Roger Ray, pastor
July 17, 2011 Proper 11
Genesis 28:10-19a 10This past week I have been on vacation, a driving trip that I have called the Roger Ray Heritage tour. I had some long over due visits to make with family and friends so my friend, Jeanmarie, and I set out driving from Springfield to Memphis where I used to live, then down to Birmingham, AL to visit my brother and an old seminary friend. Afterwards we drove up through Nashville, TN where I went to grad school and then spent a couple of days in a National Park near my hometown, allowing me to see the home and church where I grew up and the veterans memorial recently placed on the site of my original church home in honor of my father.
Jacob left Beer-sheba and went toward Haran. 11 He came to a certain place and stayed there for the night, because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones of the place, he put it under his head and lay down in that place. 12 And he dreamed that there was a ladder set up on the earth, the top of it reaching to heaven; and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. 13 And the LORD stood beside him and said, "I am the LORD, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac; the land on which you lie I will give to you and to your offspring; 14 and your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south; and all the families of the earth shall be blessed in you and in your offspring. 15 Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you." 16 Then Jacob woke from his sleep and said, "Surely the LORD is in this place--and I did not know it!" 17 And he was afraid, and said, "How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven." 18 So Jacob rose early in the morning, and he took the stone that he had put under his head and set it up for a pillar and poured oil on the top of it. 19a He called that place Bethel; but the name of the city was Luz at the first.
We ended the week visiting two of my best family friends in Louisville, KY. From time to time, Jeanmarie would say, "You really miss it here don't you?" And, as much as I love being the pastor here, I have to admit that there is something about the hills, rivers and forests of Kentucky that have an almost magical pull on me. And I recognize that it really is a land thing. As much as the rather anti-intellectual and conservative religious climate of Springfield is irritating, I know it is even worse in Kentucky.
Kentucky is now the state where Mitch McConnell is the sane senator! Only Rand Paul can make that guy look like he has an oar in the water. I'm embarrassed for my home state but, I have to tell you, I love it there, I can't help it, and God knows, I've tried!
It is almost inescapable that all of us have a certain sense that our homeland is, in once sense or another, a holy land. Anyone who has been in Ireland on St. Patrick's Day can attest to the fact that immigrants in America carry on about St. Patrick's Day ten times more than anyone in Ireland does. I have romantic feelings about my home. I ate country ham every day that I was on vacation. I ate pinto beans, grits, a hot brown and fried corn bread..... my ethnic foods. If you get to go over to Andrea Zamora's house on a holiday, she will serve you a piece of a tres leches cake which is just as uninviting to me as country ham and grits is to anyone who cares about their heart health. If you eat breakfast over at the Hartenstein's you'll be offered a half of a broiled tomato in Scottish style with your bacon and eggs...... we relish these reminders of our home.
It is helpful to remember that most of the Hebrew Bible was not written in Israel or Judah. Homesick Jews who were slaves in Babylon wrote most of it. They were not in their Holy Land, they were remembering their Holy Land. The story we just read from Genesis about Jacob's dream of ladders going up to heaven is not simply metaphorical in the minds of ancient Jews. They believed that God's throne was straight up over Mt. Moriah. The Arc of the Covenant was made like a giant throne and it sat in the Temple in the Holy of Holies, directly under where God's true throne was in heaven.
Jacob's vision was recorded in Genesis as a declaration that while other nations might be bigger, or stronger or more wealthy, that their land was God's land. That conviction, though it seems silly to claim today, is still at the root of what we call Zionism. It isn't rational, but when is extremist nationalism ever rational?
I love my homeland. I know that June still loves Scottland and Andrea loves Mexico and for reasons which defy logic, Jim Payne still loves Alabama. It is natural to love your homeland. It is noble to be patriotic about one's country. To sacrifice for, work for and maybe even die to protect the welfare of your country. But there is a continuum which may begin with warm feelings about country ham and biscuits that runs through patriotism and can keep going until it is nationalism or even a religious fervor to adamantly demand that your nation is not just God's country in your music and art but in your international politics. Most of the soldiers in the Nazi army just thought of themselves as being patriotic.
Sociologically, that was the early attraction to the Mormon religion in America. Joseph Smith claimed that the lost tribes of Judah had come to the Americas and that Jesus, when he had ascended from Jerusalem, came back down in the Americas. The magic golden plates Smith claimed to have found buried in the hills of the finger lake region of New York State were evidence that America was the new Holy Land.
God and country are inextricably wound together in Mormon theology and that is why every Mormon church has a boy scout troop as their virtual Sunday School program. Of course, every religion, if you look at from a skeptic's perspective can look pretty silly. Catholics and Jews, Baptists and Jehovah's Witnesses believe some pretty incredible things but they all have the benefit of having their holy texts and heroes protected by the veil of hundreds of years of history.
Jesus might have been really bad at math and he might have gotten drunk at his senior prom but we would have no way of knowing anything about such details. Joseph Smith, however, is close enough to us in history that a lot of his personal embarrassments are well known to us. Most of which will likely find their way into the media in the coming year if Mitt Romney remains in the race for the Republican presidential nomination.
It may not be fair, but it will be hard for anyone seeking public office not to lose a lot of credibility when associated with Joseph Smith's personal story but every nation has examples of similarly nationalistic characters who lost touch with reality.
