Handling the Grapes of Wrath

Handling the Grapes of Wrath The Dover Church
March 4, 2012 Amos 5, Matthew 10
On March 4, 1862, 150 years ago today, our nation was embroiled in a bitter civil war: 9.1 million people in 11 southern states, of whom 3.5 million were enslaved, against more than 20 million people in 25 northern and western states, of whom half a million were enslaved, mostly in the border states. 2.9 million Union and 1.2 million Confederate soldiers served, of whom 360,000 union soldiers died and 280,000 were wounded. 258,000 Confederate soldiers died and 194,000 were wounded. 2 % of the US population died: 1 out of every 10 Union soldiers and 1 out of every 5 Confederate soldiers. Already by this day 150 years ago, 3,000 Union soldiers and 2,000 Confederate soldiers had been killed or wounded in Northern Virginia at the First Battle of Bull Run. In early April another 17,400 would be killed or wounded in battles in Tennessee. The first Dover boy to die would be George Markham, a 19 year old private killed at the Second Battle of Bull Run in August of 1862. The worst was yet to come, when as many people as have died in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would die crossing a field in Gettysburg.
The Union was preserved, but at a catastrophic cost. On top of the war dead were the untold civilian casualties, the wide spread devastation throughout the South, several generations of political, economic and cultural domination of the South by the North, a legacy of resentment and sectarian hatred which still resonates strongly today for those who harbor it, not to mention the ensuing century of segregation, discrimination, second class citizenship, lynching and Klan violence the freed African Americans experienced.
Why, in four minutes or less, did the Civil War happen? When the 13 colonies became the independent United States, the founders made a number of compromises to pull the diverse and disparate states together into one nation. The biggest of these compromises was the overlooking of slavery, which existed everywhere but which was more prevalent in the south where conditions were most favorable. Set against this compromise was the Declaration of Independence and the slave owning Virginian Thomas Jefferson’s words "we hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal." That’s a pretty glaring tension built into our nation, wouldn’t you say?
As the young nation grew, the north and the south evolved in different directions. The Northern states greatest source of prosperity was rapid industrialization. The South, particularly the Deep South, came to be more and more dependent upon cotton, which had become immensely profitable to large landowners due to the invention in 1797 of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney of Westborough, Massachusetts. And just to offer an even hand in this, New Englanders, while not owning a lot slaves, made a lot of money out of the business, between the merchants who shipped slaves, the textile mills on most New England rivers which depended on cheap southern cotton, the merchants who transported those textiles to market, and the markets themselves in the more populous North.
As the nation expanded westward, politicians from the north and south made compromises about the free or slave status of every new territory. In 1797, the Ohio River was designated as the boundary between slave to the south and free to the north as far as the Mississippi River. Many influential northerners became more and more abolitionist, largely due to the preaching and teaching of Pennsylvania Quakers and New England Congregationalists and Unitarians (although I have no idea if abolition was preached here in Dover), which did not go over well down South. The Compromise of 1850 banned any further expansion of slavery into the west and southwest in return for stricter fugitive slave laws. The southerners could see the writing on the wall. They were being rapidly outpaced demographically and economically by the north. The north already dominated the Congress, would soon dominate the Senate, and would probably always win the Presidency. They saw their way of life, specifically their cotton based trickle down prosperity, as doomed. When Lincoln was elected President in 1860, with a Republican Party platform of containing slavery so that it would eventually die a death of attrition, the southerners, feeling that they had no other option, began seceding from the Union. Lincoln’s original war aim was the restoration of the Union. Eventually he came around to the eradication of slavery. The southern war aim was states rights of self determination and governance which obviously included the preservation of slavery, upon which their economic well being depended. And so there was war because the leaders could not think of any other way to resolve their differences.
