First Presbyterian Church of Watertown

Luke 9

“Good Question”

The Rev. Dr. Fred G. Garry

July 1, 2007

How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man?

How many seas must a white dove sail before she sleeps in the sand? How many times must the cannon balls fly before they are forever banned?

How many times must a man look up before he can see the sky? How many ears must one man have before he can hear people cry? How many deaths will it take till he knows that too many people have died?

How many years can a mountain exist before it is washed to the sea? How many years can some people exist before they are allowed to be free? How many times can a man turn his head pretending he just doesn’t see?

The answer my friend is blowing in the wind, the answer is blowing in wind.

Bob Dylan was not much older than twenty when he wrote this song. It would be one thing for a man of his age to ask such good questions; it is quite another to have such a good answer.

At eighteen he left Hibbing, Minnesota and made his way to Greenwich Village. He beat the same pavement of many young minstrels of his day going from coffee shop to bar and back again, any place really that would let him hone the craft of folk music. There was one thing though he did that was a bit different. He tracked down Woody Guthrie.

Guthrie at the time was in a hospital in New Jersey. Unlike many performers who lived on the road and met their end with a failed liver or a body that just wore out, Guthrie was suffering from Huntington’s Disease. By the time Dylan found him the legend was dying. The story goes that Dylan came to visit him often, playing his guitar, and struggling through the conversations of a person whose mind is in tact but their body is turning in on itself. Huntington’s is a hard way to die.

During the recording of Dylan’s very first album there is a long, rambling poem that wasn’t put on the final version. The poem is entitled “Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie.” It is a kind of declaration of being about something without being completely sure what that something really is. At one point he writes, “You need something to open your eyes, you need something to make it known.” It can be freedom, it can be a sense being true, it can be on open road. Whatever it is there is something in me that believes he could see this freedom in the eyes of Woody Guthrie even as he lay dying.

“Blowin’ in the Wind” would be published a few years later, not long before Guthrie would die. I hope though he heard it. I hope in a strange way that he inspired it. I hope it brought him a moment of assurance that the questions he asked in his life would not die with him.

To ask a good question is tough. Most questions lack the power to open the heart, to heal the soul, to challenge the spirit. Behind the good questions of Dylan’s "Blowin in the Wind" it is easy to hear the hard question Guthrie asked in the song he is most remembered for. Like many profound things, the sting and bite is not what we remember. The song, “This Land is Your Land” is sung by one and all, the chorus that is.

The early stanzas are a description of our beautiful nation.

This land is your land This land is my land
From California to the New York island;
From the red wood forest to the Gulf Stream waters
This land was made for you and Me.

As I was walking that ribbon of highway,
I saw above me that endless skyway:
I saw below me that golden valley:
This land was made for you and me.

I've roamed and rambled and I followed my footsteps
To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts;
And all around me a voice was sounding:
This land was made for you and me.

When the sun came shining, and I was strolling,
And the wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling,
As the fog was lifting a voice was chanting:
This land was made for you and me.

I believe these first four stanzas are the reason many petitioned to have the song made our national anthem. I can remember this being a bit of debate as a young person. It is a declaration of a nation, a poem of solidarity and equal blessing. This land, every part, it is a kind of gift for you and me.

Yet then at the end of the song there are some shall we say difficult stanzas that may suggest why the debate never made it too far in terms of displacing the song of Francis Scott Key.

As I went walking I saw a sign there
And on the sign it said "No Trespassing."
But on the other side it didn't say nothing,
That side was made for you and me.

In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people,
By the relief office I seen my people;
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking
Is this land made for you and me?

Nobody living can ever stop me,
As I go walking that freedom highway;
Nobody living can ever make me turn back
This land was made for you and me.

I am sure that the politics of putting such lyrics forward as a national anthem were just . . . well . . . a bit too much freedom for the land of the free.

The question “is this land made for you and me?” nestled beneath all the declarations, all the beauty, and all the rambling, a kind of coming up short, a kind of moment where you open your eyes and see the suffering of others as part of life; this doesn’t strike the listener as the stuff of national pride and patriotism.

A good question though is not to be over looked. I was startled when I saw the question in our national anthem. I sung this song so many times and never saw it.

O say, can you see, by the dawn’s early light,
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars, through the perilous fight,
O’er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming?
And the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.
O say does that star spangled banner yet wave
O’er the land of the free, and the home of the brave?

