May 18, 2003 The Rev. Dr. Will Eisenhower

The church I was the Interim Head of Staff for, prior to this one, was Trinity Presbyterian Church in Prescott, Arizona. I was leading a Wednesday night Bible study, and in the middle of that Bible study one of the church ladies--I think completely out of the blue. I don't remember that it really had very much to do with what we were talking about--said, "Oh, I just heard that UCLA was founded by the Communists."

I said, "Well, now, that's very interesting. I've never heard that. I've never heard that UCLA was founded by Communists. Where did you hear that?"

"Oh," she said, "on Christian talk radio, that conservative talk radio show that I listen to. They said that UCLA was founded by Communists."

I stopped her and said, "Are you sure that they didn't say that the ACLU was founded by Communists?"

She goes, "Oh, that's right! That's the one!"

Well the ACLU (I don't know about UCLA!) the ACLU is a favorite target of conservative commentators. The American Civil Liberties Union--founded right after World War I because of issues related to conscientious objectors and dedicated to protecting individual rights and freedoms. That's their stated purpose. Within the last generation at least, the ACLU has become a favorite target of conservatives because of issues that come very, very close to the Christian faith of the Christian churches. Not necessarily right to the heart, but they come close. They have to do with religion in public with such issues as prayer in schools, issues such as whether a city square owned by the city can have a manger set up at Christmas time, or whether there can be crosses in public, whether there can be Ten Commandments posted in court houses. You know. We're familiar with those issues. And I want us this morning to consider what's the best way to respond to efforts to erase all signs of religion, or at least the Christian religion, to erase all signs of that from public life. And I'm going to ask us to see if we can't come up with a way to think about that that is both respectful while also respectfully disagreeing. That's going to be our assignment.

And I'm going to ask us to begin at a place that may surprise you, but I think it's going to be the perfect one for us to understand what's at stake. We're going to look at Genesis chapter 28. Genesis 28. We're going to begin with the tenth verse. This is the story of Jacob and Jacob's ladder, and we have it like this:

Jacob left Beer-sheba and went toward Haran. He came to a certain place and stayed there for the night, because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones of the place, he put it under his head and lay down in that place. And he dreamed that there was a ladder set up on the earth, the top of it reaching to heaven; and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. And the Lord stood beside him and said, "I am the Lord, the God of Abraham your Father and the God of Isaac; the land on which you lie I will give to you and to your offspring; and your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south; and all the families of the earth shall be blessed in you and in your offspring. Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you." Then Jacob woke from his sleep and said, "Surely the Lord is in this place--and I did not know it!" And he was afraid, and said, "How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven."

So Jacob rose early in the morning, and he took the stone that he had put under his head and set it up for a pillar and poured oil on the top of it. He called that place Bethel; but the name of the city was Luz at first. Then Jacob made a vow, saying, "If God will be with me, and will keep me in the way that I go, and will give me bread to eat and clothing to wear, so that I come again to my father's house in peace [and, you know, he had some reason to sort of be insecure about returning to his father's house in peace], then the Lord shall be my God, and this stone, which I have set up for a pillar, shall be God's house; and of all that you give me I will surely give one tenth to you."

 

Now, there are so many issues that are raised in just this one little incident, but I want us to focus on the fact that Jacob has a religious experience. A profoundly both unsettling, disturbing one, and yet comforting and reassuring. And because of the religious experience that he has, he responds the next morning by taking the rock that was his pillow--and incidentally, the reason that I remember this story from when I was a littlest child in Sunday School was the part about having to have a rock for your pillow! I think I was probably three or four years old in Sunday School, and I remember learning this story and it was like, "Wow! A rock for a pillow! My gosh!"