What strikes me as I read up on the Civil War is how eerily similar in tone and content our civic discourse today is to that of the 1850s. Compromise is seen as sell out. The opposition is branded as traitor or un-American. Presidents Lincoln, Bush and Obama have all been depicted as monkeys in cartoons and labelled tyrant, fascist and European communist. Both the Tea Party and the Occupy Movement are populist reform movements, but as ardent and as far apart in aims as the abolitionists and the secessionists. Politicians and pundits talk in zero sum terms, total victory or nothing. Our modern culture wars with blue states against red states are passionate and prone to both demonization of the other and fringe violence. People on all sides, perhaps especially the vast majority in the middle somewhere who think a little bit of this socially and a little bit of that economically and a little something else geo-politically, are anxious because of the acrimony and the apparent lack of real desire for the common good in the partisan calculating statements in politicians' mouths.
Which brings me, of all places, to church. Ever since I became a preacher, people in the pews have been warning me to “stay away from politics. There’s no room for politics in church.” ...which always strikes me as advising me to be intentionally ineffectual or irrelevant. If you really think about it, everything in life which involves more than your self is political. If I never engage the things that are most on your hearts and minds with the Word of God as found in the Biblical witness, then preaching becomes pretty irrelevant. There are many churches that do delve into the things like the economy, war and peace, poverty and prosperity, the culture wars, the environment, politics, but those churches seem to me at least to usually be full of people who already agree with each other coming through the door. Their members come to be affirmed rather than challenged. And then there are plenty of other churches where everyone does their best to play nice with one another because we're pretty sure we're not going to agree with one another and who wants the unpleasantness of Washington in church?
The problem with this ghetoization in some churches or pretending and avoidance in others is, at least from the perspective of many people my age and younger, that church is either lunatic fringe or beside the point. If church is just a time out from the rest of the week in which we're going to do our best to block out or anesthetize ourselves against what’s most on our minds the other six days, then I can do that at home with a TV and a stiff drink or two. If, in church, we never talk about the real spiritual, political, economic, emotional, sociological and historical challenges which impact us or threaten to impact us, well then I really might just as well stay at home Sunday morning with some strong coffee and the New York Times or a Thomas Friedman book. And finally, the whole thing feels slightly hypocritical for anyone who has even briefly glanced through the prophets of Israel and the Gospel of Jesus Christ, where you can't help but notice how intensely interested and critical the God of the Jews, Christians and Muslims really is in the real political, economic, and sociological realities of our lives.
I see an enormous opportunity for the public ministry of churches like ours. We can play nice all we want, but we are divided on fundamental issues. We can never truly share our lives with one another as long as we are tiptoeing around on egg shells. And like it or not, people come to church looking for authentic community, not superficial nicety.
You're probably thinking that I want to convert all of you to my way of thinking. I don't. I would like all of us to step outside ourselves and see what our world and our lives looks like from God in Jesus Christ's way of thinking; to come to the conversation with open eyes and ears to see and hear not what I think or what you think but what God has to say to us in the Biblical witness through the mouths of the prophets and Jesus. It’s a primary affirmation of faith: does the Bible, wisely and critically interpreted, offer us a window into eternal truths and reality? Or not? If we don't think so or couldn't care less, then we're not doing church and we might as well just try to be nice. If, on the other hand, we really do want to know what God Almighty, Creator and Ruler of the Universe, not to mention God and Father of our professed Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, has to tell us about how to live and what to make of our society and God's world, then we have to be prepared to be upset, jarred, disturbed. I can tell you right now that what God has to say about just about everything is critical, but critical with an eye to being better, to being as God intended. Do we want to settle for what we know and are familiar with? Is political victory satisfactory, even if we know the consequences are deeply flawed? We’re not going to like what we hear. Not one of us. But do we want to know and can we learn to engage God’s word creatively rather than combatively. We have to want to hang in there for the truth rather than get angry and storm out. When we pray "thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven," do we really want to know what we're asking for and do we really want to be instruments of that agenda? Taking up your cross and following, losing your life to find it... Imagine that, being a place of such faith that we dare handle the grapes of wrath as the old song calls them, confident that God will reveal a way forward.