Hilton Head Island, SC – October 8, 2017
The Chapel Without Walls
II Chronicles 34:1-7; Matthew 23:16-22
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – “You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make yourself a graven image.” -- Exodus 20:3-4 (RSV)
This sermon is prompted by events that occurred in Charlottesville, Virginia on August 13 and 14. That was a little less than two months ago, but in the hurricane season of 2017, it seems like two years ago. Ostensibly, the civil unrest and bloodshed in Charlottesville were sparked because the city council had voted to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee in a park across the road from the University of Virginia. Apparently most Charlottesville citizens were not opposed, but a large contingent of white supremacists and neo-Nazis from around the country had decided to come to express their severe displeasure over the decision.
It needs to be clearly stated at the outset that not all white supremacists are neo-Nazis, but virtually all neo-Nazis are white supremacists. White supremacists believe that Caucasians should dominate American society and the world. Furthermore, American white supremacists have had an affinity to what has been known as “The Lost Cause” since the end of the Civil War.
To refer to The Lost Cause in glowing, romanticized terms is to imagine that the Civil War was primarily an attempt by the Confederacy to perpetuate traditional agrarian southern culture. That meant an imagined chivalric code, a fierce spirit of independence, an abiding aversion to a strong federal government, and above all, the maintenance of what had been known for generations as “the peculiar institution.” The peculiar institution, of course, was slavery.
For all those reasons white supremacists since the end of the Civil War have always sided with the Confederacy. However, most people who still have nostalgic positive feelings for the Confederacy are not white supremacists. Nevertheless, they may have warm sentiments for what Southerners themselves have always called “The Lost Cause.”
As painful as it may be to many Americans, let us forthrightly declare what the Civil War was not, and then what it was. It was not the War Between the States or the War of Northern Aggression or, in that gentlest of terms, The Late Unpleasantness. Those phrases are a deliberate attempt to paper over the true nature of the conflict. It was a rebellion of secessionist southern states against their own United States government. Whatever else it may have seemed in the minds of other Americans, in the mind of the-then President of the United States, the Civil War was most definitely not a war to abolish slavery. Instead, Abraham Lincoln initially insisted it was a war to preserve the Union. Only later did he come to believe abolition was also necessary.
By 1861, when the war began, slavery had been abolished in virtually all European nations and in European colonies elsewhere in the world. Only in the USA was the peculiar institution still in existence. By the second year of the war, however, President Lincoln decided that the slaves had to be emancipated. But he declared that by a very peculiar political decree, which in theory became operative on January 1, 1863. The Emancipation Proclamation declared slaves to be free only in the eleven states of the Confederacy, and not in the “border states” of Delaware, Maryland, West Virginia (which became a state during the war), Kentucky, and Missouri.
Why would Lincoln take such a seemingly meaningless step? He did so first because he hoped it would encourage slaves in the Confederacy to flee their masters and join the Union army. Secondly, he most certainly did not intend to free all the slaves everywhere and thus alienate the border states, in which there were many slaves, causing those states to join the Confederacy. The Civil War was not a struggle of high-minded Northerners against high-minded Southerners. It was a war started by Southerners and finally finished, after four terribly bloody years, by an exhausted and badly depleted Union army. Whatever high-minded motivations there might have been in the beginning were crushed in the cruel carnage on both sides. As was sardonically observed by William Tecumseh Sherman, one of the few truly successful Northern generals, “War is hell.”
It took the Israelites the better part of two centuries to conquer the entire Promised Land of Judah and Israel after Joshua started the process around 1200 BCE. The Canaanites who had been living there for centuries naturally resisted the Israelites. The Canaanites had their own gods, especially the gods they called Baal and Asherah, and they worshiped them on high places throughout the land. For four centuries after the conquest, Jews were still worshiping the Canaanite gods, despite the Bible warning them not to do that. People tend to idolize the past when they do not approve of the present. And remember, an idol, by definition, is a false god.
