Monday, June 15, 2020

Sermon Manuscript: “When the Foundations are Being Destroyed”


“When the Foundations are Being Destroyed”
Patuxent Presbyterian Church
California Maryland,
Rev. Robert Bayley, Interim Pastor
Sunday 14 June 2020 – FLAG DAY

Job 1:13-22        
1 Corinthians 3:10-11        
Psalm 11

“When the foundations are being destroyed, what can the righteous do?” Psalm 11:3

What is your earliest memory of seeing the flag of this great country of ours and being aware of what it was, of what it represents?

For me it was in first grade in the public schools of the Los Angeles suburb of Whittier, when we did something that in retrospect I know I didn’t understand at that tender age – none of us did, really – allegiance, United States of America, republic, nation, God, indivisible, liberty, justice. It was more than our little minds could comprehend must less memorize, but memorize the pledge we did as we said it every morning, hand over heart, at the opening of the school day, and in the second grade, the third grade, the fourth grade, and so on into the homerooms of junior high and high school.     

Two hundred and forty-four years ago on July 4th, 1776, the birth of this nation was announced with a Declaration of Independence, a date everyone knows as a holiday marked by picnics and fireworks and parades. Fourth of July parades are always moving events with marching bands, groups of aged veterans, first responders and the firetrucks every little boy loves to see. What always, without exception, brings an emotional response within me is the sight of current military personnel, because I am aware that these young men and women in uniform have donned that uniform out of choice and in so doing have said by wearing it that they would fight to defend my life even at the risk of losing their own. I look into their faces, and I cannot speak.

But way in the distance of our collective national memory is something else that happened, one year after that historic fourth of July, on June 14, 1777 when the flag we learned to pledge allegiance to was adopted, consisting of 13 alternating bars of red and white, and a quarter corner of blue with a circle of 13 stars representing, it was said at the time, a new constellation in the heavens, the anniversary of which we mark today, Sunday June 14, 2020, Flag Day.

There was, however, no pledge of allegiance to the flag or to this country until a Baptist minister, Francis Bellamy, wrote our present pledge in 1892, with the phrase “under God” added by President Eisenhower in 1954 in the height of the cold war against atheistic communism.

Now we are living in a time where we are experiencing firsthand the eroding of the foundations upon which this country was founded and for which this flag stands.

The Psalmist David knew both the reality and value of foundations as well as what it means to have those foundations threatened or even destroyed, giving us our text for this Flag Day:  

“When the foundations are being destroyed, what can the righteous do?” Psalm 11:3

Q: What are these foundations that are being eroded in our country today?

“When the foundations are being destroyed …”

The foundation of health – the coronavirus. The politicizing of a non-partisan global health crisis, the worst in a hundred years, has impeded our response as a nation and cost lives. We are losing the foundation of an assumption of health and adequate health care.   

The foundation of income through work – 40 million Americans have lost their jobs and their source of income by which they have provided for themselves and their families, losing the foundation of income security.

The foundation of trust and civility the corrosion of leadership.
I find myself speechless at times in the presence of the relentless demonizing of half the nation by the other half, of pettiness and fabricated attempts to destroy the reputations of those with whom some disagree, and behavior and rhetoric that instead of bringing us together as a nation during this time of multiple crises is instead continuing to drive ever deeper the wedge of division that has been injuring our national soul now for several years doing severe damage to the foundation of civility without which no nation or culture can long endure.

We are now engaged in a new civil war, fought not with weapons but with words, not over north and south but left and right, not between the blue and the grey but the blue and the red, increasingly robbing us of our need to engage in respectful dialogue.  The demonizing of half of who we are by the other half of who we are is going to cause us to lose all of who we are. It is a foundation of civilization that once severely damaged will take generations to slowly repair.

The foundation of human equality – the deep running wound of racism erupting again. The unprecedented numbers of marches and persons and time involved today will hopefully see us turn a corner in a longstanding wound in our national soul, with the politicizing of racism not allowed this time to dictate what happens. This is a fragile foundation that has yet to be fully built.    
   
Ironically, our Old Testament lesson this morning tells us of a man named Job who thousands of years ago experienced the loss of all of these foundations in his life: he was afflicted with a painful illness, he lost his sources of income, and he lost his position of leadership in his community resulting in his being treated with prejudice and rejection. In the bottom of his despair he cried out, “I know that my redeemer lives …”

I believe Job is an exhibition of a reason why black churches often exhibit a greater intensity in the expression of their faith than their white counterparts due to the anvil of racism and prejudice on which that faith is hammered out.  
   
