Hilton Head Island, SC – July 21, 2013
The Chapel Without Walls
Romans 12:9-21; James 1:19-27
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – Religion that is pure and undefiled before God and the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world. – James 1:27 (RSV)
George Walden is an Englishman who served fifteen years in Parliament as a Conservative MP, was the British Minister for Higher Education, and he also served in the British foreign service. For years he has been a journalist, and he has written several books. In 2006 he wrote a book called God Won’t Save America: The Psychosis of a Nation. I keep a file of newspaper and magazine clippings in a file as fodder for future sermons, and since 2006 residing there has been a George Walden London Times article promoting his book. It is called, “Americans reveal their Puritan roots whether it’s in business, sex, or war.”
With that article title, and with the book title of God Won’t Save America: The Psychosis of a Nation, you might suppose Mr. Walden was and is not totally thrilled with what he perceives to be the persistent American proclivity for Puritanism, and you would be correct in your assumption. However, he is far more pro-American than he is anti-American, despite the bite in both his book and his article titles, as I hope we shall see.
In seminary we were taught never to use extensive quotes in sermons. Nevertheless, I want to quote verbatim the first three paragraphs in George Walden’s Times column. And remember that this was written seven years ago. Whether it now is more or less valid is for you to decide.
“Anyone who thinks of American foreign policy in the Middle East as cussed, overzealous, hot-headed and hypocritical will be unconsoled to learn that this was the kind of thing people were saying about Puritanism and its adherents some four hundred years ago. Like so much else in modern America, its actions abroad should be viewed through the prism of the country’s root religion, Puritanism.
To understand its continued centrality, imagine an America with no Mayflower and no New England. The national temperament would be less earnest, less moralistic, gentler. There would be fewer people in jail, and no executions. There might also be fewer Republican presidents and Bible literalists,” [his words, not mine] “and because a non-Puritan America would be less mesmerized by sex and introspection, less pornography and psychiatrists’ couches.
An improvement on the America we have got, you may say. But the country might also have been less energetic, less enterprising, less rigorously democratic, less uncompromisingly freedom-loving. A poorer, milder America would be less able to do good as well as harm in the world. More reluctant to be engaged in Vietnam, it might also have been less tenacious in its pursuit of the Cold War generally. It would certainly not have been in Iraq, but that would be small comfort to its French or British critics, because a softer, non-Puritan America might well have resulted in a Europe submerged by Hitler, Stalin, or both.”
Christian and American people, those are some highly thoughty thoughts. George Walden is onto something very big about the American spirit and psyche. From our national inception, Puritanism was the type of Christianity most clearly exhibited in New England much more than in the Middle or Southern Colonies, and it has shaped who we have become as a people and as a nation. Curiously, Puritanism is now almost extinct in the Northeast and the West, but it is flourishing in parts of the South and Midwest. Nonetheless, in terms of government policies since the American Revolution, there has always been a strong streak of political ultra-righteousness in the decisions of Congress and many of our Presidents. We like to think that Americans always “do the right thing,” that we constantly strive for “truth, justice, and the American way,” as it said in the Superman comic books. And to us, that means “God’s way.”
George Walden concludes his think-piece as follows: “America’s Puritan origins do much to explain why it is the maddening and exhilarating, ancient and modern, progressive and conservative, sophisticated and simplistic, creative and destructive country it is….(T)hat is how America is. In dealing with it, as with anything else, we must take account of its national temperament. Above all, we should remember that, as Alain Minc, the French historian put it, anti-Americanism is the internationalism of imbeciles.”
Is what you have just heard fundamentally anti-American or anti-Puritan? Not essentially. In fact, not at all. But it does cogently point out both the strengths and the weaknesses of America and its most evident underlying expression of religion. Whether we like it or not, as a people we still are surprisingly puritanical, at least compared to most other developed nations. Abortion or homosexuality or same-sex marriage or the wholesale slaughter of innocent civilians do not excite moral or political passions in other countries the way they do in the U.S. of A. Most modern nations have long since made their peace with issues which still constantly rankle the body politic in America. And there are millions of Americans all across the political and religious spectrum who believe that as a people and as a nation, America is still relatively pure.
But what does “relatively pure” mean? Is it possible for anyone to be relatively pure, any more than a woman can be relatively pregnant or a man or woman be a relative virgin? Doesn’t the very word “purity” connote a 100% phenomenon, and that therefore either one is totally pure or not totally pure, and therefore at least somewhat impure?
Decades ago,, sometimes in the 40s or 50s or 60s, there was a soap manufacturer that advertised that its product was “99 and 44/100ths per cent pure.” I can’t imagine there is anyone here except our youthful soloist who doesn’t recall that memorable commercial. But what did it mean? On the basis of what it said, it meant that that kind of soap, and I think it was Ivory, was not pure, because it was, by its manufacturer’s own admission, .56% impure. Nothing can be pure that has any impurities in it, including soap, prescription drugs, or people, and that encompasses Americans along with everyone else.
Nearly fifty years ago in a church discussion group, we were talking about human perfection. One of the participants in the group was an earnest, caring, compassionate young man, as fine a person as I have ever known. He said, “I know I can’t be perfect, but I can be 97 or 98 or 99% perfect.” But he couldn’t. And he can’t. No one can. Either we are perfect, which means 100% perfect, or we aren’t. And either we are pure, which presumably means 100% pure, or we aren’t. And since none of can be either, we are neither.
The impetus toward purity is an excellent one. It results in much that is good and honorable. But the search for purity can become puritanical, and, as Mr. Shakespeare said, Aye, there’s the rub. Striving for righteousness can lead to self-righteousness and arrogance and overconfidence. It can cause us to elevate ourselves in our own minds. Heaven knows, along with nearly everyone else in this ever-shrinking globe, many Americans are constantly guilty of that. We suppose ourselves to be pure, when in fact we are, like everyone else, merely human. We are not perfect. We cannot not make major mistakes. In other words, true purity is beyond us.
