helping build relationships with him. Healthy churches emphasize these four qualities: 1) conversion in Christ, that God changes us and gives us new life in Christ; 2) the Bible, that a good relationship with God grows from devotion to and understanding of the Bible; 3) the cross, that God freely gives us new life through his sacrifice because he loves every one of us, not because we do anything to deserve it; and 4) evangelism, that part of having a good spiritual life requires us to spread the gospel.

Jesus sent out seventy disciples to proclaim the good news, the nearness of the Kingdom of God. Seventy was not an arbitrary number. In the Hebrew Bible, Genesis says that there are seventy nations of the world. One disciple can then go to each people. As Christians, it's helpful to remember that there's as much diversity in seventy disciples as there is in the seventy nations. That diversity of the disciples, that diversity in the Church, is good. But we all have one goal: following Christ and helping others to do so.

+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

1. The Aliens and Seditions Acts, Jim Crow laws, internment of Japanese in World War II, McCarthyism pop to mind, and if we ask this question about fear influencing acts and decisions in our personal lives, the list would be equally damning.

2. Bernard Bailyn, To Begin the World Anew, Alfred A. Knopf (2003), p. 4.

3. Jay Tolson comments in 'Center Conversations', June 2004, No. 29, Ethics and Public Policy Center, p. 7.

4. The argument of David Bebbington presented by Mark Noll (author of American Evangelical Christianity ) in 'Center Conversations,' June 2004, p. 2.

5. Charles B. Cousar, Galatians, John Knox Press (1984), pp. 153-54.