"Seek the Welfare of the
City"
Sermon by the Reverend Dean Lindsey
Salem Presbyterian Church
October 14, 2001
1Peter 2:11-17
Jeremiah 29:1,4-7
When our ancestors spoke of religious diversity only a
few generations removed from our time, what they usually had in mind was
a Presbyterian family living across a creek from a Lutheran family.
Indeed, those two groups largely defined the earliest immigrant settlers
who first came into the Valley of the Virginias from homes they left
behind in Europe. Over time would be added Methodists and Baptists and
an assortment of other traditions. A Protestant stock was
well-established among our hills and valleys long before Catholics began
arriving in significant numbers, or Jews or any other distinct religious
groups. Now we can count Pentecostals and Orthodox congregations in our
midst, and in Roanoke there is even a beautiful Maronite--Lebanese
Christian--church where my family enjoyed a lovely afternoon of eating
and dancing earlier in the Summer.
There I was, sitting at a picnic table, eating
wonderful Middle Eastern food: humus and tabooli, and grape leaves
filled with savory things while coveting my neighbor's baklava. The band
was singing in Arabic and two dozen or so young people-mostly girls-had
formed an impromptu circle dance of which they all seemed,
instinctively, to know the proper steps.
I wondered what had brought so many Lebanese and
Middle Eastern people to the Roanoke Valley. Or, at least, what had
brought their parents or grandparents here. The simple answer, of
course, is that their own land had become unlivable. Perhaps you
remember the chaos and anarchy, the warfare and killing that overtook
Lebanon a couple of decades ago. Faced with threats to life and
property, intolerant and hateful neighbors, a government that would not
or could not protect them, these families left their homeland to seek a
better life here.
And when it comes right down to it, that is why many
of our ancestors came here, as well. Although I have not researched my
own roots extensively, I do know that some of my Lindsey forebears came
through Virginia in the early 18th century. They were, no
doubt, part of the massive Scottish and Scotch Irish migration which
chose to flee the great upheavals caused by the English Civil War
beginning in the mid-17th century. There were political and economic
reasons for that protracted conflict, but it was religious strife which
made it all especially brutal-Anglicans, Catholics and Presbyterians
struggling to gain victory over their rivals, or alternately, struggling
simply to survive. The refugees who came to our shores from those
conflicts knew first-hand the devastation and despair that intolerance
can breed.
That is why America proved to be a fertile ground for
testing out the radical ideal of religious toleration. Our nation's
founders sought to answer an age-old conundrum: how to allow for the
citizens of a new land to pursue the goal of religious salvation for
themselves and others and yet also to maintain civil peace. The founders
did so by ordering a clear separation of church and state to ensure that
no single religion could use political means to enforce its own
orthodoxy. They did this, first of all, to preserve the peace, but also
to preserve true religion itself.
The philosopher John Locke explained how this is so in
his "Letter on Religious Toleration," a mid-18th century
writing that had a great influence upon Thomas Jefferson and other
leaders in the early days of this republic. Locke wrote that the purpose
of civil law
is not to provide for the truth of opinions, but for
the safety and security of the commonwealth and of every citizen's goods
and person. And so it should be. For truth certainly would do well
enough, if she were once left to shift for herself. Truth seldom has
received, and I fear never will receive, much assistance from the power
of great men, to whom she is but rarely known, and more rarely welcome.
She is not taught by laws, nor has any need of force, to procure her
entrance into the minds of men . . . (for) if truth makes not her way
into the understanding by her own light, she will be but the weaker for
any borrowed force violence can add to her.
The wonderful consequence of the great American
experiment in religious toleration has not been, as some feared, the
collapse of religious faith in our land but rather a great flourishing
of it. It is true that no other country has achieved such a vibrant and
varied religious culture as our own. It is not a project without its
challenges. Indeed, over the past several decades, our very openness has
provided a magnet for groups which our founders knew little of: Muslims,
Hindus, Buddhists, and a host of others. We are all now familiar with
the surprising statistic that more Muslims live in America than
Presbyterians.
It is clear, however, that there are those who
consider our diversity an abhorrent thing. I lift up, first of all,
Osama bin Laden and his Taliban friends. It's is not simply that they
claim a particularly narrow view of the Quran to justify political
directives that subject their own citizens to torture or death for the
most minor of infractions against their rigid code. It is, moreover,
that they wish to enforce their definition of purity upon the world.
They wish to destroy or at least to mortally wound our nation and
culture because our very openness is a tangible threat to all they
believe in.
