Hilton Head Island, SC – April 21, 2013
The Chapel Without Walls
Psalm 80; John 15:1-12
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – Thou didst bring a vine out of Egypt; thou didst drive out the nations and plant it. Thou didst clear the ground for it; it took deep root and filled the land. – Psalm 80:8-9 (RSV)
Perhaps more than any other people, Jews identify themselves individually through their collective connection to all Jewish people down through the centuries. Jews are Jews because they are descended from Jews. Whether a Jew is religious or not or keeps the commandments or not, they see themselves as part of a people with a unique history and a unique place in the great scheme of things. Jewish identity is a very powerful sociological and psychological factor.
Most of the rest of us aren’t like that, or at least we don’t see it that way. Part of the reason for that is because many of us are not “pure” anything: English, Scots, German, Irish, Italian, French, or whatever. And even if we were, it might not matter all that much to us. The USA is often described as a melting pot, but it also is a mixing pot. That is, over the 400+ years that Europeans have lived on these shores, there has been a good bit of “nationality intermarriage,” so that relatively few Americans whose forebears have been here a long time have an ancestry limited to just one nationality. First- or second-generation Americans may be totally of one particular nationality, but most of us are ethnic mongrels of several nationality varieties. And therefore we do not perceive our personal identity to be tied into a nationality identity.
In truth, I suppose many American Jews are like that as well. Nevertheless, there are probably a higher percentage of “pure” Jews than “pure” Poles or Greeks or whatever. And in any case, even non-religious Jews tend to focus on their ethnic heritage more than most other people. History and ethnicity matter greatly to Jews.
This theme is highlighted in Psalm 80, another of the Psalms of Asaph. He begins by saying this to God, “Give ear, O Shepherd of Israel, thou who leadest Joseph like a flock!” (80:1) The Psalmist perceives God as a shepherd who leads his flock, and the name of the flock is Israel. “Thou didst bring a vine out of Egypt; thou didst drive out the nations and plant it” (80:8). Many Jews believe it was ultimately God who established the people of Israel in the land of Israel. God intended them to be planted there. “Thou didst clear the ground for it; it took deep root and filled the land” (80:9).
Some Americans believe that about America. They are convinced God intended for a new nation to be carved out of the North American wilderness. In 2013, however, that is certainly not a universal idea. We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here; that is how many Americans would describe it, without ever attempting to explain it. Lots of things happened to put us here, we suppose, but few if any of them were divinely appointed. “American exceptionalism” exists in the minds of many Americans, to be sure, but I suspect it is not a unifying factor among most of us. “Jewish exceptionalism” is a far greater bond among Jews than is any single concept of America the glue which binds Americans to one another.
So how can I preach a sermon with the title We Are Our History? I am not talking here about Americans, as such. Instead, I am talking about people identified by their faith more than by their ethnicity. If God is our shepherd, He leads us as individual believers, not as an entire ethnic group. For us, the word “Americans” does not refer to an ethnicity. We don’t have common genetic ties or religious ties or a universally accepted scriptural moral code or set of values, like Jews. Nonetheless, as Christians we do share some common bonds. They aren’t bonds of blood, per se, but rather of belief and faith and conviction. We are our history.
How did we get here? By “here” I don’t mean to The Chapel Without Walls. Each of us has our own story about that. But I mean “faith”; how did we come to have faith, if faith is in fact what we believe we have?
Probably a strong majority of us were raised in Christian homes, and thus we naturally grew into being Christians of one sort or another. By that I mean Methodists or Catholics or Lutherans, but I also mean liberal Christians (whatever that might connote), or conservative Christians (whatever that might connote), or committed or lukewarm or semi- or demi- or hemi-Christians, whatever those words might suggest. We all bring a lot of baggage with us to where we find ourselves spiritually on April 21, 2013. And who we are today spiritually or theologically is probably not who we were a year ago or five years ago or twenty-five years ago. We are evolving. But still, how did we get here?
Speaking only for myself, I am quite sure that initially I have become who I have become largely because of who my parents were. Warren and Margaret Miller were stellar people, as far as I am concerned, and they also were stellar Christians. Neither of them was a bold, in-your-face kind of Christian, who proclaimed to everyone, whether they wanted to hear it or not, what they believed. Their Christianity was exhibited mainly through their actions and by means of the various churches we attended as we moved hither and yon while I was growing up. My father was an elder in four different Presbyterian congregations in four different communities, and my mother was a “church lady” in the best and most positive understanding of that term in all of those churches. You have heard the expression “pillars of the church”? Well, my parents were major foundation stones of the church, entire walls of the church, the structural steel of the church. If the church doors were open, they (and we four boys) were there.
But why were my parents there? They were there because their parents were also there. The Millers were Methodists in Mt. Elgin, Ontario, and the Hutts were Presbyterians in Ingersoll, Ontario. My mother’s grandfather (my great-grandfather), Erastus Robert Hutt, was the pastor of St. Paul’s Presbyterian Church in Ingersoll. (Can you imagine parents hanging the moniker of “Erastus” around his neck like some recently deceased albatross? No wonder he apparently was “E.R.” to everybody, as his son, Raymond Beamer Hutt, whom I also never knew, was also “R.B.” to everybody.) I am my history, just as you are your history.
However, we can’t look back to a common religious history as Jews do. Therefore we Christians are “individual-ized” in our faith, because we can’t be “national-ized.” We don’t all share the same national history and background. Genealogically, we come from everywhere in general, and from nowhere in particular, at least most of us. So each of us has her or his own story about how we got here, wherever “here” is.
