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A Sermon by Donel
McClellan
A Sermon by Donel
McClellan
Hot Topics:
June 29, 2001
Scripture Lessons
In
the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, the King James’ word liberal was
replaced with the word noble. This morning the original word has been
retained.
Isaiah 32:1-8
1
See, a king will reign
in righteousness,
Matthew 12:9-14
9
[Jesus] left that place
and entered their synagogue; 10 a man was there with a withered
hand, and they asked him, “Is it lawful to cure on the
sabbath?” so that they might accuse him. 11 He said to them,
“Suppose one of you has only one sheep and it falls into a pit on the
sabbath; will you not lay hold of it and lift it
out? 12 How much more valuable is a human being than a sheep! So it
is lawful to do good on the sabbath.” 13
Then he said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” He stretched it out,
and it was restored, as sound as the other. 14 But the Pharisees
went out and conspired against him, how to destroy him.
German theologian Ernst
Kasemann writes in his book, Jesus Means
Freedom, about a confrontation that took place in 1952 when an especially
severe set of storms hit Holland. The setting was a small Dutch village which
pretty much adhered to the traditional and time-honored ways. Religion was
highly valued in the village and a premium was placed on strict obedience to
God’s commandments.
It was Sunday when the
worst of the storm hit and the waves threatened to break through one of the
dykes that protected the village. The police contacted the local pastor and
asked him to mobilize his congregation to work to strengthen the dyke.
But the pastor had a
dilemma, you see. It was Sunday when nobody was to work. What could the pastor
do? Should he summon his congregation and thereby break the commandment to
keep the Sabbath holy? Or should he honor the commandment and, perhaps,
contribute to the flooding of the village?
The pastor felt he
couldn’t make the decision alone so he gathered the church council and
presented the dilemma to them. Their discussion went just as he expected. The
church elders said, “We live to carry out God's will. God, being omnipotent,
can always perform a miracle to save us, but in life or in death our duty is
obedience. The dyke would not be strengthened. Not on Sunday. Not by these
faithful people.
At this point, the pastor
tried one final argument: Didn’t Jesus himself, occasionally, break the
Commandment about the Sabbath and didn’t Jesus say that the Sabbath was made
for people, not people for the Sabbath? The members of the church council
became very quiet. Finally a respected elder rose to speak. "I have always
been troubled, Pastor, by something that I’ve never said publicly. Now I have
to say it. I have always had the suspicion that our Lord Jesus was just a bit
of a liberal."[1]
It is natural for people
of all religious persuasions to wish that Jesus, when correctly understood, is
supportive of their theological bias. Most of us like to think of ourselves
being centrist with liberals on one side of us and conservatives on the other.
And most of us would like to think that our faith is substantially in harmony
with what Jesus taught and practiced.
To ask within the liberal
Protestant Christian church, if Jesus was a liberal, is to question whether
our understanding of faith is in continuity with the faith of Jesus. Therefore
a beginning point is to define what is meant by liberal.
That is a more difficult
task than it might seem. Dr. Kenneth Hoover, of this congregation, was kind
enough to give me a copy of his book on the subject.[2]
In defining classical liberalism, Ken begins with a caution:
The hallmark of all truly
powerful ideological systems is that they come to be seen as sacred in a
religious sense or, in our secular age, as “natural.” From this characteristic
arises another problem in understanding liberalism; it is so rooted in our
culture as to be nearly unconscious.
Liberalism has been a
dominant force in shaping the Western experience of representative democracy.
Many of our valued institutions have their roots in the development of a
political philosophy generally called liberalism. A succinct definition is
that given in the Encyclopedia Britannica:
liberalism: political
philosophy emphasizing the value of individual liberty and the role of the
state in protecting the rights of its citizens.[3]
These two items are far
from a comprehensive definition of liberalism, yet they are important keys to
an understanding of the liberal tradition. Liberalism has championed the value
of individual liberty and the necessity for the state to take a primary role
in protecting the rights of its citizens.
Historically, the liberal
movement sends its roots back to the Hebrew prophetic tradition, early Greek
philosophy, and the Sermon on the Mount. From these sources emerged a sense of
the importance of the individual apart from any group to which he or she might
belong. The individual was seen to have independent rights beyond the
restrictions imposed by class, custom, religion, law or authority. These
rights were grounded in the very nature of the world itself. As expressed in
that document dear to Americans, the Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be
self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their
Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty
and the pursuit of Happiness.
Today we take individual
rights very much for granted, largely because of the impact of the liberal
movement on our history. Prior to the reformation, however, one’s rights
depended solely upon one’s place in a layered hierarchy of classes, strictly
governed by the laws of the king and the church. Political liberalism was
strengthened by the efforts of Protestant dissenters who struggled and
suffered to establish the right of open debate on matters of religion and
political life.
The right of debate and
dissent is founded upon principles which emerged in the Reformation and were
honed to an elegant degree by Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson, fascinated with the
differences between various Indian tribes and national identities determined
that the Creator had intended such differences to exist. The right to the free
expression of one’s uniqueness was, for Jefferson, not based in the law or
governing body but in nature. As Ken Hoover notes”
In Jefferson’s hands,
liberalism became a theory dedicated simultaneously to the guarantee of equal
rights and the freedom to be different.[4]
The gift of liberalism is
its inclusiveness. The burden of liberalism is its consequent lack of
boundaries. Within the religious realm liberals are justifiably chastened for
ignoring the unique center of Christianity.
