"His Truth Is Marching On"

Preached by John DeBevoise
At Palma Ceia Presbyterian Church
 On July 4, 1999

We who are strong ought to put up with the failings of the weak, and not to please ourselves.  Each of us must please our neighbor for the good purpose of building up the neighbor.  For Christ did not please himself;  but, as it is  written, “The insults of those who insult you have fallen on me."  For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, so that by steadfastness and by the encouragement of the scriptures we might have hope.  May the God of steadfastness and encouragement grant you to live in harmony with one another, in accordance with Christ Jesus, so that together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Welcome one another, therefore, just as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God.  For I tell you that Christ has become a servant of the circumcised on behalf of the truth of God in order that he might confirm the promises given to the patriarchs, and in order that the Gentiles might glorify God for his mercy.

        Romans 15: 1-9a

It’s just about once every seven years that the Fourth of July falls on a Sunday.  And it presents a question for the persons designing worship as to what we should do with it.  In my own pilgrimage, I think I have pilgrimaged.  When I came straight out of seminary and was perhaps either more zealous or overtaken by my own Calvinistic sense that I felt that the Lord’s day, the Sabbath, ought to follow the calendar of the Lord’s day, that it need not intersect with the secular calendar at all.  You may remember that John Calvin was disturbed by the large number of Christians who would show up on Easter Sunday, believing that they ought to realize that the resurrection could be celebrated on every Sunday of the year equally well.  And so, he would usually preach a Nativity text, much to their consternation, on Easter Sunday.

Perhaps something of that can be done on this Sunday, as well.  I could have taken the lectionary text, which did not lift up any particular themes about the nation, or in some way sung hymns that spoke to that text rather than the holiday.  But my own pilgrimage has been to encourage the worshipping life of the church to celebrate those places where our worshipping life intersects with the secular calendar.  And certainly, today is such a day.  As I have worked in the ministry, it seems to me there is so much of what the church gives us in terms of resources that we can legitimately use to lift up and to celebrate our Christian affections and sentiments on this day.  So you’ll note that the hymns that we sing are indeed just that—hymns.  And the prayers that we use are indeed just that—prayers.  Prayers that legitimately and authentically come out of the life of the Christian community associated with the United States of America, and in particular with the Presbyterian community here in the United States of America.

It is an important caution for the Christian community here in the United States, as well as for the worshipping congregation, to avoid the temptation which seems to fall on us periodically as citizens, to believe that in some way we have a right to claim our Christian faith as the only faith present in this nation, or in some way to look at the world and believe that the Christian faith is most legitimately and most appropriately expressed in this nation above all others.  But of course, any careful study of history or much world travel will demonstrate to us how wrong that is.  I haven’t traveled a lot in the world, but I have been to Haiti, and I know that there are Christians in Haiti.  Good, authentic Christians who love the Lord Jesus Christ, and who sing their hymns.  And yet they love their country also.  And I know that it is true in Korea and many countries in Africa and many other places around the world.

So it is not right for us to believe that we are the only Christian nation, or the Christian nation more Christian than any other nation.  At the same time, it’s inappropriate with respect to the Scriptures, for us to believe that somehow we are the best Christian nation.  Our own national history has in its story places where we have strayed from the truth of the gospel and lived out something other than those seeking the kingdom of God.  That’s one of the reasons why I love so much the prayers that we use this morning, because they help to lift up not only a sense of gratitude for God’s presence in the life of the United States, but also a call to confession and forgiveness for those places where we have done something other than what God has called us to do, or where we have been something other than whom it is that God has called us to be.  And that is also a part of our Christian faith as we live it out in a particular nation.

Yet, it’s just a fact that again and again and again, Christians in the United States, and Presbyterians as a part of that, have found their faith closely interwoven with their experience as citizens.  So very often, what we have done as Christians in the United States, we have understood to be an expression of our faith or in response to our faith. 

So I picked this text from Romans because I thought it not only gave me a chance to share with you another text from the epistle that I’ve been preaching on during the summer, but because I thought it spoke to our life as citizens in this great nation as well.  Hear these words again.  It seems to me that these words could be inscribed on the other side of the Statue of Liberty, on the other side from that great poem which is such an expression of the Christian faith.

