in this year of our Lord 2017, we see across the land a shredding of inherited forms of civil society on a weekly basis, a shredding of healthy culture, a shredding of respect for language, rhetoric, and speech—tweet by tweet by blessed tweet.
But God has not left us nor does God abandon God’s children. God works through human hearts to bind up the nation’s wounds. It is the preaching of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and this alone, which will bring peace. The church has nothing better to do, nothing other to do, nothing more important to do, and nothing else to do than to preach. Preaching is everything, the whole nine yards. Let others be anxious and fretful over much service: you are a Christian—sit at Christ’s feet and lisp his Gospel to others. For when the Gospel is rightly preached and rightly heard, heaven invades earth.
We await a common hope. We await a faith amenable to culture and a culture amenable to faith. We await a fierce combination of a deep personal faith and an active social involvement. We await the will power to do all the good we can, at all the times we can. We await Christ not just against culture, not just in culture, not just above culture, and not just in paradox with culture—but Christ transforming culture!
The best preaching happens beyond church. Some is spoken and some is lived. Said Benjamin Franklin, teaching the only two values he thought important—industry and frugality: “None preaches better than the ant, and he says nothing.”4 We are not so much resident aliens as dual citizens.
We have no choice about common identity, national character, love of country. Listen to Winthrop and Lincoln and King. What we have some limited influence over is the nature, the type, the relative health of such. Notice the Beatitudes, how the blessing fall on groups. Blessed are those . . .
I believe there is at least one saving story from which, over time, we may gain strength and insight for our common story, poetry and preaching. What Whitman said about poetry is doubly true for the Gospel itself:
The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem . . . Here, at last, is something in the doings of man that corresponds with the broadcast doings of the day and the night . . . Really great poetry is always the result of a national spirit, and not the privilege of a polished and select few the strongest and sweetest songs yet remain to be sung.5
Here is what a godly love of country can do.
This year, without much fanfare, we passed the seventieth anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s entrance into major league baseball. The armed forces were still legally segregated. So were public schools. That was America in 1947, when a tee-totaling, Bible-quoting Republican from Ohio integrated major league baseball. Who remembers today the lone ranger type—so decried in church circles today—who spent most of a lifetime working for one transformation. Rickey was taught the Gospel in the Methodist church of that time where there was to be no separation, like that we have today, between a deep personal faith (conservative) and an active social involvement (liberal). Rickey was one of those people who just never heard that “it can’t be done.” For thirty years, slowly and painstakingly, he maneuvered and strategized and planned and brought about the greatest change in the history of our national pastime. It can be done. Go to Cooperstown this summer and see the story unfold. There is sermon on the mound, preached in life, brought to voice through one lone Methodist, in one lone lifetime, in one lone sport, in one lone generation. It can be done. But you need a preacher, like Rickey: “I prefer the errors of enthusiasm to the reticence of wisdom.”6
• Where is the Branch Rickey of Wall Street?
• Where is the Branch Rickey of the local church?
• Where is the Branch Rickey of the public school?
• Where is the Branch Rickey of your neighborhood?
• Where is that secular saint who doesn’t realize it can’t be done?
• Where is the preacher of the next sermon on the mound?
• Maybe she is here today. Maybe you are she.
I heard William McClain, an African-American preacher, tell about growing up in Tuskegee, Alabama. He grew up listening to the team Branch Rickey fielded in Brooklyn. “When Jackie stood at the plate, we stood with him. When he struck out, we did too. When he hit the ball, we jumped and cheered. When he slid home, we dusted off our own pants. When he stole a base, he stole for us. When he hit a home run, we were the victors. And when he was spiked, we felt it, a long way away, down south. He gave us hope. He gave us hope.”7
Don’t let people tell you things can’t change for the better. They can. This country can work. We just need a few more Branch Rickeys and a few sermons on the mound.
For freedom, Christ has set us free. Stand fast, therefore, and do not be enslaved again.
1. Winthrop, “Model of Christian Charity,” 246.
2. Lincoln, “Second Inaugural Address,” 477.
3. King Jr., “Speech at Civil Rights March,” 823.
4. Franklin, “Poor Richard’s Almanac, 1735,” 319.
5. Whitman, “Leaves of Grass,” 519.
6. Rickey, “Branch Rickey Quotes.”
7. From the author’s memory, during a sermon at UMCNCNY Annual Conference in 1995.
Marks of the New Age
Luke 24:1–12
1 Corinthians 15:19–26
Monday, August 7th, 2017
Opening: Canadian Creed
Our Gospel provides a particular kind of memory, a powerful kind of prayer, and a persistent kind of love as hallmarks of hope. Do they mark your life? Do memory (remember how he told you . . . and they remembered his words), prayer (they bowed their faces to the ground), and love (they went to the tomb, taking the spices which they had prepared) clothe life for you?
On Easter morning, women with courage walked tomb-ward to work through their worst experience. They set forth to do the work of facing grief with grace, failure with faith, hurt with hope, and death with dignity. And thee? Is that work begun, continued, or completed? Easter brings you life, uplifts, a lift for living, even into the teeth of death, so you may face, face down, and live down death.
Death makes us mortal. Facing death makes us human.
God is at work in the world to make and keep human life human.
The Gospel means to uplift you, to fill you with a common hope—listen, hear, trust—from death to life. Seek “the Living One,” he who is more alive than all life, whose life is the marrow of being alive. Why do you seek
