Independence Day and public universities: The cornerstone of democracy

The readings for Independence Day are: Deuteronomy 10:17-21, Hebrews 11:8-16 , and Matthew 5:43-48. Here is my sermon from this morning:

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On this Independence Day 2012, here in this church across the street from Thomas Jefferson’s university, it is especially right and our bounden duty that we remember the Declaration of Independence he wrote.

 I have often thought that if we cannot remember Jefferson's gift of words here, in Charlottesville, we may well forget it elsewhere.

But what we do this day must be more than about remembering a political document crafted in a fierce struggle against the most powerful nation on earth at the time, Great Britain.

We must also remember that Jefferson and his peers hoped and prayed that a better world could and would emerge from their struggle. They did not write the Declaration as a time capsule to make the world stand still.

 They, like the writer of Hebrews, desired “a better country, that is, a heavenly one.”

They knew, like the writer of the Book of Deuteronomy, that they once had been “strangers in a strange land,” and that now as a free people, they could not turn their backs on the strangers who would reach these shores also desiring a better country.

 They knew this country was unfinished, incomplete, imperfect. And they knew they were unfinished, incomplete, imperfect human beings.

The evil of slavery perplexed them, even corrupted them. It was the original sin of our country. Much bloodshed would be spilled over that single issue alone. Reason would not always prevail.

 Yet, for Jefferson, the foundation of a free people had everything to do with reason and the ideal upon which he built this university a few yards from this church.

 He did not design it as vocational school, though certainly he hoped people would find their vocation. Nor was it to be a religious school, though he struggled to find his own understanding of God in the biblical texts.

To be sure, Jefferson looked upon the university he built as a place of free inquiry and learning. But it was more than even that. Education was not merely for the sake of an abstract notion of academic freedom, as important as that is, but because education would form the foundation of how a free people would govern themselves.

 He saw this University as an essential cornerstone to being a free people. It was meant, from the start, to be public.

A free people – you and I -- need to be able to think, to ask questions, to test theories and doctrines. We need to discover the facts and nuances about science, history, culture, politics – all that makes up the universe in which we live. A free people cannot remain in the shadows of ignorance and pretend to be free.

We have recently witnessed an unprecedented leadership crisis at the University of Virginia. It is tempting to cast it as a local power struggle between good guys and bad. But it is more than that. The struggle we are still witnessing is for the heart and soul of public higher education not just here but everywhere in this land.

 Will public higher education remain open for all people who can enter, regardless of race, wealth and social status? Or will the doors close to all but an elite or lucky few before we even notice that they shut?

 The pressures – financial, technological and political – are enormous on public higher education everywhere, and are not unique to the University of Virginia.

What made the last few weeks remarkable were not the issues at stake, but how a board of trustees – here called the “Board of Visitors” – essentially hit the panic button, fired its president, then unfired its president. That could have happened anywhere.

I do not mean suggest that the Board of Visitors was embarking on a mission to close the doors of the University of Virginia in some kind of conspiracy. Rather, what happened in recent days – and what still could happen – is more slippery and more insidious.

 The doors could close a few inches at a time, as well-meaning trustees in public colleges and universities try to make due with fewer and fewer resources for more and more people who are qualified but cannot get in. That, in fact, is already happening at public universities across this country.

The University of Virginia is the very first of these public universities, and it is therefore a bellwether for all of them, whether here or on the other side of this continent at the University of California, Los Angeles where I proudly call myself an alum.

 Jefferson’s university has been intertwined with the struggle for freedom in this nation since its founding, extending through the Civil War, civil rights and the struggle to open doors for women. It is still part of this struggle. It is now a bellwether for whether a public university will truly remain public.

One of the lessons we have learned these last few weeks is that we, a free people – the public – need to speak up for higher education, and we need to speak up everywhere. The boards that govern these institutions need our support – not blind support but informed, nuanced, vibrant support.

These boards especially need our willingness to engage with them in the long tedious work of governance. Now that Teresa Sullivan has been reinstated, we cannot go away. It is not just to student councils, faculty senates and alumni associations that this task falls. It falls to us, the public.

All of us have a stake in this: What makes a public university public is not the percentage of state financial support it receives. What makes a public university public is the ownership. We, the public, are the owners of this great institution across the street.

Those who serve as our representatives as public trustees will have no backbone if we don’t have one. At stake is nothing less than an essential cornerstone of democracy.

Indeed, we have a responsibility to those who come after us to build a better country, to govern ourselves as a free people – an educated free people – and not just for ourselves but those who reach these shores to find freedom, and those who will come after us.