Jewish scriptures are not very good at being self critical about their nationalistic views. But then neither was Spain or France or Great Brittan when they built their empires, nor Russia when it built the Soviet Union, as Germany certainly wasn't in the first half of the last century.
Americans are able to be self critical about how we treated the native American Indians..... at least those of us who live at some distance from remaining tribes are able to do so. We cringe at the religious glee of 17th century accounts such as the description by William Bradford, an early settler, of Captain John Mason's attack on a Pequot village.
Those that escaped the fire were slain with the sword, some hewed to pieces, others run through with their rapiers, so as they were quickly dispatched and very few escaped. It was conceived that they thus destroyed about 400 at this time. It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stink and scent thereof; but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave the praise thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them, thus to enclose their enemies in their hands and give them so speedy a victory over so proud and insulting an enemy.But the closer we get to our own time, the harder it is for us to even allow ourselves to think of the possibility that we have confused nationalism with the more appropriate patriotic love of country.
American exceptionalism began to be entered into our national documents by the likes of Secretary of War Elihu Root, who in 1899 declared, "The American soldier is different from all other soldiers of all other countries since the world began. He is the advance guard of liberty and justice, of law and order, and of peace and happiness."
As Howard Zinn pointed out in an article published just before his death, "At the time (Root) was saying this, American soldiers in the Philippines were starting a bloodbath which would take the lives of 600,000 Filipinos." As Molly Ivans has been famously quoted, "It's hard to convince someone that you are killing them for their own good."
At the end of World War II, Henry Luce, then the owner of Time Magazine and several other important publications, declared that this would be "the American Century," that victory in the war gave the United States the right "to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit."
Most people these days try to mask their feelings a good deal better but in the days when Donald Trump was warming up for a run for the office of the President, he said that if he were elected he would take a trillion dollars worth of oil from Iraq to pay for what we "did for them" and that it would invade Libya and just take their oil. It's frightening in one way but in another it at least has the refreshing ring of honesty to just skip that stuff about weapons of mass destruction and nuclear ambitions.
Men and women, this is hard stuff for us and I know that some of you feel very differently but I beg you to let me speak as a pastor on a matter of the heart of our nation. I just drove nearly 2000 miles through Missouri, Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Indiana, Illinois and Kentucky. No where along the route of my long journey did I drive past a French Air force base, or a Saudi army base or even some innocent looking Canadian Mounties. Nor would we tolerate such a presence on our sacred soil.
But America presently has nearly half a million soldiers, sailors and pilots scattered over nearly a hundred nations from Bahrain to Brazil, from Japan to Qatar. Boys and girls, that's an empire.
We say, in our literature, that we are a religious community that is willing to question traditional beliefs. We say that we want to be open minded, to look at all sides and to have the courage to question our most cherished beliefs. But this is a hard one.
We want to believe that our nation's sins are all in the distant past. Our grandfathers and great grandfathers were blind to their ambitious nationalism but we get to wear the white hat and go forth to rescue, to liberate, to share democracy, capitalism, McDonalds and CocaCola...... but from the view of most of the world, it is not largess.... It is empire.
I am not so foolish as to think that we could be like Costa Rica and just dismiss our army and focus on education. We wouldn't survive for a week without some means of defense.
I don't live in a gated community and I regularly leave my doors unlocked. I shouldn't, I know, but I do. In large part because I don't own the things that thieves steal. I don't own guns, or jewelry, I don't have gold or silver or expensive art or electronics. Most of what is in my house is not dissimilar from what you might find in a yard sale.... Used clothing and unused exercise equipment.... So my house is sort of like Costa Rica.... No one is likely to attack me. But the United States as a whole is wealthy and resource rich and we have a lot of enemies.
We are now the modern equivalent of Ancient Egypt, or Babylon... We are the Roman Empire trying to keep a nervous Pax Americana at the tip of a spear. The question for people like us is, what do we do now that we are the king of the hill?
One horribly cold February day I was exploring the old Latin quarter of Paris. I sat alone in the unheated St. Supice cathedral listening to an organist practicing for a Bach concert until I could no longer feel my fingers or toes. I stumbled out into the snow to find a place where I could warm up in that part of Paris where either no one spoke English or no one cared to admit that they spoke English.
I ducked into a café and muttered in very bad French that I wanted a cup of coffee. It was a tiny, dimly lit café full of old French men. The barista curled his lip and pushed a tiny espresso my way and asked for 80 francs, which was about $18 dollars. I stepped back to see if it was a joke or if he was trying to just price gouge me enough for me to drink my coffee and leave with empty pockets.
While I was still trying to assess the situation, a very wrinkled up old man put one hand over mine and with the other he reached into his pocket and pulled out the money to pay the angry looking waiter. The old man patted me on the back and what I caught was, "Merci, Merci Americans."
He was among those rescued by the American liberation of France during WWII and he would not stand by and watch me be charged for a half a dozen cups of coffee when I had ordered only one.
Now, see, that's the kind of American I want to be..... I want to be the kind that old man thought I was.... A noble, selfless, courageous liberator. There is still an America like that but there is also an empire.
My fear is that mainstream religion can no longer tell the difference. My fear is that almost every church in this country is in service of the empire. And that is the church I hope we never become.