There are other issues that emerge in this story, but he takes the rock, he anoints it with oil, he sets it up as a memorial. He sets it up and he does this spontaneously. God doesn't tell him to--though God commands him when he finally returns after his long, long stay away--when he finally returns to the promised land, God commands him to return to this place and God commands him to build an altar. But at this earlier point, spontaneously he has had this profound experience and he wants to commemorate it some way. Something happened in the supernatural and he wants to have it show in the natural. So he names the place "Bethel," and that's the name that it maintains all through the Old Testament period. "Beth El" literally means "the house of God" in Hebrew. "I was in the house of God and I didn't know it." He names it Bethel. And that city becomes very, very important in the history of Israel. As you may remember, that's where the ark of the covenant was kept and housed for a long period of time. Bethel becomes the state capital of the northern nation when Judah and Israel split into a Northern Kingdom and a Southern Kingdom. This becomes the capital of the North. So this is a very, very important city. The Israelites wanted to remember this early special religious occurrence that took place at this place. Jacob doesn't know all of that, but he does respond to the experience that he's had by wanting to set something up to sort of say, "This was the place." "This is where this happened to me."

Now, important experiences always require that there be something to remember it with. That's why anniversaries are important. That's why birthdays are important. If something is important, then you want to, in some sort of ceremonial way, call your own memory back to it from time to time. Now, the bigger the experience, the more important some memorial, some commemoration, something set up in the material world to remind us about it--the more important that is. And the biggest experiences are always going to be the ones that have some kind of religious tinge to them, either explicit or implicit. How long has this been going on? Well, if we look just in the Bible (and outside the Bible we can find all sorts of evidence about the exact same religious response), but this started before Jacob. This goes back for as long as human beings have been self-conscious. They have desired to set up places to help them remember their most important experiences. So this is a very, very normal and natural human response and it has always been regarded as a normal and natural human response, possibly just until recent times.

Now, in recent times, allowing there to be crosses on public property (as we said), manger scenes on public property, allowing it to be that little kids sing Christmas carols at Christmas time or that a break for a week right before Christmas and right after Christmas would get to be referred to as "Christmas vacation." All of this has become very, very controversial within the last generation. I want us to say, "Now, how should we respond to that?" I'm assuming that we are not all of one mind about the issues raised at this, so I'm going to ask us, if we can come together and agree on some things that ought to go into our response to efforts . . . and I said the ACLU, but they're not the only organization involved. Its just that those are the initials that sort of also make UCLA and so that's why we sort of began with them . . .

The first thing that I want us to consider is that for good or ill in American society at the present time, we try to solve philosophical conundrums, and moral conundrums, and spiritual conundrums--we try to solve them as matters of law. We try to attack it legally, and that's what is going on with issues like school prayer, like taking "one nation under God"--taking the phrase "under God" out of the pledge. We're trying to address issues that confront our nation that are philosophical and moral, and ultimately that are spiritual, in the courts. And ultimately that may not be the best place to try to attack these. But I just want us to use this issue to alert ourselves to the fact that this is not the only place where we try to treat something as a legal issue that maybe is not a legal issue at all.

For instance, a little bit closer to home (maybe). The PC(USA), the Presbyterian Church in the U. S. A., used to not regard the ordination of gays and lesbians to the offices of the church--and we're not going to try to tackle this one, I just want to cite it. That used to not be seen as something that needed to be stipulated in the Book of Order. It was handled in an entirely different way. It has only been in the last several years that we've decided, "Let's solve this by putting a paragraph in the Book of Order." And maybe it's not a problem that can be solved through a vote to make it legal in the constitution. Maybe it's a philosophical, and a moral, and a spiritual issue that we are misusing. And I just invite us to consider, have we become a country where we think that the courts are going to solve problems for us? Where we think that laws, that stipulations, are going to solve things that actually can't be solved there at all. Just a question for us to ponder as sort of the wider context which, in this smaller issue I'm asking us to look at today, is going on. Is it the case that there are some political problems that politics can't solve?

I believe that in earlier times in American history, everybody would have known the answer to that to be, "Yes. We have political problems for which there is no political solution." And America at the present time has moved into a chapter where we think that through laws, through politics, through electing the right person to office, we're going to solve problems that we used to think were religious in nature, were spiritual in nature. I remember--I mean, it's a wonderful thing to get to be this old! I can remember when Jimmy Carter was running for President. Oh, my gosh! Christians got so excited! Somebody who's born again! We get to actually vote for somebody who's born again. ." "All of our problems in American society are going to be solved because we have a President who's a born-again Christian."

