WHOSE LAST, BEST HOPE John M. Buchanan
Luke 4:16-21 Broad Street Presbyterian Church
July 4, 1982 Columbus, Ohio

They called him a revolutionary, I suppose: a radical, a troublemaker. The
custodians of the status quo were alarmed by what he was saying; so alarmed that
they overlooked the fact that he was a son of Nazareth, They knew him. They had
watched him "grow in wisdom and stature." They were fond of his parents, their
neighbors. But they forgot all that in their anger and frustration. He managed
to so enfuriate the power brokers in Nazareth with his first public utterance that
he barely escaped the incident with his life.

What had he done? How had he managed to precipitate this serious crisis? He
simply had read their own scripture to them. He had gone to the synagogue on the
Sabbath in his home town, and when he was invited to be a reader he had chosen a
portion of the book of Isaiah which describes what it will be like when God reigns
fully on earth, when the Kingdom comes.

Good news for the poor, he said,
Liberty for the captives and
Sight for the blind and

Freedom for the oppressed.

They knew the passage, obviously. It may have been the prescribed reading
for the day. And so the words themselves were not the reason for their anger. It
was, we deduce, his subsequent suggestion that the time had come for the ideas to
live. It was his suggestion that these soaring abstractions which could lift a
person's spirit, were not incarnate in the way they were living.

The Bible is partial to the poor. From beginning to end there is a definite
tilt in the Bible in the direction of the underdog, the outcast, the forgotten,
the oppressed. You can ignore it only by the most blatant selectivity in reading,
Social change, social justice, economic justice, political justice, are tied to
belief in God in the Old Testament and discipleship to his Son in the New Testament.
And that relationship is one of the dynamics which is informing, disturbing, and
instructing the church today.

But on this day I am most interested in the curious yet hauntingly familiar
dynamic of a people's anger at being reminded of their best, noblest traditions.
Jesus did it all his life. It is certainly one of the reasons he was crucified.
He insisted that his people be accountable to their own traditions, their own law,
their own identity, as God's special people.

It seemed to me a provocative dynamic as we observe the founding of our re-
public on this day. The Fourth of July, particularly when it falls on a Sunday,
is a most appropriate occasion to think about and celebrate our best ideas as they
were embodied in a revolution and a war two centuries ago. And to inquire, at
least, as to their health in our generation.

The average age of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence was
under thirty. They were not wise old patricians. They were impatient, young
radicals who had a vision of what human life could be and what prevented it from
realizing its full potential. The vision was strongly Biblical, It had to do
with liberty, justice, safety, security. When they gathered in Philadelphia in
the decade after the war to write a constitution, they said in the Preamble what
the vision was in essence...

"We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union,
establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common
defence, promote the General Welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty

for ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this constitution..."

The vision is there from the beginning.....Justice - Tranquility - Common
Defence ~- General Welfare - Liberty - .

John Adams and Thomas Jefferson thought about the whole incredible sequence
of ev€nts for decades after the fact. Fortunately some of the correspondence
survives. In a letter to Jefferson, written 35 years after the war, Adams said:

"The Revolution was in the minds and heart he people.....The radical
change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the
people was the real American Revolution." (Theology Today, John Mulder,
July 1976)

Bruce Catton described it clearly: "Men and women did not propose to be
bossed around any longer, and at the same time they did not propose to go hungry
or live in want or feel the restraints of a tightly ordered society...}.They saw
liberty, not: as a glorious abstraction, but as something that began with what \
the citizen had for breakfast:...." (American Heritage, June 1976, P. 4) ve

A modern scholar, Robert Bellah, focusses on the idea of Covenant as the pe
dynamic which enlivened the vision: the "General Welfare" mentioned in the
preamble to the constitution. There was something for which governments and
nations existed, they suggested, other than the privilege of the few, the freedom
of the aristocracy and the landowners, namely the Common Welfare.

It was, perhaps, their best, most revolutionary idea. They were not naively
optimistic about the human condition, by the way. They were influenced by a
Calvism which featured a healthy sense of sin. Some of them called it total
depravity. Others concluded that, left to their own devices, people can make a
mess of almost any human endedvor, They didn't trust power at all...the power
of the crown, the power of the church, the power of the military establishment;
the power of commercial interests. They would have been appalled not only at the
size of the Federal government, but at General Motors, Bechtel, ITT, or the city
of Chicago. Again, the correspondence between Adams and Jefferson is instructive.
Adams observed, "Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views beyond
the comprehension of the weak; and that it is doing God's service when it is
violating all his laws." (op. cit., Theology Today).

They were realistic about the human condition. But they continued to hold
to their vision, They believed that they were in touch with something very in-
portant; that this new republic would be the fertile ground out of which a new
humanity would grow. Their profound hope is repeated in an obscure latin phrase
on the dollar bill, just below the eye of God - "Novus Ordo Seclorum" - "A New
Order for the Ages." They believed it was their destiny to demonstrate that a
society could, in fact, be free: that people could live in peace and charity
with one another, equal in opportunity; they believed that it was God's will
that they demonstrate how justice is applied to all. They set in motion a system
that values truth so much it protects the rights of its own critics from within,
a conviction practiced nowhere else in history with the commitment it receives
here..., for the first fragile right to be sacrificed by tyranny of the right or
left is public dissent. They believed in principles which, a century later,
would call the nation to account for its own failure, the massive sin of slavery.
They believed that what they were doing was their destiny, God's will for them.

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The flaw in the system, however, is that the very freedom the republic re
guarantees, can be used for very narrow purposes. The flaw in the system is that Rov
the altruism of one generation can become selfishness and greed in the next. There iv
is no guarantee that the vision will go on living within the system. The guardians
of the status quo in Nazareth, remember, simply couldn't abide their own ancient
hope.

