A Fourth Church Sermon by Calum I. MacLeod

March 28, 2004 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Either/Or

Calum I. MacLeod
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Micah 6:6–8
John 12:1–8

“ . . . to do justice and to love kindness . . .”

Micah 6:8

A story to frame our meditations this morning from the mystical tradition of Islam known as Sufi:

A disciple came riding on his camel to the tent of his Sufi master. He dismounted and walked right into the tent, bowed low, and said, “So great is my trust in God that I have left my camel outside untied, convinced that God protects the interests of those who love him.” “Go tie your camel, you fool!” said the master. “God cannot be bothered doing for you what you are perfectly capable of doing yourself.”

A story about the image and concept of God that we have.

It came to mind for me this week because of a peculiarly American controversy that has been raging and which has got me most interested. It is the issue around the Pledge of Allegiance—in particular, the use of the phrase “under God” in the Pledge: “one nation, under God.” As I am sure many of you know, Dr. Newdow, a self-proclaimed atheist, has gone to the Supreme Court because he believes that it is unconstitutional for his daughter to have to recite in her class this pledge that references the “one nation, under God.” What has been particularly interesting, I think—from the point of view of a person of faith—has been not so much Dr. Newdow’s position, but rather the arguments of the defenders of the phrase and how they’ve approached this issue. Much of that has been about the image or concept of God that people hold—kind of like our camel rider.

Peter Steinfels, in yesterday’s New York Times, had a very interesting summary of these arguments. He talked about the “elasticity with which the pledge’s defenders before the court have interpreted [the phrase] ‘under God.’” Some of the arguments are quite bizarre. For example, one of the early arguments for keeping this phrase was that “under God” is not really saying anything about God. It is purely offering of a historical context in which the founding of this country took place; to talk about it “under God” means that the framers of the Constitution and the writers of the Declaration of Independence were people who had some concept of faith in God. Developed on from that was an argument that this saying “under God” is purely a ceremonial acknowledgment of the heritage of those who are making this Pledge of Allegiance; it’s not requiring anything of them in terms of belief.

And then what I thought was the oddest argument, offered—I think—by the Solicitor General, who described using the phrase “under God” as “ceremonial deism.” Now I don’t really know what that is, to tell you the truth—I mean, I know what deism is, in the sense that it is a concept of God as the great Creator of the Universe, who set up the laws of physics, got the clock going and switched it on, and then God kind of sat back. God doesn’t get involved after that. That would have been Isaac Newton’s concept of God, and Benjamin Franklin was a deist. But “ceremonial’ deism”—I just wasn’t sure.

There was even one group of what seemed to be fairly honest religious people—people of faith, Christian and Jewish—who filed a brief arguing for the removal of the phrase “under God” precisely because it has been emptied of all meaning. If it’s just something that people say that has no import, then why have it at all?

This is where we get to full disclosure for me. To tell you the truth, I don’t have a particularly strong view on this either way. I’m not really invested in one outcome or the other. And then the other piece of this full disclosure is that I’ve never said the Pledge of Allegiance. You see, I am not a citizen of the United States.

Now I can hear you asking, “So why is up there battering on about this?” Well, I’m happy to say that I did find a good Scottish aspect to this whole conversation. I can hear you all groaning, “How on earth did he find something Scottish about the U.S. Pledge of Allegiance?” Well, actually it’s not just Scottish and Presbyterian; it’s about a Scottish Presbyterian who had a very important impact on this debate. I’ll do a little bit of history for you, as I was doing some exploration this week, and some of you may, of course, know this.

The Pledge of Allegiance was written in 1892 by a Baptist minister from Boston called Francis Bellamy. Francis Bellamy wrote this when he was working with an organization called the National Education Association. Bellamy interestingly, and I think probably to the chagrin of those who are on the Right of this debate, was a radical Christian socialist, and in writing the Pledge of Allegiance with it’s reference to “liberty and justice for all,” he was putting forward a concept of a nation that would live politically, socially, and economically in equality with justice. In fact, the story is told by John Baer, who has written a history of the Pledge, that Bellamy wanted to include the word equality in the original Pledge of Allegiance but knew that the commissioners of the National Education Association didn’t believe in equality for women or African Americans, so he left it out. This is what Francis Bellamy wrote in 1892; this was the original pledge:

I pledge allegiance to my flag and the republic for which it stands, one nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all.