 Paul speaks here to the Christian community in Rome, trying to tell them how it is that they ought to go about living life there in that principality.  These are words that affect us here, also.  “We who are strong ought to put up with the failings of the weak, and not to please ourselves."  And I judge that there is, for the Christian community in the United States, a moral mandate out of the scriptures to bear with those who are weaker than we are.  It’s a part of our American citizenship, as has been influenced by the Christian faith.  Each of us must please our neighbor for the good purpose of building up a neighbor.  So we are called as Christian citizens not only to seek our own end and to be productive for our own means, but also to build up our community and to care particularly for our neighbor.  It does not say the particularly Christian neighbor.  It may be a neighbor of another faith or of no faith.  You remember it was the Samaritan who stopped and helped the Jewish person along the side of the road.  And then Paul lifts up Jesus Christ as the example for this, as he does again and again and again.  Then he encourages us, in verse four, to remember that the scriptures were given to us for our steadfastness and our encouragement and our help as we live life together.  This wonderful verse, verse five, seems to me to be a kind of mandate for Christians in America:  “May the God of steadfastness and encouragement grant you to live in harmony with one another," to seek each other’s good, to seek each other’s well being, “in accordance with Christ Jesus, so that we might with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ." 

Then these words in verse seven that remind me so of the poem called “The New Colossus," written on the Statue of Liberty:  “Welcome therefore, one another, therefore, just as Christ has welcomed you."  This ethical imperative towards hospitality, not only to the strong but also to the weak, comes to us directly out of scriptures.  I think it is a part of our national heritage in no small part, because Christian Americans have helped to weave it into the fabric of our understanding of how it is we ought to live. 

“I  tell you here that Christ has become the servant," not just of those who have been called into the faith, but “of the uncircumcised," Paul says here, of those who are outside of the traditional parameters.  Jesus Christ was the first example, the apostle Paul says, of one who went beyond the standard community to those who were disenfranchised or vulnerable, or even outside our own religions traditions, in order to welcome them and to help them to feel at home in the name of our loving God.

My brother e-mailed me this week a little research he had found about how Presbyterians had sought to live out their Christian faith across the centuries of this nation’s heritage.  He e-mailed me a little research about the early Americans, the Colonials, right at the time of 1776.  The Presbyterians were looking to their clergy for some sort of statement about what they ought to do with respect to the growing revolution.  At first, the clergy took a position of silence on the issue, which was known as “The Great Restraint."  They even issued a statement called “The Great Restraint."  But as the crisis came to a head, they did speak, (and indeed the one clergyman who is a signer of the Declaration of Independence is a Presbyterian).  But they issued to their congregations a joint statement on how Presbyterians could, in good Christian faith, approach the growing conflict and rift with England.  One of the things they asked was for all of the Presbyterian women, the single Presbyterian women there in the country, to take a pledge that they would only marry patriots, and that they would not marry any Americans who were Tories.   So there is early precedent, and creative precedent at that, (although I expect that was a powerful incentive to  American men), where they were called to live out their faith and their convictions in ways that supported one another.

I want to lift up to you, particularly, this morning as we focus so on great hymns of the Christian faith that celebrate also our national heritage, the words that were so beautifully expressed in the trumpet and organ piece that Robert and David played for us earlier, and of course that is the piece that we know as “The Battle Hymn of the Republic."  This wonderful hymn seems to me to be interwoven with the great themes of the Christian faith.  It was written by Juliet Ward Howe, who was born in 1819 and died in 1910.  She and her husband were, together, very active abolitionists, which means of course that they were actively opposed to the institution of slavery here in the United States.  She grew up in New York City and was a part of the society life in New York City, although she and her husband settled in Boston.  Together, they became active in those abolitionist circles and published a paper called The Commonwealth.  She was an educated woman, which was of course unusual for women in those days.  As she and her husband became increasingly active in the humanitarian work and were contributing to the commonwealth their anti-slavery paper, they were invited  in 1861, by the President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, to come to hear him make a speech which he was making at a Union army camp.  And there, as they were listening to him make that speech, and in the recreation afterwards, they heard the soldiers in that particular regiment sing a hymn, a tune, which was called “John Brown’s Body".  Most of you have probably heard or sung this tune, also.  This was a tune based on the abolitionist John Brown, who attempted an insurrection against slavery and was hanged as a result of it.  He was immortalized in words about his life in a certain tune.  Lincoln and Juliet Ward Howe were so moved by hearing the soldiers sing this tune that Lincoln is reported to have turned to her and said, “Someone ought to write more faithful words to that very meaningful tune."  She took it, because she was a person of literature, as a direct request.  She went back to her tent that night and claims to have written out the words to the hymn that very evening, by candlelight there in her own tent. 

