From the blog Notes from the Lateral Octave:
Back when I was seeking a job as a (gasp!) UCC minister, I preached in a number “neutral pulpits” to congregations that included representatives from churches considering hiring me. One of these was at a UCC church in deepest New England, in the sort of wooden, white clapboard church that has become emblematic of American Protestantism. Nervous about my “audition” I showed up early Sunday morning and bore witness to a local tradition; the pre-service hymn sing. Most of the congregation had gathered in the sanctuary a half hour before the start of worship. Accompanied by a piano they called out the titles of and then sung six or eight hymns to get their voices warmed up for worship. Amongst such hits as “Jesus Loves Me,” “All Come, All Ye Faithful,” and “All Glory, Laud and Honor,” we sang “O Beautiful for Spacious Skies,” and “My Country ‘Tis of Thee,” two early candidates to serve as the U.S. national anthem. These are numbers 400 and 437 respectively in the Pilgrim Hymnal (until 1995 the official hymnal of the UCC). They are easily located among the fifteen sections in the “Nation” section of the hymnal, placed just before the Battle Hymn of the Republic. Before we sang anything, mind you, the entire congregation pledged allegiance to the US flag and sang the US national anthem.Well, that’s just the way life is in the traitorous, unAmerican and deeply anti-patriotic United Church of Christ. Rev. Wright has, sadly, let the cat out of the bag– we UCCers just hate America. I should know; I serve at the church where the traitorous Daniel Webster worshiped. Instead of being deeply ashamed to be associated with an America-hater of Webster’s caliber and profile, we have a portrait of him hanging in our foyer, just above the preserved pew he sat in. In front of the church the town has installed a memorial bust of Webster, the last significant piece of work sculpted by Daniel Chester French, the rabid despiser of his country who also sculpted the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC. We haven’t yet torn this tribute down, and, shockingly, we have no plans to.
And that’s just my church. It gets far, far worse. Did you know that the protest that erupted in to the Boston tea party occurred at a church whose denomination would later join the UCC, spurred on in part by a Congregational pastor? Another church from another tradition that would later unite to form the UCC actually had the gaul to hid the liberty bell under its floorboards for a period of time, simply to keep it safe from the righteous and patriotic British soldiers who only wanted to melt it down into metal for British arms which would be used to crush the the blossoming American Revolution. That revolution, by the way, was joined by a large number of liberal protestant pastors whose churches later joined the UCC. Far from being embarrassed by such brazen displays of anti-Americanism, the UCC celebrates most of these facts as “achievements” on its website. We’re not even embarrassed to admit that our church organization is so deeply democratic, offering nearly everyone an equal voice, that it may actually have influenced the shape of the American democratic experiment.
Click here for the full post (though I've borrowed all but the last paragraph...apologies to the author).
5 comments:
Awesome post!!! I just forwarded it to some friends. ;)
Because Americans have a tendency to not know their own history -- or what goes on in many churches every Sunday -- they are shocked by pastoral judgment of ethical attitudes, behavior, historical events and government policy. The United Church of Christ, the descendant denomination of the one of the earliest churches of America, the Congregationalists, has been critical of the status quo since the very beginning of our country . Congregational churches fostered the attitudes about the Divine rights of individuals versus the conventional “Divine right of monarchs,” which attitudes ultimately led to the American Revolution. One Sunday, there was a pastor who gave a stirring sermon denouncing British policy in America; he culminated by tearing off his robe to reveal a continental army officer uniform and called for drummers to beat to the signing up of recruits to fight the British. Abolition and emancipation issued from Congregational pulpits and pews. Congregational ministers and lay persons marched with MLK in Selma. United Church of Christ pastors often preach sermons critical of US history and policy including, but not limited to, slavery, genocide, internment, nuclear holocaust, failure to address the holocaust in Europe or rescue Jews during WWII. The church’s job is not only to address issues of personal salvation and individual spiritual growth but also to hold all institutions of society to God’s standards. This often leads to the conclusion that certain events are the result of God’s negative judgment on institutions or the society supporting them. Abraham Lincoln was well within this “preaching” tradition when he asked if the Civil War might not end until “every drop of blood shed by the taskmaster’s lash was atoned for by blood shed by the sword.” This same tradition was evident in the statements by some Christian Fundamentalists that the events of 9/11 had arrived as God’s judgment on a secular society. Rev. Wright’s statement about “chickens coming home to roost” was also in this tradition. Is this ever appropriate? As questions, of course! However, no one can make a categorical statement about what God’s hand might be in any event or what God’s motivation might be in any circumstance. Despite some claims to the contrary, no one really knows the mind of God. However, the tradition of the judgment and condemnations of Old Testament prophets, as well as those of Jesus, cannot help but cause us to question what might be the will of God in significant situations. So... was Abraham Lincoln right about his surmise? Or the Fundamentalists? Or Rev. Wright? That is up to you to discern. Congregationalists/ United Church of Christ have always insisted that it is YOUR responsibility before God to make choices about YOUR responses about what YOU hear. If you were a loyalist during that 18th Century church service/recruiting session, you would have vehemently disagreed with what your pastor did. But would you have been abandoned your church, spiritual family to you? Highly unlikely. As a nation we celebrate MLK, yet are we aware of his highly critical remarks concerning racial attitudes or the attitudes toward the poor or government policy during the Vietnam War? The tradition goes back to Alexis de Tocqueville and his affirmation that “America is great because America is good”...and America is good because “righteousness blazes forth from its pulpits.” Too many Americans -- scribbling and chattering on blogs and TV -- have any patience for those calling into question America’s automatic assumption of goodness. Too many claim an automatic “God Bless America,” forgetting that the song by that name, as well as the national hymn, “America the Beautiful” are both prayers. They entreat the Deity to crown the “good” of nature’s blessing with our obedience of brotherhood. The hymn entreats God to “Amend America’s every flaw and to confirm its soul in self-control.” As Karl Menniger asked, “Whatever Became of Sin?” I ask, whatever became of openness to a call to national repentance?