Nary a mention of God in the original Pledge of Allegiance. Now, this is where we get to the Scottish connection. On Sunday, February 7, 1954, the pastor of New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C., stepped into his pulpit and delivered a sermon entitled “Under God.” That minister, the preacher, was a Scotsman called George Docherty, who had moved from Scotland to the United States to carry out his ministry here and followed another eminent Scottish Presbyterian minister, Peter Marshall, into that famous pulpit. You can still read Docherty’s sermon on the New York Avenue Presbyterian website if you’re interested. (Docherty is still alive, by the way. He’s ninety-two and lives in Pennsylvania.)

It is an interesting sermon, very much a sermon of its time. The social context was that of the beginning of the Cold War. Docherty even makes a reference in the sermon that the Pledge of Allegiance as it stood could have been quoted by “little Muscovites looking at the hammer and sickle” (that is a direct quote). And so he invoked Lincoln and argued for the inclusion of the phrase “under God”—“one nation, under God”—in the Pledge. It wasn’t George Docherty’s idea per se. This suggestion had been floating about for some years but had never come to anything. But that morning in New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, the president was sitting in the congregation—President Eisenhower—along with a number of members of Congress. It has been argued that the sermon that morning played a very important part in the movement towards including “under God” in the Pledge. And sure enough, that year on Flag Day—which I’m told is June 14—the Pledge of Allegiance was amended by signature of the president to include the phrase “under God.”

And so as long as it is in the Supreme Court, I thought it might be fair to explore what it means for us as Christians in the beginning of the twenty-first century to reflect on the meaning of the phrase “under God.” For that we’ll use our scriptures from this morning—the Old Testament reading from Micah and the Gospel reading from John.

The Gospel is a particularly complex story, a story that is hard to hear. It takes place in John in the run-up to the crucifixion of Jesus, therefore during Holy Week. Jesus comes away from Jerusalem and goes to Bethany, where his friends are. They have dinner together, and then this interesting story unfolds. There are different ways to approach the story.

The anointing of Jesus with perfume has a reference towards what is going to happen at the end of the week—to the crucifixion, the death, and burial of Jesus—and Jesus himself makes that quite explicit in the text. Gail O’Day at Emory University comments on this passage and suggests that there is another thing to recognize in the story. Mary anointing Jesus’ feet is prefiguring what Jesus will do to his disciples later on in the week—washing their feet. And then there is this complex discussion of what it is to be faithful, which takes place when Judas engages Mary in questioning the action that she has taken and which Jesus takes up and responds to. What we find then as we look at the text is the Gospel writer setting up oppositions. There’s an opposition between Martha and Mary well known in the Christian tradition. Someone put it this way: “Martha served and Mary sat.” They exemplify different ways of engaging with Jesus.

There’s an opposition between Mary and Judas, because Judas challenges Mary in what she has done, saying that the perfume would be better used if it had been sold and the money given to the poor. And this then evokes an opposition between Judas and Jesus, which itself prefigures what would happen at the Last Supper in the betrayal of Jesus by Judas. What to do with these oppositions in the text? I want to refer to the Old Testament passage that read earlier. A very familiar passage I’m sure to many of you from Micah, chapter 6. Someone once said it’s like the summation of the prophetic message in the Old Testament. What does the Lord require of us? It’s not so much our worship, it’s not the rivers of oil or the sacrifices, but God requires that we do justice and that we love kindness and walk humbly with our God. In some of the older versions, the text reads “do justice and love mercy,’ but I like the phrase kindness—it’s an interesting word to use in that context.

I want to suggest this morning that when Jesus sees these oppositions that are arising, that instead of siding with one or the other, Jesus synthesizes the oppositions. The way that Judas is treated in the Gospel is complex for us, because in John’s Gospel particularly, the motive that’s put behind Judas’s betrayal of Jesus is that of money, and the Gospel writer keeps imprinting that on us in the Gospel. That’s why there’s that commentary about Judas being a thief. But if you read the words of Judas, some of us might agree that it might not have been a bad thing to sell the perfume and give the money to help people in need. In some sense, was Judas not just living into one way of understanding the call that Jesus had given him as a disciple? Might we argue that, in some sense, Judas was taking the side of justice?