 There is a reason we hear this passage from the Book of Deuteronomy every Fourth of July, and we do well to inscribe it on our hearts in our minds:

“The LORD your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who is not partial and takes no bribe, who executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and who loves the strangers, providing them food and clothing. You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

 AMEN


By James Richardson, St. Paul's Memorial Church, Fiat Lux

We hold these truths to be self-evident...

My sermon for Independence Day 2011:

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"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

Today we remember Americans of two centuries ago, some whose names are familiar – Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton – and others whose names are nearly lost in the mists of time. One of those names nearly forgotten, The Rev. Jacob Duche´, was the rector of the most important church in America – Christ Church, Philadelphia, the symbolic focal point of British monarchy and the Church of England in America in the 1700s. 

Anyone who was important in America passed through the doors of Christ Church. Members of his congregation included Benjamin Franklin. 

On the afternoon of Thursday July 4, 1776, Duche´ watched as the Continental Congress declared independence from Great Britain.

Then Duche´ walked across the square to his church. He convened a special meeting of his Vestry, his board of directors. With his Vestry’s concurrence, Duche´ opened his parish’s large Book of Common Prayer, and he began crossing out all references to the King of England. 

He replaced those references with the “United States of America.” 

In a very real sense, the American Episcopal Church was born in that moment with Duche’s act of defiance against the mother country and the mother church. 

Duche paid a heavy price – he was jailed by the British and eventually exiled. 

Crucially for all of us, an idea was born in that moment, though only a handful of people could quite then see it: Religious freedom. 

Duche’s pen struck a blow against not just against a colonial power, but against the idea that government could dictate to its people the religion they are to follow. 

Think about how radical that idea was: every government of Europe had a state church. Spain and France were Catholic, the Germans and Danes Lutheran, and the English were Anglican. 

But in America, there would be no official state church. 

The idea was nearly still-born. It took a terrible war for independence to make the idea of religious freedom a reality. Other generations would come after and be faced with new challenges and assaults upon this ideal. 

And so it is meet and right and our bounden duty that on this day, the Fourth of July, we celebrate Independence Day and we remember this precious gift of religious freedom that the founders of this nation gave to us. 

The founders of our nation were not necessarily more saintly or more Godly than us. On many things they fell woefully short. They could not, or would not, end slavery, leaving it to another generation and a terrible civil war that nearly ruined this nation. They were expansionist to a fault, blind to the indigenous people of this land. And many a huckster would come wrapping themselves in the flag. 

But on this day in 1776 our forbearers got one thing right – one thing very right – and it changed the world beyond these shores for all time ever after:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

Over time, those words inspired millions from black Africans living in apartheid in South Africa to those who freed themselves from the shackles of segregation here in the South. Those words could not be repealed. 

We appropriately remember today the author of those words, Thomas Jefferson, here in this church within a few yards of the great university he founded. 

On this day in 1776, Jefferson got it exactly right: he understood that if a particular religion was imposed by a government as the “official religion” then that government could not possibly treat its people fairly. 

On a deeper level, Jefferson understood that religion coerced by the power of government was a false religion. And official government religion could never be truly a religion of the heart. 

If the Creator created all men – and women – equal, than all should have an equal chance of experiencing God their own way. They could only do that if government stayed out of religion. 

The United States would not and could not be a “Christian nation” but a nation that would allow people the freedom to discover their God, each in their own way – or be free of any religion at all. 

That is why it is wrong to impose prayer in public schools or use the vast power of the state to harass and discriminate against Muslims. 

If some are not free to practice their religion their way, then none of us are free.
Our independence as a free people was hard won, paid in blood, toil and tears. Our independence was not just from a colonial power, but from religious demagoguery that haunts many lands still today. 

As we celebrate today the Declaration of Independence, we should also remember the other great document Mr. Jefferson penned about which he was equally proud: the Virginia Act for Establishing Religious Freedom: 

"Well aware that Almighty God hath created the mind free; that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burdens, or by civil incapacitations, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness..." 

We live in a time when the value of religious freedom is under assault by those who would use the power of government to impose their religion on others.

The Talibans of this world are not just in Iran or Afghanistan, but here in our own country among pundits and politicians who would impose their own idea of Christianity on the rest of us. 

