July 7, 2004

Tri-Town Community Service, Wednesday PM

Charles Dickens wrote one of the most compact, and most intriguing, openings of any novel on the bookshelf when he wrote the opening of “A Tale of Two Cities.” The first sentence reads, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”

One of the few opening lines that can top that one is “In the Beginning, God Created the Heavens and the Earth.” Dickens probably lacked divine inspiration when he wrote “ A Tale of Two Cities,” but he did an amazing job of capturing the spirit of the French Revolution, a time of both noble ideals and self-sacrifice and real savagery, bestiality among people bent on revenge.

Who here is a gardener? What kind of tomatoes do you plant? Do you like to try new varieties every year, or do you tend to stick with the same tried and true beefsteak tomatoes every year? Or how about corn? A new hybrid ever year, or do you stick to something you know and trust, like Silver Queen white corn. I throw these names around like I know what I’m talking about. I’m not a gardener, but at least I know the names that people say give them good results year in and year out. And that’s pretty much what people are looking for these days—a sure thing.

A wise gardener knows if he’s looking for a sure thing, put your trust in good solid roots, and roots are what I want to talk about tonight. You may have noticed that we as a country celebrated a holiday this week—our 228^th Fourth of July. Can you believe that 228 figure? Wasn’t it just yesterday when America was so wrapped up in celebrating its bicentennial. Sometimes it feels like we’re all in a time machine that’s picking up speed as we head into the future faster and faster. That’s why it’s good to remember that we Americans have good solid roots planted by farmers like Thomas Jefferson and even lawyers like John Adams.

But America’s roots, and our roots as Christians, go back much further than 1776, or even the first colonies that preceded the American Revolution, up and down the east coast. Penn State has a training program called the master gardener, and America’s roots were planted by the real master gardener, back at the dawn of creation itself. That’s what Jefferson said when he wrote that freedom is a right that all men and women possess, a gift from the Creator himself. What’s more, he said that the gift was inalienable—meaning nobody could take it away.

The author of Psalm 33 was simply observing what had already been ordained in heaven when he wrote, “Happy is the nation whose God is the Lord; happy are the people he has chosen for his own.” Just as I believe, and continually stress that God calls every one of us to a unique role in his plan for the salvation of the world, so evidence is overwhelming to support the notion that nations are called to unique roles in history, as well.

Of course, to believe that, we have to believe that God is not content to wind up creation like a big spring and let it go wandering where it will. One of my favorite toys growing up was an electric football game, but it was a far cry from the electronic video football games of today. In this version, the game operated with a playing field that vibrated, and each of the little football players rode on a tiny piece of what looked like waxed paper. As the field vibrated, you couldn’t really control where your man would run. Sometimes he would run forward, sometimes to the side and sometimes backwards. Sort of looked like the Steelers last year, Keith.

But God is not satisfied with chaos governing his creation. He has an outcome in mind that will bring justice and order to the world, and the psalmist underscores this divine order when he says “The Lord frustrates the purposes of the nations; he keeps them from carrying out their plans. But his plans endure forever; his purposes last eternally.” The poet Bobby Burns wrote, “The best laid plans o’ mice and men gang aft agley,” but our great God is at the helm tonight and always.

So tonight, before the 4^th of July 2004 fades into August and the end of summer, I would just like to suggest three principles rooted in Psalm 33 that we need to adopt for ourselves as we pray for the renewal of our great nation. The first is to look back in devotion for what the Lord has done for us.

In recent years we have seen people try to turn back the pages of history and claim that America was not founded on Christian principles, but the evidence to the contrary is insurmountable. In 1798 John Adams, then the president, wrote that the American Constitution “was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the governance of any other.” John Jay, first chief justice of the Supreme Court, argued that “Providence has given to our people the choice of their rulers, and it is the duty of our Christian nation to select and prefer Christians for our rulers.

In 1863 Abraham Lincoln wrote that “we have grown in numbers, wealth and power as no other nation has ever grown, but we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace…and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our own hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God who made us.” Sound familiar?

We forget with our customary narrow vision that America remains a very young country in the scope of history, to say nothing of God’s perspective. In one sense America’s story spans only four generations. When Jefferson died, Abe Lincoln was a young man of 17. When Lincoln was assassinated, Woodrow Wilson was a boy of eight. By the time Wilson died, Ronald Reagan was 12 years old. Now that Reagan has passed away, we can only wonder who will be raised up in his place. We don’t know, but we can pray that God sends us strong leaders for the years ahead.

However, I would like to suggest that since America is relatively young by the standards of the world, perhaps God is waiting to see how this experiment will play out. Perhaps God will withhold his blessing from our country based on the lack of reverence for him. Verse 18 of Psalm 33 says that “The Lord watches over those who have reverence for him,” but the prevailing attitude towards God in this country seems to be apathy

Second principle from Psalm 33 is that we need to live and work in the present firmly rooted in God’s will.

We have two formidable enemies in this nation today. The first is obvious—terrorists want to destroy us. But the second should be even more obvious—the decline in spirituality. America remains a strong country, strong militarily and economically. But America also leads the world today in such negative statistics as violent crime, divorce, teen pregnancies, abortions and illegal drug use. Our media giants export movies, TV and music to the world, and much of it carries a message that America is a corrupt and dying society, a place where violence, promiscuity and greed are in control.

Guess what, folks? That’s what the terrorists say about us, that we are so corrupt and so corrupting that we deserve to be wiped out.

For many years the state of New Hampshire has put its motto on its license plates, a motto made famous by a Revolutionary War general, John Stark—“Live free or die.” The irony is that inmates at the state prison produced those license plates and printed those great words on them. Those prisoners could not leave their cells, but isn’t it true that many of us stay in our self-imposed prisons when we have the power to leave? We want to live free, but instead we choose death, because we do not want to do what the scriptures say we must do to be truly free.

And what does scripture say we must do? From Second Chronicles: “If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and will heal their land.” America has, however, looked everywhere but to God for its foundation. It has looked to military strength, it has looked to financial strength, it has tried to console itself in the sheer vastness of the American continent.

But these are illusions. We need to anchor ourselves in the God who has our destiny in our hands. We need a spiritual awakening.

Some years ago, a “human fly” went to Los Angeles. It was announced that on a certain day, he would climb the side of one of the big department stores. Thousands gathered to watch him that day. Slowly he made his way up the side of the building, until he got up near the top. He looked to his left and right and above his head for something firm enough to support his weight. Then he seemed to look at what looked like a bit of gray stone or brick jutting out from the wall. He reached for it, but it was just out of his grasp. Facing a choice between a desperate gamble and failure, he jumped at the stone, but he fell to the ground and was killed.

In his hand was found a spider’s web. He had mistaken it for the stone. The story reminds us that no one knows, or understands, or has meaning in his or her life without putting complete faith in the rock who is Jesus Christ. Tonight I would ask you—are you grasping for things that are unstable?

Finally, the last principle that we can take from Psalm 33 is that as we face the future, we not only cling to God’s hope for ourselves, but we proclaim it to the world.

One of the reasons why President Reagan was so popular, why Americans were genuinely grieved when he died, is that he stood for hope. He believed in an America that symbolized hope, not just for all of our own people, but for millions of people around the world who still try to get here any way they can legally or illegally. The irony, of course, is that so many of our nation’s problems are caused by a lack of hope. People often turn to crime because they don’t see any other way out—they’ve lost hope. Depressed people turn to alcohol, drugs or suicide because they think they have nothing or no one to turn to.

You’ve probably heard the old joke about a man who arrives at the Pearly Gates and is given a tour around Heaven by St. Peter. The new arrival is shown the hall where the Catholics are playing bingo, and the office where the Presbyterians are having one more committee meeting, and the dining room where the Methodists are having a pot luck supper, and I honestly tried to think of something for the Church of Christ in this joke, but I couldn’t. That’s probably just as well. Anyway, St. Peter leads the man down one corridor and whispers, “Be very quiet as we go past this room. Those are the Baptists, and they think they’re the only ones up here.”

I’m not picking on Baptists there. Every Christian church has, at one time or another, has thought of itself as holding a monopoly on God’s truth.

My version of our joint future, and maybe yours, too, is that God will draw unto him all people who call upon his name for their salvation. That’s what it says in the Book of Isaiah—“On this mountain the Lord of Hosts will make for all peoples a feast. The Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces.” One of the very cool things about the ministerium and these services and the way we go about things is that our message is consistent: it matters less whether you are Methodist or Presbyterian or any other church than whether you confess the Lord Jesus Christ as your personal savior, that you consider him your personal hope.

America, too, has sometimes been guilty of thinking that it holds a monopoly on truth in the world. We have sometimes thought of ourselves as up here and the rest of the world down here. That kind of arrogance undercuts our standing in the world and fuels resentment among other peoples and other lands. But getting back to President Reagan again, it was said at his funeral that he believed in the vision of America as a city on a hill, a land set aside by God to offer hope to the world.

Like President Reagan, I believe in America as the land of hope. I believe in an America that still offers millions of people a chance to experience freedom and opportunity. I believe in an America that is the most generous country on earth, a country that pours out its treasure and its blood to alleviate others’ misery. I believe in an America where all men and women are free to worship God as they please. And in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, I believe in an America whose true greatness and true strength lies not in what we possess, but in who we are.

Yes, we have good solid roots, both as a country and as a church. If we tend to our roots, nurture them, feed them, protect them from disease, God has promised to bless our land and keep it prosperous and strong. But if we let our roots wither, allow them to get choked by competing roots, then the whole tree, tall and majestic as it may be, is in trouble. God has blessed us abundantly. Will he continue to watch over us, provide for us, guide us, when we no longer allow him to be part of the soul of our nation? Will he withdraw his spirit and leave us to our own devices?