And then Mary’s act—this very intimate act of devotion, very physical, using her hands and her hair to anoint Jesus’ feet with oil—we can see this as an act of kindness, in that whatever it was, whatever it was prefiguring and pointing forward to, nevertheless it was an act of kindness and love by one who loved her master. Now when Jesus responds to Judas, we might hear harshness in his words: “You always have the poor with you.” But Jesus is not making an opinion here; he’s quoting scripture. “You always have the poor with you” is from the book of Deuteronomy in the Torah, in the Law of God. And it’s from a context that says you always have the poor with you, so therefore you must continue to take care of the poor. And so Jesus, instead of siding with the act of justice or of kindness, brings them both together.

It is important for us to see in all this the figure of Mary, the woman who does the anointing. Elizabeth Schuessler Fiorenza is a very fine biblical scholar, and she talks about Mary here as being the “model of the faithful disciple.” And Schuessler Fiorenza reminds us to note that Mary is a woman and she is lifted up as the exemplar of the disciple because Jesus will then go on to wash the feet of the disciples and tell them to do that to others, yet Mary has already done it to her master. And so we’re in this context where we have justice and kindness coming together.

One of our focuses in worship this morning is the situation in the Middle East as we welcome Marthame and Elizabeth Sanders to our service, missionaries in the Holy Land. (We’re delighted they’re here, and I hope many of you can go down and hear something of their story after this service.) I was struck this week with images of the Palestinian Hamas leader being assassinated and then the haunting picture of a fourteen-year-old boy with a bomb strapped around him coming towards the checkpoint and being stopped and stripped and then the bomb being exploded and him being taken into custody. It put such a pathetic face onto the horror of suicide bombs. As I experience that situation, I hear the cries of the people of Israel for justice and for peace and for freedom from random acts of terror. And I hear the cries of the Palestinian people for land and for freedom and for fairness. But I don’t see much kindness anywhere. It’s not just in that macro sense. It’s about how we live our daily lives as people of faith in a community of faith.

I was heartened to see a lovely example of this yesterday. I came into church to prepare for today and walked downstairs as they were just finishing the monthly Community Breakfast. Our staff from the Elam Davies Social Service Center hold this monthly breakfast where they invite some of the guests of the Center who are making progress in their lives—finding places to stay or holding down jobs—they invite them to this breakfast to check in and see how further they can help them as they move along. That’s doing justice.

Then I walked upstairs to my office and there were four or five of our Deacons doing their monthly phone-around of the members of the congregation who are to be prayed for in the coming month. We pray for every member of the congregation over a period of eighteen months. When someone’s turn is coming up, the Deacons pick up the phone and they call—“Do you have anything to share?” “Any joys or concerns?” For some people, it may be the only call they got yesterday. Acts of kindness.

Doing justice and kindness—where justice and kindness come together, I believe, is where we find love. There’s a great old story that Anthony Di Mello tells about a bishop who’s examining candidates for baptism. He says to them, “By what sign will others know that you’re Christians?” And everyone’s a bit stumped—they didn’t expect that question—so no one answers. And he asks again, and this time he points to the cross that he’s wearing on his chest to give them a clue to what the answer is. Then one voice pipes up and says, “I think the sign is love.” The bishop was about to say “Wrong!” but he caught himself in the nick of time. You’ll know we are Christians by our love. Remember the old hymn? It’s not in our hymnal anymore, but it’s from the beautiful poem called “Worship” by John Greenleaf Whittier. The language is a little old and it’s gender specific but listen to the sentiment here.

O Brother Man, fold to thy heart thy brother.
Where pity dwells, the peace of God is there.
To worship rightly is to love each other,
Each smile a hymn, each kindly deed a prayer.

And so, friends, in the end, whether the phrase “under God” stays in the Pledge of Allegiance or not I think is less important for our lives, for our community. I think it’s less important in God’s heart than that we live under a God who calls us to be just and to be kind.

Though I may speak with bravest fire,
And have the gift to all inspire
And have not love my words are vain
as sounding brass and hopeless gain.

Amen.