When we stand up for those who feel the breath of discrimination based on their religion, we stand with the founders of this nation and their highest ideals. We do well to celebrate our freedom as nation this Independence Day and we do well to never take for granted this precious gift: our religious freedom.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

Independence Day and moral courage for our times

I haven't been in the pulpit in several weeks, so what better day to return than the Fourth of July? Today we are using the readings for Independence Day: Deuteronomy 10:17-21, Matthew 5:43-48, Psalm 145 or 145:1-9

Here is my sermon for today:

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When I think of church, I usually think of blessings, and I hope you do too. But the ancient sages would tell you there is another side to this:

Curses.

And curses can be instructive.

There is an old Chinese curse that Robert Kennedy was fond of quoting. The Chinese curse is this: “May you live in interesting times.”

“May you live in interesting times.”

We certainly live in interesting times, and we certainly can, if we chose, see it as a curse. On this Independence Day, our nation is at war in the Middle East and Central Asia; our economy is in its deepest slump since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Our environment is under assault in the air, and on the land, and in the sea. We have witnessed the calamity of the worst oil spill in history, driven by our addiction to cheap energy, and the calamity continues at this moment.

Our government sometimes seems adrift and out-of-touch, or paralyzed by partisan gridlock and media-driven extremism.

We live in interesting times.

We live in a time of great change, and that change impacts everything we do, every place we go, touching everyone we meet.

Children grow up and graduate, or don’t. Some of you face health issues, or a job change, or retirement.

Some of you are facing the loss of a loved one. The only thing inevitable in life is change.
Ours is not the first generation to live in interesting times or face relentless change.

Robert Kennedy, in 1966, in a speech in Capetown, South Africa, talked about the challenges of interesting times:

“They are times of danger and uncertainty; but they are also the most creative of any time in the history of mankind.”

Kennedy, who came to South Africa to lift up those, who at great personal risk to themselves, opposed apartheid, went on to say there is a quality above all other qualities needed during interesting times: Moral courage.

Kennedy said moral courage is in shorter supply than “bravery in battle or great intelligence.”
Moral courage is the strength of character that motivates someone to stand up and be counted precisely when it hardest to stand up.

Moral courage is that quality that says the conventional wisdom is not always right, that the action of one person can make a difference, especially when no one else thinks it possible, and especially when it matters the most, especially in interesting times.

And Robert Kennedy said this:

“It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”

On this Independence Day, it is moral courage that I especially want to celebrate.

Those who founded this nation lived in interesting times. They were told they could not win against the greatest superpower on earth, Great Britain. They did not always have moral courage, they faltered when it came to slavery.

But they had enough moral courage to prevail against Britain, and enough moral courage to shape a nation that is still young, still unfinished, still very much in need of moral courage.

You may not know this, but Independence Day is an official feast day of the Episcopal Church. Our church was founded in the tumult of the American War for independence.

And what better place to celebrate this feast day than here, at St. Paul’s Memorial Church, across the street from the great University founded by the author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, and shaped by other founders of this nation especially James Madison.

Jefferson was 32 years old when he penned the Declaration, and today we celebrate not just our independence but also the moral courage of Jefferson and those he stood with on that 4th of July long ago.

We live in interesting times. We live in a time when moral courage is needed as never before.
Here is the thing about moral courage:

Sometimes moral courage comes in a huge moment for the entire world to see, as with George Washington at Valley Forge or Martin Luther King at the Selma bridge.

And sometimes – maybe most of the time – moral courage comes in the accumulation of small moments, in our daily life and work, and in places that don’t make headlines, and with people who are not celebrities.

Those moments have come right here in this church, like when Ted Evans, the rector of St. Paul’s, had the moral courage to stand up in the 1950s and declare that this parish – St. Paul’s Memorial Church – would not cooperate with a scheme to use churches in Charlottesville to educate only white children.

He paid a price in the community and with his bishop but Ted Evans stood his ground.

And some of you here today had the moral courage to stand with him, and to you we owe a debt of gratitude.

Those moments of moral courage continue here in this place today, and you are changing the world one rippled at a time. It all adds up.

Some of you are doing research on global warming or unlocking the mysteries of retroviruses. Some of you care for the sick, or teach our young people, or work in a day care center, or a soup kitchen or food pantry, or in our community garden as a volunteer, or you volunteer with Habitat for Humanity, or IMPACT or PACEM or The Haven.

Some of you work in your home or in a job to support your family. Some of you own a business that provides services and jobs in our community. Every one counts, everyone can have moral courage in every walk of life.

A way to measure our moral courage can be found in our biblical lessons today, the lessons that are assigned by the Episcopal Church specifically for Independence Day.