Still, fanatic Muslims do not corner the market in
intolerance and ill-will. If we needed yet another reminder that this is
so, we only had to listen to some of the messages which came from
Christian pulpits immediately following the September 11 attacks. While
most pastors humbly sought out God's help for those who were feeling
traumatized, a few were eager to proclaim God's hand in the very
destruction we had witnessed. While many sermons struggled mightily with
the clash that the people of faith inevitably feel over Jesus' command
to love our enemies, others issued calls for "massive and
disproportionate retaliation." Those words are a direct quote from
the pastor of one of Florida's mega-churches. In the same sermon he also
suggested that the true culprits are those who removed prayer from the
public schools.
It must be said that there are those who call
themselves Christian who abhor the openness and diversity of American
society every bit as much as the Taliban do, who read their Bibles
through the same set of lenses as Osama bin Laden reads his Quran, and
who believe that American society deserves God's rebuke.
All of which raises a question for you and me. Do
Christians have a mandate for getting along with our neighbors in a
polyglot, multi-religious society, or are there limits for our
tolerance? We can find answers to this question in some surprising
places.
First of all, there is the example of Jeremiah. I have
been preaching from this ancient prophet for several weeks now, relating
how he sought to offer God's word to a disobedient nation soon to reach
its ruin. Our reading this day comes from a time after the ruin of all
that was Israel. The Holy City has been destroyed, the temple has been
razed, and the leading citizens all deported to the enemy's capital
city-Babylon. Other prophets have been encouraging some sort of last
ditch insurrection. "Go underground! Be terrorists! Stir up
trouble! Never submit!" they urge. But not Jeremiah. He tells them
something much different.
Build houses and live in them. Plant gardens and eat
what they produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives
for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage.
The Jewish people have been carried off to a foreign
land, and God tells them to get along. Not to cause trouble there or to
try to bend the great Babylonian empire to the ways and will of the
Jewish people, not even to wish any ill upon them. Rather this is God's
command, "Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into
exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will
find your welfare."
Seek the welfare of the city! And mind you, this is
not just any city. It is a polyglot, multi-religious metropolis at the
heart of a pagan empire.
Centuries later, Christians would wrestle with some of
these same issues. As a small, unprotected, even despised group within
the Roman empire, the early church never considered claiming authority
over temporal government. "Honor everyone. Love the family of
believers. Fear God. Honor the emperor." These slogans of the early
church were matters of survival as well as arguments for showing
forbearance towards neighbors who held a different faith. Peter goes
even further than that, however, writing, "Conduct yourselves
honorably among the Gentiles . . . that they may see your honorable
deeds and glorify God." How we act in a world of competing
religious beliefs is not simply a sign of who we are but is an
indication of who God is and of God's desire for all people.
One consequence of the attacks of September 11 has
been a greater alertness to the deep value of American freedoms. Besides
seeking to harm our fellow citizens, those who have brought evil upon us
also desire to destroy those freedoms. And perhaps there is no freedom
more important nor more fragile than religious freedom. The religious
fanatic follows a closed system of belief that cannot tolerate dissent
and will not admit the legitimacy of other ways of seeing. How could
such people view our precious religious freedom with anything other than
hatred and disdain?
In 1922, at the First Presbyterian Church in New York
City, Harry Emerson Fosdick preached what was perhaps one of the most
famous sermons of the 20th century entitled, "Shall the
Fundamentalists Win?" It was his plea for "an intellectually
hospitable, tolerant, liberty-loving church." In that sermon he
asks, "when will the world learn that intolerance solves no
problems?"
Perhaps the world has not learned that lesson, but
surely we have, living in a land in which we practice our faith, not
because someone has forced us into it, or because we are seeking
temporal rewards by virtue of following in it, but because we have
chosen it and tested it and found it to be true. So also, we are not put
in the position of forcing others to come around to our system of
belief, to compel them by any means at our disposal. Rather, we are free
to live our lives in faith and to encourage our neighbors to do the
same.
There will always be those who choose to wrap their
religion in the flag and desire to wrap the flag within their religion.
However, they do not serve our nation and its founding principles, nor
do they honor a savior who came as a servant and not as a conqueror.
Jeremiah said, "seek the welfare of the
city." This day, we can say, "seek the welfare of our
nation." That is a high calling, and not simply for Americans but
particularly for those who follow Christ. "Seek the welfare of our
nation," a nation of many languages, many people, many races, and,
yes, many religions, including our own. Christ has given us this place
in which to live and serve. "Seek the welfare of the nation, for in
its welfare, you will find your own."