The Bible does not speak with one consistent voice on the subject of purity. It indicates again and again that all of us can and should be pure. The 17th century Puritans of England who came to America didn’t cook up their Puritanism solely by themselves. All three of our scripture passages for today refer to the notion of personal purity, and they strongly promote it.
Traditionally, King Solomon was reputed to be the author of the Book of Proverbs. Surely many proverbs through the centuries were collected by someone or other, and almost certainly it wasn’t Solomon. However, it is possible to suppose that it was Solomon who wrote the first part of Proverbs, Chapter 5. Elsewhere we are told that Solomon had three hundred wives and seven hundred concubines. That’s one thousand ladies lolling around the palace, which is far more than enough. So it could well have been Solomon who told his son, “My son, be attentive to my wisdom, incline your ear to my understanding, that you may keep discretion, and your lips may guard knowledge. For the lips of a loose woman drip honey, and her speech is smoother than oil; but in the end she is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword” (Proverbs 5:1-4).
Anybody who had conjugal or other such relations with a thousand women had to have known at least two or three who were of the loose-lipped, honey-dripping variety. The writer of this proverbial advice is warning everyone to be careful, and wise, and pure, lest we make serious missteps which shall cast us down into a moral freefall. To be pure is to be wary, says he.
The 12th chapter of Paul’s letter to the Romans is a famous portion of scripture. When I was in seminary, I discovered that someone had given a sizeable sum of money, the interest from which was to provide small grants to students willing to memorize a number of biblical passages, of which Romans 12 was one. I took up the challenge, and ultimately was awarded the grant, which was perhaps two or three hundred dollars. In those days that was a worthy chunk of change, and I’m glad I made the effort. I have long been more familiar with those particular passages than any others, simply by having committed them to memory.
The advice Paul gave his readers in Romans 12, and indirectly us as well, is to strive to be pure in all things. And it is excellent advice. The problem comes when we think we have attained everything Paul urged us to do. Then our purported purity might become puritanical.
The Puritans were a very stiff-necked people, to use a biblical phrase. They were unbending in their judgments of others. It all began in the early 17th century, and it reached its zenith in England in the Commonwealth Period under Oliver Cromwell. Cromwell destroyed hundreds of Anglican and Catholic church structures, because they were, in his opinion, insufficiently pure. It was the American Puritans who locked people in stocks, with their heads and hands held fast in a humiliating wooden mini-outdoor-prison. Perhaps you have seen stocks in Williamsburg or Plymouth or Sturbridge Village or elsewhere. The Puritans believed they alone were pure, and everyone else was morally tainted, and they believed that locking people in stocks proved the stock-lockers both right and righteous.
When individuals imagine themselves to be ethically pure, it is one thing. But when an entire nation does that, it is quite another matter. That is what George Walden addressed in his book and in his London Times article. There is much to be said for attempting to translate ethics into action, but when it purportedly becomes a major driving force in a nation’s policies, it can become both dangerous and noxious. When we wage wars to do the right, we are by definition wrong. When we interfere in other countries’ affairs, supposing that we know better than they how to govern themselves, we do violence to their integrity. We do not seem to understand how irritating the American proclivity for purity is to those outside our borders who are subjected to it.
Martin Luther did not like the biblical Letter of James. He called it an epistle of straw, and he wanted it stricken from the Bible. It infuriated Luther when James said, “”You see that a man is justified by works and not by faith alone” (2:24). But he was equally put out by our text for today, James 1:27: “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God and the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world.” That isn’t possible, insisted the stubborn German. For whatever it is worth, I agree with him. Besides, there surely is a lot more to personal purity than just to visit orphans and widows and to try to keep oneself unstained from the world. That can’t be done, Jimmy, said Marty.
Robert Hanbury Brown wrote a book called There Are No Dinosaurs in the Bible. He quoted a prominent churchman who said there are three distinct kinds of people when it comes to religion. There are those who are all for religion, and those who are all against religion, and those who take religion seriously. Those who take it seriously realize it is humanly impossible to achieve everything that religion urges us to do. Nevertheless, we can always strive to do better, and to put into practice what we heretofore have failed to do but can perhaps do now with major effort and energy. Working toward purity is very good. Deluding ourselves into thinking we have achieved it is very bad. It causes all sorts of headaches and heartaches, as well as bellyaches.
Charles Wesley, John Wesley’s younger brother, was an outstanding 18th century evangelical hymn writer. “Jesus, Lover of my soul” is one of his best-known hymns. He wrote of Jesus, “Plenteous grace with Thee is found/ Grace to cover all my sin/ Let the healing streams abound/ Make and keep me pure within.” John Wesley said we all should “strive toward perfection.” So indeed we should. But it is personally and corporately disastrous should we think we ever get there. We can become insufferable puritans by so doing.
I chose “Rejoice, ye pure in heart” as the last hymn not because it supports the essential idea cast forth in this sermon, but rather because most of you know it quite well. Better to end a service on a somewhat dubious-for-the-occasion final hymn than a right-on unknown one. But I warn you: Beware of thinking yourself ever to be sufficiently pure in heart, because you won’t be.
Purity is always relative. It is never absolute. Those who suppose themselves to be absolutely pure have automatically rendered themselves to be relatively pure at best, if only by their faulty supposition. We must always strive for purity without supposing that we shall ever attain it. To make the attempt is praiseworthy, and God approves. To imagine that we succeed is blameworthy, and God strongly disapproves.
In summary: Be as pure as you can without becoming puritanical. Everyone, most of all God, will applaud your efforts.