In this stanza and the rest of the stanzas Key wrote about the flag flying during the Battle of Baltimore in the war of 1812, in each stanza are a series of questions. Each one trying to ask: is the flag still flying?

I never picked up on this until 9/11. In the days after the attack the pastors held a community prayer service. Called upon to preach I felt the weight of what it meant to speak in the midst of tragedy and violence, to speak not only as a pastor but as an American. I believe it was because the rescue workers were quick to raise the flag in the midst of the Trade Towers’ rubble that led me to see the question.

Turing to the community what came to my heart was to ask the question of the flag. Hatred, evil, death and destruction had come our way. True. Yet, in the shock and confusion I found great comfort in the question, does that star spangled banner yet wave? And the answer was yes. Yes it does.

From that point on I’ve seen our anthem and even our nation as a good question. And here is the surprising thing: it has become not just a question of national freedom, but of freedom for all.

This week Mayor Graham invited me to speak to him about our Malawian friends and their time in the North Country. Yet, the conversation took a strange turn as we started to talk about Mexico instead of Malawi. Not long on the air the phone in front of me lit up and he said, “We have a call.” I have to admit a moment of panic. For I had forgotten it was a call in show, people are invited to call in and ask a question. Yet, what came over the phone was not so much a question as a declaration.

The caller was angry that given the numbers of people who seek to enter the U.S. illegally from Mexico, why would we help them? After clarifying our role as helping people who are staying in Mexico and not trying to enter, I had a little Woody Guthrie moment.

I could see the people. As I pontificated a response my mind wandered to childhood images of people. They were walking through the canyons, dying in the arroyos and wondering if this time they will be free. They were the migrant farmers of my youth, the people we call “illegals”. These are ones who pick the grapes and the strawberries, who dig the ditches through the sandstone and landscape the manicured gardens of California. I didn’t mention this on the air then, but I guess I am now, you cannot grow up in California and not feel the weight of irony when people say “it is our land” knowing full well we took it from the very people who are dying in the desert just for a chance to work for next to nothing.

What I did say was to mention a recent article in the New York Times which asked, should we give the statue of liberty back to France? The writer of course was being hyperbolic, but his point was rather simple: if we are no longer interested in the huddled masses, if we are no longer open to the hungry the poor the ones who are broken, if we are no longer a place of freedom for all, should we give the statue that proclaims our land to be such back to France?

It’s a ridiculous question, but on Independence Day we must ask good questions of freedom. Are we the land of the free? Does the banner still wave? Are we still a light shining on a hill? Given how hard it was to bring our friends from Malawi here I pause a bit before I answer.

In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus didn’t pause. When the moment of decision came regarding freedom, Luke says, “he set his face to Jerusalem.” Jerusalem was the place where freedom could be found. To get there he headed down a lonesome highway. He would walk, ramble Woody Guthrie might claim, through the no man’s land of Samaria and touch the untouchables. Along the way his disciples came to ask him a question of violence for those didn’t receive them: he waved them off; new disciples came and made pledges to follow him: he cast them aside as well. It was as if he had set out on a course of freedom and there was nothing to stop him.

Nobody living can ever stop me,
As I go walking that freedom highway;
Nobody living can ever make me turn back

I am not sure if Jesus’ disciples really knew where Jesus was heading when he set his face toward freedom; I am pretty sure, though, they didn’t believe the freedom his gospel promised would be given at the cost of his life. For they didn’t believe even after he did it. One thing is for sure: Jesus was walking a path toward freedom, a freedom highway so to speak.

The freedom highway that Guthrie speaks of is where we need to ask a good question today. Are we walking a freedom highway? And is this highway open to all? Is this land made for you and me? Is my friend, Grace, the malaria coordinator from Malawi welcome on this highway? Is the migrant farmer from Oxacca welcome to walk the highway? How many years can some people exist before they are allowed to be free?

Before you say it is up to them, remember Jesus set his face to Jerusalem so you could be free. For him it was never up to you. The village of Samaria didn’t even want to know what it meant to be free. Jesus set his face to Jerusalem for you and for me, he walked the freedom highway believing that now is the time for people to be free. Free from sin, free from fear, free from death, free from malaria and hunger and violence.

Are we walking the freedom highway? Who is going to walk with us? I am proud to be an American as I believe asking these questions is what makes us patriots and good citizens. Asking the question of freedom and opening our hand to the stranger, the hurting, the broken and the hungry, that is what this land was made for. It’s made for you and me. Amen.