Now, you may think that all of our problems were solved during the Carter administration . . . not that many people would agree with you. . . But I think it is a matter of the times that we live in that we think that we can solve problems politically and legally that actually elude political and legal solutions.

Well, how do we respond to efforts to try to stipulate that religious symbols may not appear in public? Well, first, I want to say we should respectfully disagree. We should respectfully disagree and be very, very, comfortable as we point out all of the reasons that erasing all symbols of religion from our public life is not a good idea. And we could talk just constitutionally. It rests on a misunderstanding to the establishment clause in the Constitution in the Bill of Rights. We can talk about historically there's never been a nation that has, you know, successfully pushed away all symbols of religion. There has never been one. Practically, I submit that it's an impossibility--that religion and America are so entwined that, like peeling an onion, every time you try to do away with something religious, you just find more religion underneath. It is not the case that there is a thin layer of religion over our public life and somehow or other we can take that away and be done with it.

As a practical matter, think about how many names of how many cities in America--if we were going to take away all reference to the Christian religion, well, we'd have to change the name of St. Paul, Minnesota. St. Louis, Missouri. St. Petersburg, Florida. San Antonio, Texas. Corpus Christi, Texas. Santa Fe, New Mexico. I mean, all across the country! I mean, if you don't want any reference to anything Christian at all . . .

And I think a lot of this surfaces in my home state, the state of California. And as a Californian if you ask, OK, if we had to take Christianity out of all the city names of California--San Diego, San Juan Capistrano, San Clemente, Los Angeles is the "city of the angels," Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz, San Francisco, Sacramento refers to the sacraments. I mean, the map of California would lose almost all of its cities! I think the only three that would be left might be Eureka, Fresno, and Oxnard. I mean, those are not religious, so far as I can tell (although people in Fresno think that Fresno is a religious name . . .)

But we're terribly naive if we think that this is even do-able! Now, that's disagreeing. Can we respectfully disagree? I think that sometimes Christians get hysterical over issues related to the ACLU, so hysterical that you can't even remember the order of the initials. And we ought to say I think that we are a better nation, a stronger nation, a truer nation for challenges like this coming our way. I think our faith is more solid if challenged. For one thing--and let's just close with this--it forces us to make a distinction between the religious, spiritual encounter with God and the symbolic, ceremonial anointing of the stone.

You can anoint all the stones in the entire Galilean desert if you want to. It's not the same thing as that original encounter with God. You can put crosses and manger scenes on all of the front lawns of all of the courthouses in America and it won't make the decisions made inside more just, more righteous, more faithful. We have had more religious symbols involved in our life as a nation and we have been guilty of terrible sins against one another and against others. There is a big difference between the anointed stone and the dream of the stairway to heaven. And I think a good thing to do at the present time, is be thankful for challenges like this that give us a chance to say, "You know what? We respectfully disagree. We think that you've got a misunderstanding of what the Bill of Rights originally meant, but thank you for raising this issue, because it helps us remember it's not the cross on the courthouse lawn, it's the Savior who died on the cross that saves."

Let's pray. Dear Heavenly Father, Lord, we thank you for challenges that you allow to come our way that help us think through what are the things in our faith that are truly, ultimately significant and what are those things that are simply helpful reminders that have a time and sooner or later are lost and covered over with the dust of history. Lord, our faith does not get lost, does not get covered over with the dust of history, because you keep it alive and new in our hearts. And, Lord, for that we are very, very grateful and we give you thanks and praise in the strong name of Jesus. Amen.

The Rev. Dr. Will Eisenhower

Interim Pastor

Faith Presbyterian Church

Minnetonka, Minnesota

[Transcribed from an audiotape of the worship service on May 18, 2003.]