First Presbyterian Church of Watertown

Thessalonians 5

“Jesus, Who Died for Us”

The Rev. Dr. Fred G. Garry

November 16, 2008

In our Book of Confessions there are two ancient creeds, The Apostles Creed and the Nicene Creed. There are three from the sixteenth century, the time of the Reformation: the Scots, the Heidelberg Catechism, and the Second Helvetic Confession. The Book of Confessions has one creed from the seventeenth century, the Westminster Confession. This confession has two catechisms with it and without a doubt shaped Presbyterianism in America more than any other document save the Bible. There are no creeds from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Yet, when you get to the 20^th there are three again: the “Barmen Declaration” speaking against the Nazis, the Confession of 1967 speaking against racism and prejudice, and then there is the “Brief Statement of Faith.”

I feel privileged that the last two, which are the only ones written in America, I feel privileged that I got to know the main authors of each of these and am able to read them through the lens of knowing the people who gave a portion of their life bringing them to the church.

I didn’t share this last piece with the confirmation class last week. The focus of our attention was the Nicene Creed. Before exploring the words of Athanasius I felt it necessary to build the basic march of centuries in our Book of Confession. We needed to understand the big picture before we ran back to 325 when the Nicene was created.

Yet before we headed into Constantine and his need to make Christianity one thing, I said something to the class that caused me to pause. There is a moment where what you’re saying is seen in the light of it’s audience and you stop in your tracks. It’s like the words take on a whole new meaning. I gave the rationale for each of the different creeds and catechisms, why they were written, and all was fine. But when I got to the end, the last one, the Brief Statement of Faith, it was as if I could see the words forming in the air and I didn’t like what I saw.

Essentially, I explained to them that the Brief Statement of Faith was commissioned to recognize and celebrate the reunion of the Northern and Southern Churches. During the Civil War the Presbyterian Church split along Union and Confederate lines and for 120 years essentially didn’t speak to each other. It may be that there were efforts made for reunion, there were probably pastors or leaders who called for such a restoration, but for the life of me, I have never heard of it.

That is what hung in the air: 120 years we didn’t speak to each other. While I am convinced that the split was not a kind of perpetual civil war, it was strange in its persistence and lack of recognition that a sense of common bond should be restored. I mean we all believe in Jesus and that he has saved us from death and sin. Shouldn’t that have been enough to start again together?

In a different context I don’t know if I would have asked the same questions, been as appalled at our lack of union. In an adult ed class fortunate enough to follow me through the creeds, I am sure it would be dealt with a certain amount of cynicism and pragmatic balance. There would have been shrugs of shoulders and raised eyebrows where we say “alas”. But with a group of twelve year olds it just looked bad. It made me sad. 120 years of disunion. Huh?

Every year at this time I read a book on Abraham Lincoln. In the past few years I have expanded this focus to include books on the Civil War. For the better part of my education and reading into American History I have tried to avoid the Civil War. It seems to be a bottomless pit of books and theories and anecdotes and ideas. As I have dabbled a bit these last few years the good news is that I have yet to drown, but I certainly haven’t gained a great foothold either. These waters are deep and filled with cunning currents.

This year’s book of choice was Upon the Altar of the Nation. It is a moral history of the Civil War. The author is asking the question of justice: how did the North and the South justify the war as they fought it? For such a question the historian, Harry Stout, looked to newspapers and sermons and political speeches. There are also letters and diaries. But I must say I was most impressed and disturbed by the sermons.

Preaching a sermon is always laden with complexity if you do it right, but preaching a sermon about shooting people who are your neighbor is, well, a heavy burden. On the bright side, the pastors in the Presbyterian Church took the high road after Lincoln was elected. When Lincoln won states started to leave and take their union with them. This upset many, many people. I am sure the pastors of many churches were upset, but they kept it to themselves. For the most part we played the kingdom card: a sermon address the kingdom of God, not the kingdom of man. Reforming the soul is far and away enough of a challenge without trying to wade into regional politics and presidential elections.

Yet the high road ran out at Fort Sumter. While the only casualty in the fracas where the militia of Charleston claimed the fort from the Federal soldiers was a horse, a horse did die in the battle, this was a whole other affair than mere secession. As soon as votes gave way to gunfire, we were talking about something different. Now we are talking about the future of the nation not a protest of Lincoln’s election in 1860.

The high road was left with such insults in sermons like the southern folk are not really Americans; they are Southerners as they call themselves. Pastors began to wade into the waters of the conflict. In fact they called people to join them.

All of sudden “patriotism” made it into the sermons and the need to find resolve. This was all rather lofty and intelligent and bold. (Everyone likes a bold sermon unless you don’t agree.) But then it really changed; then there was Bull Run. It would seem that Bull Run changed everything. Bull Run was the first battle of the Civil War where actual armies faced each other. Oliver Wendell Holmes, the famous chief justice, lived and fought through Bull Run. And his experience, in some ways, defined the experience of the nation. It changed him and us forever. At that moment he left aside all the naïve, youthful exuberance that led so many to enlist in 1860 and ’61. Holmes was in the Massachusetts volunteers who were in the chaos of war for the first time. And in that chaos he lost something and yet he gained something as well.

The sermons that followed Bull Run not only had the element of patriotism and courage and determination, but there was a new element, a new dimension. Pastors started to infuse theological expressions and doctrines into the conflict. Baptism of blood, a sacrifice, the altar of the nation: these are like nuclear warheads in the arsenal of Christian doctrine. When you start talking blood and dying for others and redemption of an altar you are no longer in a political dispute regarding states’ rights, a dust up that has gotten out of hand; you are in a fight for what is the will of God.