The lessons speak to having the moral courage to care for the poorest among us, the widows and orphans and immigrants. “You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt,” the Deuteronomist proclaims.

The psalmist tells us that greatness comes through compassion and kindness, not anger and violence.

And Jesus puts it squarely on the line: “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”

Strength comes not with force of arms but in the forgiveness of enemies, in protecting the vulnerable and in compassion for immigrants.

If I may add a personal note: My father fought in World War II, in the South Pacific, and he saw terrible things. He believed this country worth defending and he put his life on the line for that. Yet he taught me from a very young age that true patriotism is not about military might, but is about participating as a citizen, voting, paying taxes, getting involved in the community, making a difference.

Each time we live this way, each time we stand with the least among us, with the oppressed and forgotten, we bring the Kingdom of God a few steps closer, and we come a little closer to becoming fully the human being God would have us be.

It takes moral courage to live this way, and yet this I also know:

Within you is the fiber of moral courage because God put it there when you were born.
Moral courage ultimately comes as a gift of faith, in our hope for a better world unseen, a world we are partners in creating.

So on this Independence Day, may each of us have the strength and moral courage to be the hands and feet of Christ, and may these interesting times be not a curse but a blessing to us, and to those who come after us. AMEN

Photo of James Armstrong, who carried the flag across the Edmund Pettes Bridge in Selma, Alabama, in 1965, reenacting "Bloody Sunday" in 2005. Mr. Armstrong died in 2009. Photo in the Birmingham News.

Back in Charlottesville

We are back in Charlottesville, traveling all day on the Fourth. We were delayed getting out of Dulles, but the benefit was seeing seeing fireworks displays across the countryside from our commuter plane as it puttered its way down to Charlottesville.

Thanks to all of our family and friends in California. Your love and hospitality was amazing, both in moments of great joy and in sadness at the farewell to a young friend on Friday evening. And we are happy to be back in Charlottesville with all of our friends here.

We hope you enjoyed some pie on the Fourth!

Blessings,

Jim & Lori

Pie art by Sacramento artist Wayne Thiebaud

Celebrating our independence and religious freedom

You may not know this: Independence Day - the Fourth of July - is an official feast day on the Episcopal calendar, right up there with the feast day for Peter and Paul and all the saints.

The reason Independence Day is a church day isn't that the founders of our nation were necessarily saintly, but because the Episcopal Church was born in the American Revolution and the fight for independence from Great Britain.

Many of our nation's founders, particularly the Virginians, were members of the established colonial church which so happened to be the Church of England. Once free from Britain, they still wanted to retain what later became known as an "Anglican" form of worship. Thus was born the Episcopal Church. There is much more to the story than this, but that is enough for now.

There is another element to this worth noting in our contemporary world so torn by religious conflict. The founders of the United States believed that all things ultimately come from God, and their religious values were at the heart of their individual moral perspective. They certainly believed that those values informed how they would govern a young nation, and those values permeated the document we celebrate this weekend, the Declaration of Independence:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

Yet the founders were repelled by the idea of a theocracy, a religiously based government. They had experienced such a government. The British monarch was also the head of the Church of England, and it had been only a century since Britain had endured a calamitous civil war between factions of Protestantism. The founders of the United States wanted no government with any official religion.

These values of religious freedom went even deeper than that. God was at the center of founders' moral life, but they understood that people see and hear God differently - or not at all. Even amongst the Virginia Episcopalians -- Thomas Jefferson and George Washington chief among them -- their understanding of God differed dramatically (and those divisions remain today).

The founders envisioned democracy as the way people could live (sometimes in great tension) in a society made up of peoples from many lands, many traditions and many religions, or no religion. The United States would not be a "Christian nation" but a nation that could allow people to find God each in their own way without being coerced by the powers of government. Jefferson's 1786 Virginia Act for Establishing Religious Freedom stated the reasons clearly:

"Well aware that Almighty God hath created the mind free; that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burdens, or by civil incapacitations, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness..."

Over two centuries, this free market of religion has allowed Christianity and every major religion to flourish like in no other nation on earth precisely because none was the official religion. One only look at England to see the outcome of a church being supported by the state: The Church of England, some say, will all but disappear by 2050.

More ominously, we also only need look at contemporary theocracies, Iran chief among them, to see the dangers of a nation governed by religious institutions. Our independence as a free people was hard won, and that independence was from not just a colonial power, but from theocratic government. We do well to celebrate our religious freedom this Independence Day: