Fairly late in the last century, when I was a young man just out of college, I went to Washington to work for a United States senator. I’d have had a hard time locating my own politics too precisely at the time, but the senator I worked for was a Republican, and that was just fine with me. I was a staff assistant on the senator’s staff, which is as low as you can go on the organizational chart. I spent time in the mail room, I also helped constituents navigate the federal government, and I spent a lot of time as an aide to the senator, driving him around Washington and in the Virginia countryside.
In the black Lincoln Town Car that was standard issue for members of Congress in those days, there was an early version of a mobile phone, hard-wired to the antennae on the back windshield, and there was a CD player. I can only remember ever listening to one CD with the senator in that car, but my memories of it are very clear. The CD we listened to many times over was a recording of Willie Nelson singing Gospel tunes.
The senator was not a regular church-goer, but he is a believer, and he’d be comfortable, I think, with the label “God-fearing.” I could guess at a number of the songs we listened to Willie sing, but the one I remember clearly - because the senator insisted that we sing along on the refrain - was “In the Garden,” a tune that was hitherto unknown to this former boy chorister. The senator always rode up in the front seat, beside me, and he was vigorous in in his encouragement when the chorus came around:
And he walks with me,
And he talks with me,
And he tells me that I am his own.
And the joy we share as we tarry there,
None other has ever known.
The senator was well aware that at the time I was one of the gentlemen of the choir of men and boys at Washington Cathedral. And I imagine that he knew this old Gospel hymn was not in my repertoire. I am quite sure that he was only partly teasing me by prodding me to sing along with Willie Nelson. Partly, he thought it would be good for me. I’m sure he was right.
These two musical spheres - one on Capitol Hill, the other on Mount Saint Alban, where the cathedral stands - might have provided an early signal to me that many situations and conditions that we think of as dichotomous, either/or situations actually exist on a spectrum. You don’t actually have to choose between Willie Nelson and William Byrd, you can move back and forth along the spectrum. And it’s perfectly alright if you live closer to one end of that spectrum than the other.
It’s characteristic of our thinking in this century that we tend to see things as falling on spectra, without, perhaps, being fixed at a single point thereon. We think of gender, sexual orientation, emotional intelligence, even ethnicity (to some degree), and a host of other things in this way. Call it non-binary thinking; it’s not uncommon.
Religion, however, is seldom an area of thought where people expect to encounter non-binary thinking. To the contrary, people mostly expect religious folk and religious organizations (like churches) to specialize in binary, dichotomous, either/or thinking. Righteous or unrighteousness. Saint or sinner. Saved or damned. Sheep or goats. Heaven or hell. Religious language often lines up easily along binary lines. Deuteronomy proves my point this morning. Listen to Moses, “I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life....”. You see what I mean.
Dichotomous, binary language, is not unknown to Jesus, and, in fact, he sometimes seems to specialize in it. When we get to the Sermon on the Mount, which is where we are this morning, Jesus is using a rhetorical technique to contrast his teaching to the commandments his audience had been taught to live by. In some cases, Jesus presents a binary choice, in others, he seems to be trying to to move his listeners along the spectrum, or to imagine a more expansive view of that spectrum.
When we join Jesus on the Mount this morning, he has recently concluded the Beatitudes. In much of what follows of the sermon, he is trying to shape the behavior and attitude of his followers. These are lessons worth stopping to listen to for a moment, in paraphrase:
Don’t let your anger get the best of you: seek forgiveness and offer it.
Don’t be unfaithful to the one you love, for it does more damage than you realize to both of you, and the results are never good.
Don’t make promises you can’t keep; and tell the truth.
Don’t be vengeful or seek retaliation, even if you have been wronged. Turn the other cheek, and go the extra mile.
Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. Yes, love your enemies, even if it’s hard to do.
Don’t brag about your generosity to others, but do be generous.
Don’t be ostentatious in your prayer, but do pray.
Don’t store up wealth that you don’t need, it does you no good, and someone else needs it. You can’t serve two masters anyway: which is it going to be, money or God?
Don’t be anxious. Don’t worry; be happy. God knows what you need, and he will provide it.
Judge not, lest ye be judged.
Don’t profane that which is holy; don’t throw your pearls before swine.
Ask and it will be given to you. Seek and ye shall find. Knock and the door will be opened to you.
Do unto others as you would have them do to you.
Don’t just be hearers of these lessons: live by them.
There’s more to the Sermon on the Mount, but these points are many of the highlights. They sound timely, don’t they?
In his second inaugural address, in 1865, as the final days of the Civil War drew near, Abraham Lincoln referenced the Sermon on the Mount, saying, “It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged.” Perhaps he was a little disingenuous in his resort to scripture, but at least he was trying. He considered that the war might have amounted to God’s punishment for the sin of slavery, inflicted on both sides of the conflict. Much of the speech is constructed around biblical texts, which are woven throughout. And although Lincoln supposed that God “now wills to remove” that sin of slavery, he allowed that “the prayers of both [sides] could not be answered. The Almighty has his own purposes,” he said, and he assumed those purposes would prevail.
Back in the days when I worked in Washington, someone once quipped that I split my time between two hills in that city, the Capitol stood on one, and the cathedral on the other: one was sacred and the other was profane. But I have to admit that I never saw it that way, and I wonder now if I was just naive, or if things really were different then.
People sometimes forget that the constitutional prohibition of an established religion in this nation serves to protect religion at least as much as it protects the government, and maybe more so. And the founders’ wisdom in structuring our nation this way is one of the reasons religions have flourished in this country.
If you ask me, the soul of the nation and of American Christianity (such as it is) have both been marred by hegemony of the marketplace, the wisdom of which is wrongly assumed to be a fact.
This pulpit is seldom a place for politics, and I think that’s mostly as it should be, so I mean to tread carefully here. The senator I worked for found himself on the wrong side of his own party for positions he took on gun control, women’s rights, and (in the recent wars) on so-called “enhanced interrogation” techniques. And I should know better than to bring up any of those issues from the pulpit.
But on this President’s Day weekend, I hope you will forgive me for being a little nostalgic for the days I spent sitting beside a Republican senator singing along with Willie Nelson’s renditions of songs from an old-time religion. Singing those hymns together did us both more good than either of us realized.
And on this weekend, will you bear with me, as I call to mind again Lincoln’s second inaugural address, so shaped by the scriptures. Lincoln was profoundly aware of the dichotomies that literally tore this nation apart. I’d say his concluding words form a perfectly good prayer for our own day and age:
“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
Amen.
Preached by Fr. Sean Mullen
16 February 2020
Saint Mark’s, Locust Street, Philadelphia