According to the four Books of the Kings and the Chronicles, there were not very many admirable, God-fearing monarchs in the four centuries of the ancient Jewish kingdom. A man named Josiah was the last of the good kings. He ruled until 600 BCE or so, just a few years before the Babylonians came and conquered Judah. The Book of Second Chronicles tells us that Josiah “began to purge Judah and Jerusalem of the high places, the Asherim, and the graven and molten images” (II Chron. 34:3). The First and Second of the Ten Commandments commanded the people of Israel that they were to have no other gods before Adonoy, the God of Israel, nor were they to create any man-made images for themselves. “Graven images” were representations of the Canaanite gods. The astonishing thing is that idolatry was still going on among Jews six centuries after Moses received the Ten Commandments from God on Mt. Sinai.
*****
It is easy and perhaps even natural to worship old idols if things are not going well in the present. For sixty years after the Civil War was over, and for forty years after Reconstruction was over, the South mourned its defeat in the war. They would not let go of The Lost Cause.
By the Nineteen-Teens and Twenties, when the whole nation, including the South, had recovered economically, and good times finally returned, monuments to The Lost Cause began to be erected throughout the South, and in some parts of the North as well. In 1915, the noted racist silent movie Birth of a Nation was produced by the white supremacist director D.W. Griffith. It extolled the Ku Klux Klan and the mistreatment of black people, and decried the failed attempts of Reconstruction to repair the damage inflicted on everyone during and after the Civil War.
A hundred years later, in 2016, the black movie director Nate Parker scripted and starred in a very different version of Birth of a Nation. It extolled the failed slave rebellion in 1831 in Virginia under Nat Turner. Because this latter movie was so pro-black, it may have been a significant factor in encouraging white supremacists to gather in Charlottesville two months ago.
It takes a long time for old idols to die. Please listen carefully. To some people, especially people who are not well educated in history and who are reactive citizens rather than active citizens, the Confederate States of America can become a false god. A similar kind of people can turn the United States of America into a false god. Ken Burns has just televised an excellent and fair-to-all-sides-of-the-conflict documentary on the War in Vietnam. The United States lost that war. Lost causes die hard. It has ever been thus. But in order to move forward, lost causes must die. For the good of everyone --- winners, losers, the affected, the unaffected, and the disaffected ---, false commitment to false causes must be relinquished. They must be expunged from the national spirit of the nations which are affected by whatever tragedies befall them. To continue to pick at the wounds inevitably continues to damage the body politic.
The word “revere,” according to the dictionary, means “to show devoted deferential honor to.” It further says that synonyms for this word are “reverence, venerate, worship, adore.” According to the Bible, God alone is worthy of worship. In fact, the word worship literally means “worth-ship,” which means worthy of worship or reverence or veneration or adoration. To venerate anything other than God is a definition of idolatry.
There are people who still revere The Lost Cause. There are people who venerate the Confederacy. There are people who adore the United States of America. Some of those people, who mean well by their reverence for these things, revere these things more than God.
Last year the-then second-string and now unemployed black NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick silently knelt whenever the national anthem was sung prior to an NFL game. He said he did this because he was protesting the treatment of blacks by white police officers in several notorious incidents around the country. In the first NFL games this year, a few NFL teams knelt in silence as the national anthem was sung. Following that, the President of the United States, in typically colorful pejorative language, said all the kneelers should be fired for not respecting the flag. The next Sunday virtually all of the teams either knelt or refused even to come out on the field until the anthem was finished. It was never clearly stated whether they were supporting the protest of Colin Kaepernick, or were intending to display disrespect for the flag (which is highly improbable), or were opposing the persistent intemperance of the US Commander in Chief.
It is very difficult to bury lost causes, but they must be buried. Idols are not worthy of anyone’s worship who believes in God, or even for those who don’t believe in God. Idols always cause trouble, and they always lead to lost causes. That is true whether the idol is the CSA, the USA, the flag, white supremacy, an investment portfolio, or a very expensive automobile.