The French scholar Alexis de Tocqueville,. enchanted by the American experi-
ment, nevertheless saw the flaw in 1835. "No power on earth can prevent the in-
creasing equaiity of conditions from leading every member of the community to be
wrapped up in himself.....Anduo one can foretell into what disgrace and wretched-
ness they would plunge themselves lest they should have to sacrifice something of
their own well-being to the prosperity of their fellow citizens." (Sydney Mead,
The Lively Experiment, p. 85).

With an amazing unanimity the historians, the scholars, who take the long
view of things, conclude that when people lose their important, essential prin-
ciples, their commitment to a big cause outside themselves, they begin to turn
inward, to withdraw inside the perimeters of their own lives, to look and sound
selfish.

Sydney Mead, for instance, writes that "When people lose a sense of direction
and therefore of hope,...when they lose belief in the great experiment, they are
apt to turn with some hysteria to tangible, technical guarantees of security, to
attempt to freeze and preserve what they have." (ibid., p. 85)

Arnold Toynbee and Bruce Catton both believed that the American revolution
goes on without us, elsewhere, the leadership falling into other hands. The
American Revolution continues, they suggested, wherever people are struggling to
be free, free from the same sort of restraints that motivated the colonists to
become revolutionaries: oppression, limitations on personal liberty, hunger,
fear. Why, of all the people in the world, do we Americans have such trouble
giving the Communists the credit when the people of El Salvador insist on the
rights we once called shattenbid, or the people of South Africa insist on the
right to vote, to be represented, to live where they wish and participate in the
life of their own nation?

Within the system major changes are affecting the very nature of the republic.
It is a matter for continuing reflection and debate, but obviously the government
has pulled back significantly from direct involvement in the pursuit of the common
good. It may be a creative maneuver. Less federal government involvement in
matters of justice, equality, common welfare, may in fact stimulate sufficient
local initiative to deal even more effectively with the problems. In fact, that
is precisely what has happened in some instances. The people of Franklin County
gave a half million cans of food to hungry neighbors recently. That's good.

The shift of responsibility has a price tag, however, and, it is my deepening
conviction that the church's role in all of this is not so much to advocate one
position or the other as it is to keep an eye on the price. It has a way of
getting forgotten. It is not, in the final analysis, a matter of theological
significance whether the federal government, or the county, deals with the pro-
blems of the unexployed poor in our neighborhood. It is a matter of theological
significance, however, that the poor be dealt with and not lost in the shuffle, that
we not simply forget about the devastating unemployment which is a result of shifts
which barely inconvenience the privileged,

The pain is not imaginary. The dramatically increased lines at our Food
Pantry and at the doors of the church, and on the phones all day, asking for help,
is blunt testimony to human pain. Ending federal responsibility and involvement
is not, I would submit, an inherently good thing, unless someone, somewhere else
in the system picks up the slack.

The Wall Street Journal reports the facts every morning. Fewer dollars for
Federal Mine Inspectors result in a significant increase in mine accidents. May
27, first colum: fewer dollars for inspection, regulation, and treatment,
result in an immediate and alarming increase in the incidents of lead poisoning
in urban infants and children.

I do not believe that the Republican Party or the Democratic Party has the
whole truth, or the divinely inspired program. I do not believe business has the
whole truth any more than I expect the whole truth from labor. I can't believe
that the Washington Post slants its news any more or less than Dow Jones publica-
tions. What I believe is that when self interest is the primary motivator, truth
first, and justice second, are the casualties. What I do believe the New Testament
teaches and our history confirms is that our own best traditions constitute a

vision significantly bolder and bigger and more courageous than anyone has been
willing to risk in recent years.

What we need is Lincoln'c profound perception of this last best hope which
we can nobly preserve or meanly lose. What we need is a rebirth, literally, a
conscious resurrection of big principles we are too willing to sacrifice. I found
a new name for it recently: a “sense of the green," not as in greenback - we
never lost that - but as in the "village green". It comes from the president of
the National Urban Coalition. A time essay I clipped a while ago quoted him to the
effect that early New England towns set aside some land in the center to be held in
common. The village green was a very important symbol, he maintained, not only
functionally but for the commonality, the sense of corporate ownership, and respon-
sibility for the common life which it symbolized. "Today", he said, "people have
difficulty feeling that they have things in common, that there are group interests
that override individual needs."

A "sense of the green" would help, indeed: a sense that old ideas of melting
pot, of equal opportunity, of economic and political and social justice, are still
very powerful ideas and that in much of the world, particularly the emerging third
world, men and women love those ideas so much they are willing to die for them.

We used to believe them to be true. We used to believe that human beings are at
their best when they willingly take care of one another, when compassion and a
willingness to bear the burdens of another are revived as virtues not weakness.

We used to believe that all the elements of this system are designed to and operate
best when submitted to the common good. In the midst of a time that has treated
visions very roughly we need nothing so much as a rebirth of hope and confidence
and a renewal of those radical ideas we cllebrate today.

The Christian faith, after all, has taught consistently that God's kingdom is
characterized by some of those very ideas: justice, kindness, sacrifice, dignity.
Tt is wrong to identify God's kindgom with any earthly system but it is not wrong
to acknowledge that at our best we have tried to make those ideas into political
and social realities.

The danger is always that we, like the keepers of the status quo in Nazareth,
will be so pierced by our own best principles that we will turn faith inward, or
strike out at the one who reminds us and calls us to account. That, we can cout
on Jesus Christ to do. To accept, forgive, and save us, but not without first
reminding us of our noblest traditions and showing us what we could be. AMEN.

aie