Hilton Head Island, SC – November 8, 2020
The Chapel Without Walls
Amos 2:4-8; Jeremiah 8:8-12
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – “They have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying, ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace. Were they ashamed when they committed abomination? No, they were not at all ashamed; they did not know how to blush.” – Jeremiah 8:11-12b (*RSV)
The longest, most expensive, most divisive political campaign in American history has, at last, come to an end --- maybe. The South Carolina Senate race cost over 200 million dollars. Thirty years ago the presidential race cost little more than that. As we all know, the total number of votes has not yet been recorded, because some states did not begin counting mail-in and absentee ballots until Election Day. Because there were many millions of such votes to be tabulated, the final tally cannot be known quite yet. But the results are clear. In truth, however, nothing about this election has been ordinary or predictable, including the polls, which were wrong – again.
As you know, I always list sermon titles for a few weeks ahead. Several weeks ago I chose the title for today, We Did NOT Dodge a Bullet. In advance, I figured I could come up with a sermon to correlate to that title no matter what happened in the election, because the American political malaise is far more widespread than the problems and potentialities of the past four years.
Therefore let me begin by referring to the two prophetic passages of scripture I had intended to use from the time I chose this sermon title. Amos was a prophet who came from the village of Tekoa in Judah. Tekoa was a few miles south of Bethlehem. Amos was a pruner of sycamore trees, which were a different species of tree from our sycamores. They produce a fruit which was eaten by poor people and livestock. Amos moved from the Kingdom of Judah in the south of the Holy Land to the northern Kingdom of Israel. In other words, he was a poor and poorly-paid migrant worker. Nevertheless he was perceived as a prophet in Israel, but what he had to say probably did not elicit joy in the hearts of many who heard him.
Amos began his prophecy by lambasting the kingdoms that bordered Israel and Judah. He cited Gaza, the capital city of the Philistines, for their sins, and Tyre, the capital of the Phoenicians (in modern-day Lebanon), and then Edom, Ammon, and Moab, all of which were part of modern-day Jordan. Speaking as the voice of God in each of these denunciations, Amos used a stock phrase: “For three transgressions of Gaza (etc.), and for four, I (God) will not revoke the punishment.” These foreigners were going to have to pay a steep price for their sins.
No doubt Amos’s Israelite listeners were thrilled to hear that God was going to smite Israel’s enemies for all their sins. But then, following the litany of woes God would visit upon the Israelites’ enemies, Amos said, again speaking for God, “For three transgressions of Judah, and for four, I will not revoke the punishment.” Since Judah and Israel had split apart two centuries before, the people of the north were happy to hear that God was going to nail their nemesis.
But Amos, a prophetic nudzh if ever there was one, had one more denunciation to proclaim. “For three transgressions of Israel, and for four, I will not revoke the punishment.” Now, as they say, Amos had gone from preaching to meddling. “Because they sell the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of shoes – they that trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth, and turn aside the way of the afflicted.” God always has a particularly high concern for the poor and the sick. The rich sold the best of them into slavery, and they sold others into slavery for the mere price of a pair of shoes. They showed no concern for the truly needy. When the powerful do nothing to try to lift the poor from their poverty or they try to lessen or eliminate health care for the sick, God is fiercely angry.
Then there was Jeremiah, a prophet who lived in Jerusalem a century and a half after Amos. Jeremiah was disgusted with leaders who wrapped themselves in the robes of piety and treated the downtrodden badly. Speaking on behalf of God, Jeremiah wrote, “How can you say, ‘We are wise, and the law of the Lord is with us’?” Some people have always falsely claimed religious authority for what they do, and then they do the opposite of what religion clearly requires. “From prophet to priest every one deals falsely,” said Jeremiah. “They have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying, ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace. Were they ashamed when they committed abomination? No, they were not at all ashamed; they did not know how to blush.”
We shall soon emerge from a four-year period in which literally thousands of lies were spoken without the slightest hint of shame. They were the inevitable prevarications of a narcissistic personality disorder. But it was not just one person who uttered these intentional falsehoods; scores of people on both sides on the aisle in both Houses of Congress stretched the truth with impunity. During the campaign millions of dollars’ worth of attack ads were shown on television and the Internet. They were intentionally misleading and were “half-truths” at best -- but millions of citizens cast their votes believing those ads to be truthful. The rich donors who paid for the ads were not ashamed, and those who believed the ads did not know how to blush for having swallowed the lies. The Citizens United case settled by the US Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision ten years ago has turned American political campaigns into cesspools of false accusations.
We have become a society which accepts lies and misleading innuendos without giving our acceptance a second thought. We tell ourselves that that’s the way it is, and we can’t change it, so we meekly go along with it.
Will the 2020 election change this? Will it change anything? No doubt it will change some things, but it will not lift us out of the hole we have been digging for ourselves for at least four decades. For three transgressions of America, and for four, the punishment cannot be revoked. However, it is not God who will bring hard times upon us; it is we ourselves who bring about our own calamities. Neither the presidential election nor the congressional elections can miraculously cure of our maladies. We have healed the wound of our people lightly, saying, “‘Peace, peace,” when there is no peace. Were we ashamed when we committed abominations? No, we were not at all ashamed. We do not know how to blush.
Blushing occurs only in refined cultures. Widely accepted moral and social rules are followed, and when they are broken, the offenders become quickly red-faced, suddenly overwhelmed with how badly they have acted. Lies are told, misbehavior is discovered, slanderous words are used, and the miscreants feel instantaneous shame. But when the rules are regularly ignored or violated by a majority of the people, no one is ashamed; no one remembers how to blush.