Because of that wide
inclusiveness, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between the concerns
of the Christian liberal and the political liberal. A good list of
contemporary issues was sent to me last week by a church member. She said:
Dear Donel,
Got thinking about your
sermon and decided that being a liberal is a Hot Topic all by itself. I keep
pretty quiet about it but the following are ten things that I believe:
1.
A woman's right to choose
2.
Universal health care
3.
Gun control
4.
Strict pollution controls
5.
Save old growth forests
6.
Instead of wasting money on Star Wars, raise the salaries of our servicemen
and women.
7.
Legalize Marijuana for medicinal use
8.
Encourage bio-technology studies, genetic testing and use of placental and
fetal tissues in research.
9.
Encourage Planned Parenthood at home and abroad.
10.
Equal rights for women, gays, blacks and ethnic minorities.
I could probably "drum" up
a few more but don''t want to be "drummed" out of
the church.
This list suggests the
role of the government as contemporary liberals see it. Whether or not you
agree with the list of my friend, it is obvious that protecting rights or
protecting the environment, forests and the defense of the nation, require the
intervention of the government on behalf of its citizens. Although classical
liberals were opposed to the expansion of government the view has changed.
Classical liberals strived to free individuals from the domination of king and
church. They had difficulty envisioning a government which would not be
oppressive.
With the industrial
revolution and the rise of the middle class a new economic reality emerged.
Large companies and corporations have shown themselves quite capable of
exercising their power to produce profit, frequently at the expense of their
workers or the environment. Liberals seek a government which will balance the
power of such corporations against the common good of the nation and the
world.
Liberals seek to protect
individual rights and to balance the power of business with governmental
intervention.
What about Jesus? Was he a
liberal?
That, too, is a complex
question. My overly simplistic answer is yes and no. Yes, Jesus
was a champion of individuals in spite of their economic, religious, racial
and sexual identity. Jesus might be considered the founder of the liberal
tradition of respect for the individual and the celebration of uniqueness and
individuality.
And no, Jesus did not
demonstrate any trust in political or military institutions as protectors of
the rights of persons. In terms of confidence in the government or any human
institution to balance the abuse of power, Jesus was not a liberal. In fact,
in most ways he was more conservative than most Jews of his day.
A simple reading of the
Gospels reveals a very observant, very Jewish Jesus. It is clear that Jesus
and his family were observant of the Torah, paid tithes, kept Sabbath,
attended synagogue, participated in ritual observances, kept the dietary code
and in every other way respected the traditions of their faith.[5]
When Jesus challenged
Jewish tradition, for example on the occasions when he performed healings on
the Sabbath, he differed, not with the spirit of the Jewish law but with its
interpretation. His arguments were with his contemporaries not with the Jewish
tradition.
My suspicion is that we
contemporary liberals would find Jesus smiling on our attempts to protect
marginalized people and to extend the gift of hospitality to everyone in our
society. And I suspect Jesus would frown on our disregard of the more
demanding disciplines of the Christian faith. We do muddy our faith in God
with our allegiances to other gods: nation, political party, the stock market
(although that particular god has failed a lot of people recently), hobbies
and possessions. I believe Jesus would be harsh in condemning our liberal
diffusion of faith. Too often, in order to be accepting of other faiths, we
have diminished the value of our own faith.
Conservative commentator
Doug Raymer expresses the claim of the historic
Christian faith well:
Just as when they were
first spoken, the words of Christ are viewed as being radical and extreme . .
. today. But Jesus is neither "liberal" nor "conservative". He is simply
correct, and we must learn that when our views differ from His, it is we who
are out of line, and not our Lord.
When all is said and done,
there is still a crying need for the liberal voice to be raised in the
dialogue of this society. I have not seen it defined better than by James
Michener. Writing at the age of 83, he had a little fun with the label others
had applied to him: A charge that can be
lodged against me is that I am a knee-jerk liberal, for I confess to that sin.
When I find that a widow has been left penniless and alone with three
children, my knee jerks. When I learn that funds for a library have been
diminished almost to the vanishing point, my knee jerks. When I find that a
playground for children is being closed down while a bowling alley for grown
men is being opened, my knee jerks. When men of ill intent cut back on
teachers' salaries and lunches for children, my knee jerks. When the free flow
of ideas is restricted, when health services are denied whole segments of the
population, when universities double their fees, my knee jerks, and when I
learn that all the universities in Texas combined graduated two future
teachers qualified to teach calculus but more than five hundred trained to
coach football, my knee jerks, and I hope never to grow so old or indifferent
that I can listen to wrong and immoral choices being made without my knee
flashing a warning . . . When I have been dead 10 years and a family comes to
tend the flowers on the grave next to mine, and they talk about the latest
pitiful inequity plaguing their town, they will hear a rattling from my grave
and can properly say: 'That's Jim again. His knee is still jerking.'
[6]
Amen
[1].
Ernst Kasemann, Jesus Means Freedom,
Fortress Press, 1968, p. 16. Cited by Nancy Duff in her introduction to The
Decalogue and Human Freedom by Paul L. Lehmann,
Eerdmans, 1995, p. 7. Conveyed by James J.
Baker, pastor, Westminster church, Charlottesville, Va.
[2].
Kenneth Hoover with Vernon Johnson, John Miles and Sara Weir, Ideology
and Political Life, Harcourt College Publishers, 2001.
[3].
Harry K. Girvetz, The Editors of the
Encyclopedia Britannica, from
www.britannica.com
[4].
Hoover, p.24
[5].
For a detailed confirmation of Jesus’ Jewishness
see: Jesus the Jew, William Loader, wwwstaff.murdoch.edu.au/~loader/JJew.html
[6].
James Michener, The World is My Home (New York: Random House, 1992), 229-30. |