When it comes to the foundation of human equality our national history has revealed a consistent pattern of commitment to principles and truths in our secular documents that echo the principles and truths of Scripture:

The Declaration of Independence, signed at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 4 July 1776.
This foundational document contains this phrase: “…all men are created equal.” Yet forty-one
of the signers of the Declaration of Independence owned slaves including Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and Presbyterian minister John Witherspoon, continuing a commercial and cultural practice already in place since 1619.

Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address at the Gettysburg, Pennsylvania battlefield 19 November 1863.
It was in Mrs. Thomas’ fifth grade class in the little elementary school in the desert town of Boulder City, Nevada, that we were all required to memorize Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. To this day I can still quote the opening lines:

Four score and seven years ago our forefathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”   

And yet while freedom from being someone else’s property became theirs with the signature of President Lincoln on the Emancipation Proclamation, freedom and equality are two different things, and the latter has eluded African Americans to this day, with the unprecedented rallies and marches at this time in our history reminding us that it is time to redress this grievous wound to the soul of so many.  
  
Baptist minister Francis Bellamy’s Pledge of Allegiance in 1892. Written at the request of a flag manufacturer wanting to promote the placement of flags in every public school classroom, Rev.   Bellamy concluded his brief pledge with words indelibly inscribed in the minds of millions of school children from that day to this: “… with liberty and justice for all.” But the liberty and justice to which we have pledged ourselves has had an unequal distribution over the years dependent on income, education, geography and, more than anything else, skin color.

Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial 23 August 1963.
“When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, (they were) a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as
white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”  

It was in that same speech that Dr. King spoke prophetically of this day in which we now find ourselves some 57 years later:

“It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment… . The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright light of justice appears.” A sober warning most appropriate for today.
   
His speech, drawing heavily on Biblical language, referenced Amos 5:24  “Let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream,” inscribed on the MLK monument in Washington, DC and in numerous other monuments and tributes to Dr. King across the country. It was for him the defining Biblical text. And for those of us who claim to be followers of the God who wrote the Bible, it is a text we cannot, we must not, ignore. None of the Bible is optional.

All men are created equal,” says the Declaration of Independence, our foundational national document, our secular scripture.

“... all men are created equal, echoed Abraham Lincoln in his Gettysburg address.

“… with liberty and justice for all,” wrote Rev. Bellamy in his pledge of allegiance, giving the clear impression that it is a statement of fact rather than a suggestion.

“… all men, yes black men and white men, would be guaranteed rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” thundered Rev. King in front of Lincoln’s statue, as though in some way it was a new concept he was introducing, and new it was for most standing in front of him.

All means all means all: God puts it this way: “For God so loved the world (and there are no parenthetical exceptions of His loving one group more or one group less based on culture or skin color), that he gave His only son, that whoever (no exceptions again) believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” This alone is the metric for valuing human life. – ALL human beings are created equal.   

This requires more of us than the emotions of the moment. It requires of us an internal decision to begin to seek, one step, one day at a time, ways in which we can be part of a solution rather than through passivity, part of the problem. There is no allowance for conscientious objectors in this God-given call to justice for human beings.

History has placed us at a crossroads where, because of the nature of time, we will not be allowed to linger long. Time is ticking – how will we use it?

As one of the members of this church reminds us beneath their name in every email they send, from a quote of Dr. Martin Luther King: “The time is always right to do what is right.”

So it’s time to ask the question that forms the other half of our text for the day: “When the foundations are being destroyed, what can the righteous do?”
   
“… what can the righteous do?”

This is not a rhetorical question but rather one that asks for a response because it knows there is one.
   
While all of the foundations that are under attack at this time are critical to our continued survival as a great nation, and one in particular is front and center, that of human equality, we cannot, we must not, look to any social contract to serve as the ultimate foundation for our existence. Rather we address the foundations of this world from the vantage point of the foundations given by God, the only foundations that will last forever.  
   
What we are experiencing is a call to clear the clutter from our own foundations as followers of Jesus Christ, affirm them and strengthen them. What are these foundations?

The foundation of Jesus Christ - 1 Corinthians 3:11
“For no one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ.”
This is fundamental – our lives grounded on a foundation of a relationship with Jesus Christ, the absence of which, at the end of day, renders all other societal foundations valueless.  

Jesus Christ came into my life the summer before my senior year of high school and he has never left, building in the core of my being a foundation that has stood the test of time.