The word integrity comes from a Latin root which means “soundness” or “to blend into a solid whole (w-h-o-l-e).” A person of integrity is completely “together;” there are no loose ends. From Latin, the word integrity also means “incorruptible.” Politicians of integrity cannot be bought, nor do they try to purchase anything for themselves by means of their political offices. Integrity should be one of the first things political parties look for in the candidates they nominate.
There was a joint editorial in USA Today by the two men who ran for governor in Utah. Chris Peterson, the Democratic candidate, is a professor in the law school of the University of Utah, and Spencer Cox, the Republican candidate, is the Republican lieutenant governor. Their campaigns sponsored joint ads supporting inter-party cooperation instead of condemnation. They said, “Politics has never been for the faint of heart, but meanspiritedness has reached a disturbing new low….Civility is more productive than scorched-earth politics because lasting change requires coalitions, consensus, and ultimately consent….The other option, born of rank tribalism, breeds obstruction and ultimately will leave too many ordinary Americans behind.”
Democrats may think they dodged a bullet in the presidential election. But the metaphorical bullet, or more properly many bullets, were fired many years ago from many weapons on many sides. They entered into the bodies and the psyches of millions of lower-income Americans whose jobs were endangered or lost because of technology and automation. Because of that, they felt both drawn to and threatened by education. They felt they could not afford to learn the skills which would improve their standard of living, and so they felt more and more ignored by the elite society of success which they observed all around them.
Thirty or forty years ago those kinds of workers were part of the Democratic base, but increasingly these blue collar workers gravitated toward a certain section of the Republican base. Donald Trump did not coalesce these Americans; he merely capitalized on their sense of alienation with his unparalleled ability to energize and further unite them. Because he is such a showy salesman, he was able to convince them to follow him because of his many improprieties, slanderous comments, and outrageous statements, and not despite them.
Why did so many, and not only the relatively uneducated, believe so many claims that were simply not true? It was because they feel so disaffected. And why is that? It is because The System has neglected them for far too long. These are the type of people Amos and Jeremiah were talking about. They are hard workers, if they have jobs, and they are patriotic, if they believe the nation is defending them, rather than their having to defend themselves. But if they don’t think they are being defended, they will literally take their defense into their own hands.
FDR’s New Deal was created for these kinds of folks. Since then, though, there has been a steady erosion of positive government programs to support them. And more than most other Americans, they need support. They cannot make it without assistance. If they can be encouraged to work hard at something they find fulfilling, they will do it, but they object to hand-outs, and they really object to hand-outs to those whom they think take advantage of The System. People like us don’t understand people like them very well. Therefore we tend to ignore them. But they are like Willie Loman in Death of a Salesman; they are telling us that “attention must be paid.”
In his campaign, Joe Biden said that he does not want to be president of the Blue States or the Red States, but that he wants to be president of the United States. That is an excellent place to begin. Our country is severely polarized. Half the nation is on one side and the other half on the other side, and there is an ominous, yawning void in the middle. The middle ground is always where the greatest progress is made, and too many of us have lost sight of it.
An optimistic president is the second-most-important advantage this country needs. And what is the most important factor? It is for all of us to return to the honest, decent, equitable, honorable political and cultural values which characterized America in previous years. We have been under too much pressure for too long to be the world’s benevolent emperor that we have neglected our own citizens whom we need to help, lest they slip beneath the cracks of an increasingly complex economy and society.
The un-affluent and the downright poor we always have with us. We must learn how more effectively to assist them in their straightened status. It may be more difficult to be impoverished now than ever before, if only because there is so much wealth at the top that none of it seems to trickle down to those underneath the top. Most of us live beneath the pinnacle, but it is especially those at the pyramid’s base who are the most stressed in our contemporary economy.
The most encouraging facet of this election was the size of the turnout. By the time it is all sorted out, nearly a hundred and fifty million Americans will have voted. A far higher number voted this year than in any other year in our nation’s history, and they did so as perhaps the highest percentage of registered voters ever. Joe Biden has close to five million more votes than Donald Trump. Even so, the president has seventy million votes. We need to come to grips with how and why that happened. One of the very few benefits of the pandemic is that it enabled a huge number of people to find themselves with little to do other than watch large flat screens or small flat screens to see what was going on in the world. That apparently convinced more people than ever that they needed to vote. And well more than half of them did that prior to Election Day.
The USA and the world have been on tenterhooks for the past five days. Were it not for the outdated, outmoded, unethical Electoral College, we would have known before midnight on Nov. 3 who had won the presidency. But because of the Electoral College, Americans were led to believe that nothing else, other than the American presidential election, was happening in the world this past week. We certainly couldn’t hear or read anything about it. All the television networks should be ashamed of themselves for plowing through the same numbing numbers again, and again, and again. But then, they also do not know how to blush.
One of the choruses in Felix Mendelssohn’s oratorio Elijah begins with these words from Psalm 121: “He watching over Israel slumbers not nor sleeps.” God watches not only over Israel, but over every nation on earth. He wants only the best for all of us, but we, not God, are the ones who must take the actions which bring out the best. God’s influence in the world is only indirect, not direct. He inspires us to do His work, but we must avail ourselves of His inspiration.
From war’s alarms, from deadly pestilence,
Be thy strong arm our ever sure defense;
Thy true religion in our hearts increase;
Thy bounteous goodness nourish us in peace.
O God of earth and altar, bow down and hear our cry;
Our earthly rulers falter, our people drift and die;
The walls of gold entomb us, the swords of scorn divide;
Take not thy thunder from us, but take away our pride.