The Rev. Dayle Casey
The Chapel of Our Saviour
Colorado Springs, Colorado
July 8, 2007

Proper 9 – C
Isaiah 66:10-16
Galatians 6:1-18
Luke 10:1 -20

In his book American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation, Jon Meacham answers those who contend that the United States was founded as a Christian nation with a well-documented “No.” Clearly, Meacham agrees, most people in America in 1776 were Christians, just as the majority of Americans still are, but the Founding Fathers, Christians and others as well, deliberately created a government that was designed to be neutral in matters of religion.

The historical record shows that beyond doubt the Founding Fathers of the United States were religious men, Meacham says, and Americans as a whole have remained a religious people throughout our history. Our founding documents and the men who wrote them, subsequent leaders who have governed in accordance with those documents, and the people of the United States themselves all consistently reflect a strong faith in the grace and providence of God.

This confidence, this faith in the providence of God, is expressed in the Declaration of Independence’s conviction that “Nature’s God” both created and continues to direct and judge the lives of nations, as well as the lives of individuals. “All men are created equal” it insists, and “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,” and it is the proper responsibility of government to see that rights granted by God are secured.

The revolutionary leaders were confident in the rightness of their cause, and they appealed to God to help them honor and accomplish it, because they believed that “Nature’s God” was, in fact, the author of the liberty they fought for. This faith was later reflected in Lincoln’s day, when Lincoln, too, submitted his decision to abolish slavery to the judgment of God, because he believed that “if slavery is not wrong, then nothing is wrong” and that it is “right” that makes “might,” not the other way around. This faith was expressed as well in Roosevelt’s insistence, supported by such religious figures as Reinhold Niebuhr, that the divine origin of liberty requires a free people to resist men like Hitler who would deny liberty and justice to others. This faith in the providence and judgment of God was reflected in Martin Luther King’s belief that “the moral arc of history” may be long, but that it “bends toward justice.” And this faith is revealed in a host of other examples, both ancient and contemporary, throughout our nation’s history.

The historical record makes it quite clear, though, Meacham insists, that the Founding Fathers meant what they said in the Constitution – that there shall be no religious test for public office – and that they meant what they said in the First Amendment – “that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion” – that is, that in the United States the “self-evident” truth that it is God who is the author of liberty requires that there be no official religion established by the state and, therefore, no pressure from government that citizens of this country confess any particular religious creed and no political penalty for not confessing any creed at all.

That this was the firm intent of the Founders is confirmed by the fact that several amendments to the draft constitution were offered that would, if adopted, have required office holders in the new government to profess a belief in God, and some wanted to require a profession of the Christian faith in particular. But these efforts were rejected by the Founders, most explicitly so by George Washington. They were rejected, first, on the theoretical grounds that the amendments were not in accord with the liberty that the Founders believed God endowed human beings with, and that they sought to secure, and, second, on the very practical grounds that, even without taking into considering those of Jewish or other non-Christian faiths, any specific religious test would ultimately require agreement among Christians – from Anglicans and Roman Catholics, on one end, to Baptists and Quakers, on the other – which would be to require an impossibility.

The Founders were equally clear, however, that “Congress shall make no law prohibiting the free exercise” of religion, because the practice of one’s own faith was also one of the liberties of mankind that was “self-evident.” They recognized, in other words, that human beings are not God, and because human beings are not God, theocracies – human governments that claim to speak and rule for God – have a way of becoming tyrannies, which was one of the realities of the old world they were seeking to avoid in the new.

Therefore, because it was clear that the American people were a religious people, and equally clear that either the imposition of a state religion or the denial of religious liberty would be a denial of the liberty all human beings were endowed with by God – because, in other words, it is “self-evident” that freedom of conscience and matters of faith are matters that can in no way be coerced without destroying them – the free exercise of religion is a right that governments of free persons must protect, and therefore the establishment and propagation and support of any particular faith will have to stand or fall on its own intrinsic merits in the free marketplace of public discourse, as received and measured by the hearts and minds of believers in their private lives, in their homes and in their churches, with no assistance from the nation itself.