Juliet Ward Howe went on to be continually effective and helpful in the United States, and as a part of the Christian faith.  She was the first woman elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.  She is also generally believed to be the woman given responsibility for starting the institution of Mother’s Day.  Did you know that?  She did it by trying to create an international organization of mothers against war, mothers for peace.  She called for them to be in prayer together on this Sunday in May, and out of it grew the practice of bringing respect to one’s mother on that particular day. 

She has been influential in a variety of ways across our national heritage, and always as an expression of her faith.  What I found very meaningful was to look at how her lyrics gave expression to her faith.  I ask you to take a moment to look at the insert in your bulletin and to see the explicitly Christian lyrics that are laid out there.  This very meaningful hymn has been sung at the funerals of more American presidents, by their direct request, than any other hymn in the Christian tradition.  It was sung also, in our lifetimes, at the funerals of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon.  This hymn was sung, interestingly enough, at Winston Churchill’s funeral, at his direct request. 

It has, very much, a millennial aspect to it.  She starts by quoting scripture, particularly Revelation and the lines that Kathy read from Jeremiah, where she talks about her own eyes having seen the coming of God’s glory.  And she refers to these lines from Jeremiah where the prophet says that the Lord is trampling out, in his own wine press, his own vintage grapes.  But they are going to be grapes of wrath.  She picks up this theme of God’s judgment being played out across the nation, which she understood the Civil War to be:  an act of God’s judgment for some of our past transgressions.  But the note of hope is there in her faith that God’s providence would triumph, that God’s truth would continue.  And this, of course, has been of great sustenance to Christians in the United States across the decades.  Our hope, that even in the darkest of times, God’s providence would work itself out. 

Juliet Ward Howe went on to talk about how she believed she had seen, even in the campfires of the camp that night, in some way the presence of God.  And it seems to me that this is the move that Christians in the United States have made again and again, to look at our own individual experiences in national and political events, and to repeat where we have seen the presence of God at work in those things.  She saw, in those campfires, soldiers and citizens building an alter to God.  She saw them seeking to read the Bible by the lamps there in camp.  She saw that as a sign that His providence was moving forward, even though they were not sure what the outcome of that war would be. 

She goes on, with each of the verses, lifting up her Christian faith.  She sees in the conflict something of the gospel’s account, and she sees in this wonderful line, “As ye deal with “My contemners," (that’s not a misprint there, but it’s the best source I could find from three different translations, of a verse we seldom sing).  I judge it to mean those who held Christ in contempt.  "As ye deal with My contemners, so with you My grace shall deal."  She makes this wonderful affirmation that God deals with us in His justice with His grace, that it is His mercy that shall triumph.  “His truth is marching on!" 

Then, on through each of the lines, I move to the last two, where she becomes explicitly Christological, speaking of the movement where even as Christ, in His life, lived in such a way that we were redeemed by His life.  So also, Christians are called to live in such a way that God’s kingdom is carried out.  For us, that means to make men and women free, we should live in such a way that people can be free.  This is the call for the Christian life, that people might be free.

Finally is a verse that Martin Marty, the great sociologist of religion at the University of Chicago said this year at a speech at the White House, that is perhaps the best guide for Americans as to how we ought to approach the millennium.  We see in the movement of history God’s presence at work, God’s providence at work.  God is coming.  We are not able to say specifically when, and indeed Jesus taught us that we ought not to look for the specific day, but we ought to be encouraged with the knowledge that God is coming, that the future belongs to God, that His glory will be triumphed.  And that He will give wisdom to the mighty and honor to the brave, and the soul of wrong will become His slave, and His truth will march on.

My intention this morning was to give you the chance to sing the verses of this wonderful hymn, and I invite you stand and sing it with me now.