The foundation of God’s Word – Ephesians 2:19-20
“Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and aliens, but fellow citizens with God’s people and members of God’s household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Jesus Christ himself as the chief cornerstone.”  

Either this book “of the apostles and prophets” is trustworthy or it is not. There can be no equivocation regarding its role in our lives. Here’s how I have put it over the years: The mystery of inspiration and the complexities of transmission notwithstanding, I have leaned into the Bible with the weight of my existence and found it to be trustworthy in all its parts. It’s a relational thing, an experiential thing.

The foundation of the ownership of our lives, our existence – 2 Timothy 2:19
“…God’s solid foundation stands firm, sealed with this inscription, ‘the Lord knows those who are his.’” 

Bob Dylan reminds us of this principle in the refrain of his song, “Gotta Serve Somebody”
“But you’re gonna have to serve somebody, yes,
Indeed you’re gonna have to serve somebody.
Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody.

We’re all ‘gonna serve somebody.’ There is a solid foundation on which are inscribed these words, “The Lord knows those who are his,” those who are ‘gonna serve the Lord. Does He know you are His? Do you?

The foundation of good works that are the evidence of our faith – 1 Timothy 6:18-19
“Command them to do good, to be rich in good deeds, and to be generous and willing to share.
In this way they will be laying up treasure for themselves, as a firm foundation for the coming age, so that they may take hold of life which is truly life.”

We build a good foundation within ourselves in our character when we focus on doing good for others in the midst of a culture marked for the past few years with an ‘us first’ worldview. We are called not to follow a ‘me first’ model of leadership but rather a leadership that says, in His own words, “the Son of man came not to be served, but to serve, and give …”  The Gospel of Jesus Christ is radical and at times offensive because it strikes at the heart of the self-centered and self-serving interests of fallen humanity.

We were reminded of this critical posture in our affirmation of faith this morning from the Barmen Declaration written in the face of a growing ‘me first’ nationalism in Nazi Germany in 1934, that included this sober warning from the lips of Jesus in God’s Word: “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great men exercise authority over them. It shall not be so among you: but whoever would be great among you must be your servant.”
   
As we seek to be servants of others, we build on this solid foundation of good works.

So here’s the bottom line: The foundation we choose now will determine what will happen at the end of our lives.

Jesus illustrates this in a picture story we can all ‘see’ and understand in Matthew 7:24-27:
“Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on a rock. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall because it had its foundation on the rock. But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash.” (“… great was the fall of it.”  KJV.)    

Again – the foundation we choose now will determine what happens to us at the end of our lives. And at the end of it all, at the end of human history, all governments and kingdoms including our own will cease to exist, and it will become so that “The kingdoms of this world have become the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ and He shall reign for ever and ever.” Revelation 11:15. In the meantime – “What shall the righteous do?


MONDAY MORNING
Every week I give you ‘Monday morning’ homework, so here’s your homework for this coming week, two questions which, having once read, you cannot escape responding to in some way:

(1) Which of these foundations under attack is God calling you to get involved in                                 in some way?

(2) Which of these foundations in God’s Word is God calling you to pursue and                                 cultivate in your own life?

Let’s Pray: Heavenly Father, Lord Jesus Christ, Holy Spirit: We confess that during this time in our individual and national history we are feeling overwhelmed and helpless. We seek to decipher foundations being eroded, and at the same time to discern foundations that are trustworthy for our lives.

On this Flag Day we pray for all those in positions of political power: for those who know you as Lord and Savior on both sides of the aisle, and in whom therefore the Holy Spirit dwells: convict them deeply in the best sense of the word of their political partisanship at any time their positions are not what is best for the people of this country. Fill them with a passion for the call of your Word to justice and righteousness.  And for those who don’t know you work in their God-given consciences and give them genuinely guilty consciences when they do things out of partisan politics instead out of a sincere desire to do what is best for the people of this country.

And for us – work in our consciences as well, and open to us insight into how we can be part of the solutions needed to address the foundations under threat in our communities, our county, our state, and our country. Fill us with an equal passion for the building of your strong foundations deep within us that will last forever. We ask these things in the strong name of Jesus Christ, the solid rock, our only Savior. Amen.

And now let us sing the closing hymn, affirming what we have talked about this morning:

My hope is built on nothing less than Jesus blood and righteousness.
I dare not trust the sweetest frame, but wholly lean on Jesus’ name.
On Christ the solid rock I stand all other ground is sinking sand,
all other ground is sinking sand.

Sermon © 2020 Robert Bayley
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