To whom do we kneel - - - in reality? In reality, most of us don’t kneel to anyone or anything, including God, simply because many of us were never taught to kneel in worship anyplace, and now, many of us are too decrepit to kneel even if we tried. But if we were to kneel, would it be to God, or might it be to an idol we have concocted for ourselves, or to a cause which failed and which can never be resurrected?
A symbol is something which always points to something else. A symbol can never be that to which it points, because it always points to something else. In the front of this room every Sunday morning there are two symbols. One, the American flag, is always here. This is the Cypress Hall of the Cypress Club retirement center, and it entirely appropriate that the American flag should be here. And anyway, this spacious room belongs to The Cypress, and The Chapel Without Walls deliberately has no walls of its own. Nevertheless, on the front wall we hang a cross every Sunday morning, and then it is taken down afterwards. That too is appropriate. We want the symbol here while we are here, but it would not be proper for us to insist that the primary Christian symbol should be here at all times, because not all Cypress residents are Christians. Besides, to repeat, these are not our walls.
But the two Sunday-morning symbols point to unseen entities. The one is an unseen nation beyond us. The other points to an unseen historical figure, and beyond him to an unseen and un-see-able God. Both symbols deserve respect, but neither should ever actually be revered. Only God and Jesus deserve reverence. Therefore all idols must be cast aside and thrown down. Not all idols must be obliterated. Flags, nations, investment portfolios and perhaps even expensive cars need to be kept, but they cannot be maintained as idols. The allegiance given them must be transferred to the only One deserving our ultimate allegiance, and that is God.
*****
The entire twenty-third chapter of Matthew is a blistering denunciation of many of the religious practices of the scribes and Pharisees. Jesus said these things just a few days before his crucifixion, which may explain why his crucifixion occurred so soon afterward.
One of the subjects Jesus addressed in this litany of woes is very abstruse to us. It is hard to know exactly what Jesus was talking about. We can correctly deduce that he was referring to oaths. An oath is a declaration made before God. In William Barclay’s commentary on this passage, he calls the problem to which Jesus pointed “the science of evasion.”
When I was a young boy, and I did something to peeve my mother, she would get a fierce look on her face, and she would say, “By the holy-pink-toed prophet, I’m going to put a tin ear on you!” I never knew who the pink-toed prophet was, nor did I ask her. I also never had a tin ear put on me, whatever that might have meant. It all certainly sounded dreadful, and I would try to straighten up immediately to prevent this horrible-sounding calamity from being enacted. Years later, I concluded that Mom never really intended to do what she said she would do, but she did want me to straighten out, and that was the means she used to instill the straightening.
“By the holy pink-toed prophet” is an oath, but not a serious one, nor a genuine one. Apparently Jesus was also telling the Pharisees that some of the oaths they made were neither serious nor genuine. If they swore something before God, it should not be based on the temple, or the gold of the temple, or the temple altar, or the gift on the temple altar, but the oath should be declared only on God’s name. God alone is God; all other things, by definition, are less than God, and we should never allow them to become idols to us.
*****
White supremacy was one of the essential and undeniable foundation stones of the Confederacy. Before, during, and after the Civil War, white supremacy became and still is a god to people who believe that the white race must reign supreme in the world. That is a very faulty, deluded, and dangerous idea. It must be rejected. It is a lost cause, and we must do everything we can to hasten its death. For the sake of everyone in America, and for the sake of America itself, that lost cause must be put to death.
Did the birth of a new nation occur in 1861? According to D.W. Griffith and many Southerners, it did. According to the Great Emancipator it didn’t. No Confederate States of America existed before 1861, nor did such a nation exist after 1865. Therefore, did it ever exist?
By the reckoning of every right-thinking person, The Confederacy ceased to exist more than a hundred and fifty years ago. RIP, Rest In Peace; the time for its burial is long past due .