Occasional Sermons

Not long ago, my son came into my study with a question about a homework assignment. He had been asked to write an essay on one of Abraham Lincoln’s speeches and was unsure which to choose. “Without question, his second inaugural,” I stated, “ because it’s there that Lincoln evinces most clearly that he is essentially a political theologian.” “Mom!” he vociferated, and stormed out of my study. The reason for his extreme reaction was that just the previous week I had declared Rembrandt van Rijn an artistic theologian. And that declaration, I confess, had followed prior declarations to the effect that Alfred Lord Tennyson was a poetic theologian, Blaise Pascal a mathematical theologian, and Mother Nature a natural theologian. My declarations had lost all credibility with my son because he had concluded that there exists and have existed no person or thing that I am unwilling to declare a theologian, and perhaps you will rush to the same judgment when I suggest to you this morning that the Choir is composed of musical theologians. I ask you, however, to suspend that judgment long enough to hear me out. Our nation presently suffers from an affliction; an affliction that could be labeled “hyper-secularism.” Secularism, the explicit exclusion of the religious, now pervades our perspectives, our principles, our standards, and our interpretations. The reasons for the affliction of hyper-secularism are complex and various – beyond the scope of this sermon, but one of the effects of the affliction of hyper-secularism is that religious people like ourselves have been driven to a place of radical disjunction. It is as though we re to be like Janus, the ancient Roman god depicted as having two head facing opposite directions – On the one hand we believe that God is the author of all creation. We believe that he and he alone rules history and the nations. We believe he rules our lives. And if we believe all this it means we must see God in our scientific understanding of the origin of the cosmos. We must see him in the movement of history and the vicissitudes of the nations. We must see him in every step of our own pilgrimages. And we must see him higher and prior to anything else. On the other hand, we are to conform ourselves to this nation’s hyper-secularism and see him nowhere. As I said, we have been drive to a place of radical disjunction. And what makes this disjunction increasingly calamitous is that hyper-secularism seems, by attrition or default, to have gained the advantage. Our faces are, after all, most frequently turned toward the secular world, and so we have come to assimilate the secular perspective, in truth the truncated one, as the normative and objective one; while our religious perspective has been relegated to a private and partisan realm that must not intrude upon the secular one in any way. We have completely lost sight of the fact that it was precisely a religious perspective that formed this nation and made it what it is. Our nation, and indeed our wider culture, and we may think God for this, was created, sustained, and defended by the religious understandings of the great men and women of our faith. I found confirmation of this in, of all places, the Wall Street Journal. The Journal stated, and I quote, “From the Pilgrims to the civil rights movement, the great leaders of this nation were inspired by and acted through their religious understanding of the Bible. We have now produced a generation wholly ignorant of the Bible and wholly bereft of even the concept of a religious understanding, so how could this generation begin to possess the capacities of its forebears?” Abraham Lincoln, in his second inaugural speech spoke, of course, of the Civil War in which our nation was at that time engaged. He declared in that speech that the war was God’s judgment upon a nation founded in his name that would dare to enslave his people. “And although we must fondly hope and fervently prey that the aw will quickly pass away,” Lincoln declared, “If God wills it to continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sun, and every drop of blood drawn by the last shall be repaid by another drawn with the sword, as it was said 3,000 years ago, so it must be said, ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’” Lincoln’s understanding of that war and its ultimate significance were rooted in o secular view of history, but in his religious conviction what lay behind and what drove history, and that is God. And that makes Lincoln, among all else that great man was, a political theologian. When politics, or art, or poetry, or music are the means by which one gives expression to religious convictions, that’s theology. Theology is not just the stuff of ivory towers. Theology takes place wherever there is a union of human experience and expression with religious conviction. I now reassert that we are honored this morning by the presence of musical theologians – men and women who through music express our common religious convictions, convictions that proclaim the sublime and joyful truths of the faith that gathers us here. In this hyper-secular world, may we be challenged by their example to reunite our religious convictions with the vocations we practice and the talents we possess, and so join the ranks of theologians who have created, sustained, and defended our nation and culture. Amen.