Now I would propose this morning that a faith in the providence of God was precisely what Jesus possessed. And I suggest that the free exercise of religion, coupled with the appeal of a Gospel that would freely move the hearts and minds of people, was precisely what Jesus was relying on when he told his disciples that “the harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. Go out now and make the appeal!”

His was a time of theocracies. It was a time when the religion of the people was controlled by the authorities of the land, authorities who were, in Jesus’ mind, bungling the job big time. They insisted on the payment of the temple tax, and they gave themselves great credit for the tithing of dill and cumin in their own lives, but they overlooked the weightier matters of the Law. So Jesus chose seventy ordinary people and sent them out with the Twelve to tell the people, the authorities and ordinary folk alike, that God was going to bring his kingdom soon and that the kingdom wasn’t going to look much like what the authorities, the experts in the Law, had in mind. There would be a day of judgment, a day of reckoning because the weightier matters of the God’s Word were being ignored. Woe to you who do not receive the Word, ”for it will be more bearable on that day for Sodom than for that town!” he said.

And on this Sixth Sunday after Pentecost we, too, are walking along with Jesus who is passing through from place to place on his way to Jerusalem, looking for someone who will welcome him. And today’s Gospel reading reminds me of the Hasidic story of the man who went to visit a famous rabbi. The visitor was shocked at the spareness, the bareness, the emptiness of the rabbi’s little one-room house. “Why don’t you have any furniture?” the visitor asked. “Why don’t you?” the rabbi replied. “Because I’m only passing through,” said the visitor. “Well, so am I,” the rabbi answered.

Jesus is looking for someone who will welcome him, but everywhere he goes he meets with either rejection or excuses. The Samaritans don’t welcome him, because he is from the south. Although he grew up in the north, now he is from the south; he isn’t one of them. He’s a Jew, not a Samaritan. And now he’s on his way back to the south, back to Jerusalem. Others say they will go south with him, but they have other business to take care of first, they say.

But even though Jesus hasn’t gotten many takers so far, he sends us out into towns and villages along the road, seventy of us, to proclaim the kingdom of God. He tells us to travel light. You won’t need any furniture. Take no purse with you, no backpack, no shoes.

Jesus means for us to be free, free to stay awhile and proclaim the kingdom where we are welcomed, and free to move along for the same purpose. You can’t be tied down by a lot of “stuff,” he says. He gives us no diocesan demographic studies, no feasibility studies, just a charge: “Go ahead now, preach peace, heal the sick, and proclaim the kingdom of God. But know that I’m sending you out like lambs among wolves, with no government to back you up, without money, with no more than the shirts on your backs.

But how are we to do it without a mission board to back us up, we want to know. How are we to do it without an 800 number for the diocesan office, without a VISA card for expenses, without email to send in our reports?

We are just to be ourselves, Jesus tells us. That’s the mission. We are to be the human agents through whom the peace and healing presence of God are made present; we are to let God happen to others through us. We are to offer the peace of God to those who will receive it.

Around the Fourth of July every year, St. Paul always give us the facts about freedom. He reminds us that freedom, real freedom, biblical freedom, is freedom from self-indulgence, freedom to know that you’re only passing through, freedom to be there for others, especially for those in need. And he reminds us that in order to be truly free, you can’t be tied down by a lot of stuff, as Jesus said. In fact, to be truly free, you can’t even be tied down by your own agenda or by your own life, Paul says, because the questions of freedom are the questions of stewardship, the questions about how you want to spend your life: What do you want to be free from? What do you want to be free for? How free do you want to be? And what are you willing to pay for it?

And the rest of this sermon – this year’s stewardship sermon – is about the price of liberty, about the cost of being disciples whom Jesus sends out to pay for our freedom, with only the shirts on our backs.