"One Sunday, there was a pastor who gave a stirring sermon denouncing British policy in America; he culminated by tearing off his robe to reveal a continental army officer uniform and called for drummers to beat to the signing up of recruits to fight the British."
Uh...to add to the knowledge of Americans regarding there history...that was a Lutheran pastor. Peter Muhlenberg. January 1776 ;-)
uh...and for Americans who can't spell...LOL!
Senator Barack Obama’s remarkable address will fail to the extent that many people focus on his refusal to distance himself personally from his pastor, the Reverend Mr. Jeremiah Wright, though he rejects Mr. Wright’s irrational and bitter statements of opinion. It might be better for Senator Obama if voters were instead to attend only to his calls for racial healing.
To do so would be a mistake. An important and unwelcome part of Senator Obama’s message is that Mr. Wright’s words in services at Trinity United Church of Christ are not aberrant in the black community – not in the barber shop, not in the beauty shop, not around the dinner table, and not in churches. This is something that many white people, and some black people too, would prefer not to think about, but honesty and maturity demand that we face it. But Senator Obama also pointed out that bitterness and paranoia were not all that he found in his pastor and his community: he found intelligence, kindness, and love. And he reminded us that there are few communities whose members have any call to be self-righteous – or to condemn themselves.
And so Senator Obama said that to disown Mr. Wright was to disown the black community, which has been his community. We can be sure that in his work as a community organizer he made common cause with people who held views that would have made Pastor Wright sound like Dr. King by comparison. But the cause was what mattered: even the greatest irritants had redeeming traits, and the Senator believed that in the long run the better angels would win out. I take it he believes the same with respect to our people as a whole: what divides us must not be denied – it is more than mere disagreement, and it can be ugly – but we remain committed Americans. On this view, communities are like families: the tie that binds is not about unanimous agreement or even approval. It is about achieving something together and about caring, and sometimes it must be about forgiveness. That is a conviction deeply rooted in many religious faiths, certainly including that of the United Church of Christ, Wright’s and Barack’s denomination.
I know this because my father was a minister in the United Church of Christ. I have thought of him often as we have discussed Pastor Wright and his embattled parishioner. From time to time my father used the pulpit to espouse political views that appalled some of his parishioners. He knew they were upset because they told him so, usually privately and face to face. But they loved him, and he them. It never occurred to them that they might leave the church. They would have been dumbfounded to hear that they were guilty by association for not doing so, and would have laughed out loud if anyone had told them that their membership in St. John’s disqualified them from political office. In fact some of his political critics were his strongest allies when the works of the church were to be done.
In Sunday services in our UCC church the minister led the congregation in confessing that we were all of us, including the minister, sinners who could only ask for undeserved forgiveness. And so we were: there was something about each of us that stained us, but it was not the whole truth about us. Part of the truth was that we were a community united by extraordinary love and by the good works we did together. We could not have been such a community had we been unwilling to offer one another the forgiveness that each of us sought from a source beyond us. A litmus test disqualifying sinners would have emptied our pews and destroyed our community. And so we lived with our shortcomings and our sometimes bitter differences, which we hoped might recede over time as our doing good works together led us to a greater understanding of one another and of ourselves.
That is what Senator Obama and his friends at Trinity do. Now he calls for our nation as a whole to embrace it. This we call a leap of faith, perhaps a hope too far, though it is not a naïve man’s fantasy either. He may not survive this situation, but I hope that his aspiration does, and that he will have contributed to our understanding and healing. He has seen the Promised Land.
Edwin M. Hartman
Somerset, New Jersey
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