We can see this most clearly in how Lincoln responded to Bull Run. This was a whole new ball game. What he did was call the North to spend a day in fasting and prayer; he proclaimed a fast day. Lincoln would do this three times during the Civil War. At three different moments he would say we need to pray as a people; we need to humble ourselves as a people. Not just a few, not the religious. Everybody needs to repent. And lest we feel there was some sort of greater sense of devotion in the North, Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, declared 10 fast days during the course of the Civil War.

The fast day proclamation that Lincoln wrote after Bull Run is straightforward. We have been blessed and we seem to be ungrateful children who have not been able to play nice with others. We need to repent, to pray, and to fast so that God knows that we are mindful from whence comes all these blessings. The part I love in this is that, so early in his presidency, there is a sense in how he sees the events that God is governing each and every step. Every battle, every twist and turn, God is there. God was challenging us as well as blessing us. And there is in this early proclamation a thought that was percolating. What if these events are meant to purify us as a people and make us right once again?

I found the idea that the president would call the nation to fast an intriguing idea until I read the proclamation he wrote in 1863 for another fast day. This proclamation was a whole different level, a wholly other man. Like Holmes and his experience at Bull Run, two years and hundreds of thousands of dead and so many more wounded, had brought Lincoln to a different place, a different world so to speak. Lincoln’s fast day in 1863, his call to the nation to repent, revealed a new man. The same of course, but different. No more were there obtuse, cautious references to our sins and the need to pray and repent. By 1863 Lincoln turned to the North and said we are the most dreadful of sinners. We have been blessed without measure, but we have forgotten our God. It was a sentence that stood alone in his proclamation: “we have forgotten our God.” Those were the words of a president to a nation at war. He said this to us as it were.

In this proclamation Lincoln is beset with a deeply troubling question, a moral question, a question of salvation or damnation. He asks the nation to ponder whether this war is a test to refine us, or a curse that is meant to bring wrath upon us without hope or benefit. This is not a rhetorical question. He is not saying, could we be this bad, could we be this doomed? There is nothing hypothetical here. He says spend a day fasting and praying with this question. Is this purifying or damning?

The Civil War is a place where angels fear to tread. It opens up a lot of questions we need not answer if things are going to keep working, keeping going on as they have. But the moment where you decide to sacrifice your sons and daughters and they die, is without question a moment in our history we like to forget, or at the very least treat as some sort of moral imperative we couldn’t avoid. Because to remember and in remembering offer a rationale and explanation demands that we live and believe and be a people in ways that is at the very least very inconvenient.

As I read over Paul’s early letter to the Thessalonians, a letter where he was trying to explain what death meant to the Christian, there were a lot of images before me. I could see sense of shock and confusion, a kind of despair that grief could let ravage the soul. His church in Thessalonica was hurting and confused and this was his first pastoral response to a real life question. In light of Christ, what does it mean when someone dies?

There were lots of questions and moments of confusion in the emerging church. Jesus died and was resurrected and then ascended and supposedly was coming back soon. Are we not going to die before Jesus returns? Will we be resurrected like him? Does his ascension mean heaven and earth have become very close together- commingled? What sort of time line are we talking about? Months, years, decades, centuries? These were some of the questions Paul faced.

Some of the questions he answered well, some not so well. But there was one abiding truth he kept coming back to in all his answers. No matter what Jesus died for us and this has changed everything. When someone dies for you, gives up their life for you, you should see life differently. The easy disposition that somehow all that is good in life is just there for the taking, takes on a whole different view. All of a sudden you look at what you have as a gift, as a sacrifice, as only because someone gave up their life for you. Paul said no matter the time or the manner or the method, your life is not your own, it has been bought with the price of him who died for you, Jesus Christ.

America is always commingled with this. There is always a kind of blending of our life being hard work and our life being this gift we could not have dreamt. At Bull Run people gasped and were confused and wondered what in the world is happening. But then they took a step back, like Lincoln, and wondered what if there are moments in our life that are meant to remind us of how blessed and loved and wrapped in mercy are our souls.

By 1863 he knew we didn’t need a step back but a falling on our knees. For the beauty of life was being wiped away and a pall of death and loss was wrapping both the North and the South. It could be that the churches played such an intimate role in the justification of that war that they really couldn’t talk to each other until the memory had faded into lore. It could be that we were just so busy trying to take care of other things we didn’t need to say, we are one in Christ, we belong to each other. It may be. Or it could be that the question of purity and damnation was answered in the affirmative on both sides.

This is the slippery slope of the Civil War. Once you start down this path you start speculating and calibrating the machine of “what might have been or should have been.” Yet what is deeply troubling is that I always find those moments shining a light on our time. I can’t help but ask what if, what if there was a fast day declared tomorrow? Of what would we repent? True, we are not in a Civil War, and slavery is no more, except in the Western States, but it is very apparent that we have forgotten our God. We live as if our blessings are our own. We say we believe but live as if it is not important. Certainly not tantamount. I wonder if a fast were called tomorrow would we pray that our fortunes are restored or would our prayer be that our churches be reborn? Our churches have been broke long before the latest down turn of the market.

At Bull Run something happened that changed everything. Young men died for us. They gave up their life so we could live. On Calvary Jesus died so we may live, so our days would be right and joyful. I am pretty well convinced that as a people neither of these holds meaning for us any more. They died so we may live, but we don’t live as if that was necessary. That was what changed Lincoln by 1863. He could see that the sacrifice, which had become unnecessary, was now all that was required. We needed the sacrifice of our God. That was what he meant when said, “we have forgotten our God.” Amen or Alas.