Frederick Buechner tells of an especially dark time in his life when one of his children was sick and his anxiety over his daughter was making him almost as sick as she was. Then one day a man he knew only slightly, a friend from Charlotte, North Carolina, telephoned him. Now Charlotte is about 800 miles from Buechner’s home in Vermont, and Buechner assumed that the man was calling from North Carolina, so he asked him how things were going down there. No, said the man, he wasn’t in Charlotte; he was in Vermont, at an inn about twenty minutes from Buechner’s house.

“He had known I was having troubles,” said Buechner, “and he thought maybe he would see if he could be a friend for a day or two. The reason he didn’t tell me in advance that he was coming must have been that he knew I would tell him for Heaven’s sake not to do anything so crazy, so for Heaven’s sake he did something even crazier still, which was to come those 800 miles without telling me he was coming, so that for all he knew I might not even have been there.

“But as luck had it, I was there, and for a day or two he was there with me. He was there for me. I don’t think anything we found to say to each other amounted to very much or had anything particularly religious about it. I don’t remember even spending much time talking about my troubles with him. We just took a couple of walks, had a meal or two together and smoked our pipes, drove around to see some of the countryside, and that was it.

But “I have never forgotten,” says Buechner, “how he came all that distance just for that. I also believe that although, as far as I can remember, we never so much as mentioned the name of Christ, Christ was as much in the air we breathed those few days as the smoke of our pipes was in the air.... I believe that for a little time both of us touched the hem of Christ’s garment, and both of us were, for a little time anyway, healed.”

Maybe that’s it. Maybe we just need to be free enough to show up and say, “Peace be to this house.” Maybe our proclaiming the peace of Christ is just our showing up at the right time and simply being ourselves as we are, fellow sinners redeemed by the Cross of Christ, just showing up with ”our sinful bodies...made clean by his body, and our souls washed through his most precious blood,” which is the only thing we really have to offer that’s worth anything anyway, as St. Paul says, the only thing we have to boast of.

Maybe bringing the peace and kingdom of God near to another person is nothing more and nothing less, really, than “bearing one another’s burdens, and so fulfilling the law of Christ.” Maybe the mission of the Church is just our being as free to do that as the earliest disciples were free to do it, without the support of government to prop them up, without a diocesan committee behind them, and without so much as lunch money in their pockets.

This morning Jesus simply tells us that there is an abundant harvest out there, that more laborers are needed, and that we don’t need a lot to do the job. He tells us that we don’t need to make some razzle-dazzle doctrinal pitch, but that we just need to be free to take ourselves and God’s message of peace to others. He does add that if we do so we will meet indifference, and even the growling opposition of wolves. Then he adds as well that if we do meet with some success along the way – if someone is healed through our presence – we don’t need to rejoice in that, as if the spirits are somehow subject to our command, but that we should only rejoice that our own names are recorded in heaven, but that we don’t have to worry about being successful or not in any case, because it is not we who are bringing God’s kingdom, but God, so we just need to let God and God’s peace happen to others through us, and that as for those who reject the message of the kingdom, well, God’s judgment, not ours, will be there for both of us.

What the Founding Fathers did not do, in the documents they drafted and through the institutions they framed, was create a nation that would guarantee that anyone will welcome us or receive or heed the message we bring. They did not create a nation that would guarantee that my faith, or your faith, or anyone else’s faith, would prevail with the help of government subsidy or law.

What they did do was create a nation in which I am free, as are you, to do what Jesus sends us to do while we are passing through – free to make a claim, as Meacham puts it, ”on the the moral sense of the nation”; free, regardless of wolves, to go throughout the land proclaiming the coming of God’s kingdom; free, regardless of wolves, to share the peace, gospel, and the judgment of God to whoever will welcome us.

The freedom to do this is what the Founders fought and worked to secure in our land, not because they believed themselves to be the authors of liberty, but because they recognized that liberty itself, both the liberty to proclaim the Word and the liberty either to receive or reject it, is a gift from God.

This is a freedom that no government guaranteed for Jesus. It was a gift of God to Jesus, which Jesus paid for with his life and has passed on to us.

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.