The Gospel of John has a different account of the Last Supper than the other three Gospels. For one thing, in Matthew, Mark, and Luke the Last Supper was the Passover meal, the Seder. In John, the writer declares it occurred on the day before the first day of Passover. Additionally, Jesus talks for a far longer period of time than he does in the first three Gospels. He goes on in a huge almost-un-interrupted monologue for four and a half chapters.
At the beginning of the 15th chapter of John, Jesus gives a famous metaphor for his relationship to his followers, the twelve in the upper room as well as the billions of us who came along over the next twenty centuries. “I am the vine, and my Father is the vinedresser,” Jesus said. He may have been thinking about Psalm 80 or some of the other passages in the scripture where Israel is spoken of as God’s grapevine. Later in his discourse Jesus said, “I am the vine, you are the branches.” With Gentiles, it is not a genetic connection; it is a spiritual or theological connection. I can’t believe Jesus said some of the things John said he said in the upper room, but the essential message is clear and valid: Jesus lived in God, and we live in God and Jesus. We are our history, and that is the history we all share, whatever may be our genetic lineage.
But how about those of us who actually are Americans? What is our collective history? We were in Jamestown in 1607, all of us. We were in Massachusetts Bay in 1620. We were in Lexington and Concord in 1775, and in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776, and in Yorktown in 1781 and at Appomattox in 1865 and on the deck of the USS Missouri in 1945. But we also were there with Lewis and Clark on the way to the Pacific and with Sitting Bull at the Battle of the Little Bighorn and with Martin Luther King, Jr. at the Lincoln Memorial. We stood in the ruins of the World Trade Center on 9/11 and at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, April 15, 2013.
No matter when we personally or our earliest forebears first set foot within this nation, we are all part of the history of this nation. We are it, and it is us.
Nevertheless, we don’t see ourselves connected to national history the way Jews or the Chinese perceive their own identity. In last week’s New Yorker, there was a story about China. In it the writer, Ian Johnson said, “Few people are as obsessed with their history as are the Chinese, who have a sense of continuity with the past that is rarely appreciated by outsiders. Most Westerners trace their intellectual history to peoples who lived in what are now foreign countries, or spoke languages that are now essentially dead. For the Chinese, history and myth are local, and classical Chinese isn’t incomprehensibly removed from today’s vernacular.”
Imagine that! What would it be like to be a resident in a country that has existed intact for nearly five thousand years? Or how would we feel to speak a language which has changed surprisingly little in five millennia? There is an “us-ness” to the Chinese that is similar only to the “us-ness of the Indians and the Japanese and the Jews and the Persians (or Iranians) and the Egyptians and the Greeks. Not even the Cambodians or Ethiopians or Italians or French or English have it, and certainly not the Johnny-come-lately Americans.
Still, we Americans are our history, relatively short as it may be. And it is events like 9/11 or the Boston Marathon of 2013 which cause us to reflect on who we are. What are we made of? How do we measure up in times of crisis? And how do we properly measure what a true crisis is?
9/11 was big. Boston, as terrible as it was, was not at all in the same category as a disaster. Yet television news coverage has treated it as though the Boston bombings are equivalent to 9/11. Commercial networks had no commercials for hours at a stretch, repeating the same information or misinformation over and over and over. If we are our history, our subsequent history shall be determined in part by how we respond to this latest terrorist event, and others which shall inevitably follow it. However, if we turn into even more of a nation of reactors instead of reasoned actors that we have become since the end of World War II, our history shall engulf us, and we will be cast onto the ash heap of world history.
People whose most observable political trait is retaliation rather than reasoned response cannot long maintain a legitimate place as a major world power. Force does not create might; right creates might. I certainly am not suggesting the two brothers did not need to be confronted by force, because obviously that was disastrously necessary. But the more we resort to violence to solve many disputes, the more violent we shall become. And we are and have been among the most violent nations in human history.
What happened in Boston last Monday happens once a week or month in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, and Congo. Considering how much we have been a factor behind the scenes in the continuing calamities of other nations, we have been fortunate far beyond our deserving within our own borders. We have had nothing like 4/15/13 since 9/11/01. Britain has; Spain has; Russia has; certainly Israel has. We are our history, and so far we can be very thankful for that.
Terrorism is almost always an illustration of what has come widely to be known as “asymmetrical warfare.” That is, a very small group of people use relatively small weapons to instill fear into the hearts of a large group of people. It happened against the British in Kenya with the Mau Mau, in Viet Nam against the Americans and our allies with the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese, and in Afghanistan against the Soviets and Americans, and in Iraq, again against the Americans and our allies.
Terrorism is cynically intended to test the will of the large majority of any people. Shall the attacked over-react, or shall they use all the reason politically that they can muster?
A few months before he was killed by shrapnel last Monday at the finish line on Boylston Street, eight-year-old Martin Richard made a poster which gave what turned out to be his posthumous valedictory on what happened last Monday on Boylston Street. His poster declared, “No more hurting people. Peace.” Then it had the nuclear-disarmament symbol, which has become a universal symbol for peace. It is the letters “N-D” in semaphore code inserted into a circle. If we always strive to do what Martin’s poster said, then his life will not be in vain.
If we are our history, let it be a history lived out by Martin Richard rather than by the Boston bombers. It is repeated three times in Psalm 80 (vs. 3, 7 & 19):“Restore us, O God of hosts; let thy face shine, that we may be saved!”