News
and Opinion
A
Tale of Two Presidents
Forrest Church
December
13, 1998
I
almost didn't change my sermon topic yesterday when I sat down to write
this sermon. I was going to be preaching about prayer. And who knows,
when it comes to the mess our President and Congress have put us in,
prayer may be as good a recourse as any. We could pray that the president
would finally own up to his lies, put himself in legal jeopardy and
liberate everyone in our country, including himself, from the shame
of impeachment. We could also pray that the Republicans in Congress
might show at least a hint of our founders' prudence and admit that
the president's actions, self-admittedly squalid and ugly, come nowhere
close to the bar of high crimes and misdemeanors they set for impeachment.
But I'm afraid it's a little late in the day for prayer. And since all
of us either are or should be preoccupied by the finally solemn and
certainly sobering drama being acted out in Washington, I must again
share my thoughts about the crisis in our country.
Before
I do, let me say this. A liberal pulpit is a very different place from
a fundamentalist or orthodox pulpit. This has nothing to do with politics,
it has to do with religion. A liberal pulpit is a free pulpit in two
important ways. I am free to say what I believe, and you are free to
disagree with me. In my sermons, books and columns, I don't speak for
you, I speak for myself. I try as best I can to draw from our rich tradition,
and I always try to temper and balance my own views by listening to
yours, but my conclusions remain my own. You may recoil at them, but
you are not compromised by them. That is because you too, as members
of a free faith, are liberated, even charged, to follow your own conscience,
your own light.
That
is not to say that I don't get in trouble now in then for my public
ministry. I know that many Democrats in this congregation have been
troubled by my strong support for Mayor Giuliani, even by my active
participation in his administration as Chair of the Mayor's Council
on the Environment. Even my mother has a few problems with this. My
mother is a yellow dog Democrat. You could put the best Republican on
the block up against her neighbor's yellow dog, and she'd vote for the
dog. The good news -- and I believe in the spirit of our faith that
it is good news -- the good news about my ministerial confidence, is
that if I can survive my mother's censure, I can certainly survive yours.
Just
remember, the robe I wear on Sunday morning is not a clerical robe,
it is an academic gown. My authority is not vested from on high, but
from within. My charge is to speak the truth as I see it, not as you
ought to see it. This holds for my political beliefs as much as it does
for my theological ones. When I came to All Souls twenty-one years ago,
I did so with the faith that we could grow together in service and in
love: that was the most important thing. But I also came here in the
knowledge that I would be free to develop a public ministry. Mine is
admittedly a modest public ministry, but your support, not necessarily
of my views but of my freedom to preach and publish them has been a
sustaining gift. For this, I thank you from the bottom of my heart.
One
final word before I begin. Years ago a treasured colleague told me that
if I ever get through an entire sermon without offending someone in
the congregation, I will have failed in that week's job. By that criterion,
let me thank you in advance for this morning's successful sermon.
Let
me begin by saying that I am absolutely appalled by what is going on
right now in Washington. As disgraceful as President Clinton's behavior
has been -- and no one, including he himself, disagrees with that, at
the level of irresponsibility and wanton neglect of our nation's higher
interests, the Congress has trumped that behavior in aces and spades.
You
can understand the frustration Republicans in Congress feel. The president
has sinned. Even worse, having lied and been caught, he keeps dancing
on the coals.
But
as much as they try to twist his lying about sex into a matter of state,
the subtext here is religious, not political. Ours is a profoundly religious
nation. From the founding of our country until today, we have placed
our leader's morals closer to the center of our national debate than
in any other democracy.
But
until today, we had the good sense to keep the zealots on the sidelines.
If we had not, articles of impeachment could have been introduced against
almost every one of our presidents.
Congressman
Thomas DeLay suggested recently that if we cannot impeach a president
for lying -- even about sex -- not only our own country but all of civilization
will somehow suffer. Even placing adultery aside, which for practical
purposes the Republicans seem to have done, this is a religious statement,
not a political one.
The
point of law they cling to is lying under oath. Until now we have had
the good sense never to put one of our presidents under oath to see
if he is lying. Apart from impeaching the entire presidency, not to
mention Abraham, Jacob, and King David, such an imposition of morality
on politics is completely unsustainable.
I
invite the Religious Right and their Republican servants to go back
to the Bible. What makes their flawed heroes any different from our
flawed president?
"Abraham,"
the Pharaoh asked, "is Sarah your sister? May I therefore lay with
her?" "Yes," he lied.
"Are
you truly Esau, my first born and heir, that I may bless you?"
Isaac asked. "Yes," Jacob lied.
And
David sent his mistress's husband to the front lines to die in battle
in order to marry her.
It
would take far more than a sermon to list presidential lies far worse
than those told by President Clinton. Does this exonerate him? No. Not
before God. But when Congress starts playing God, judging where Jesus
might suggest they should not dare to judge, this religious nation toys
with inquisition.
President
Washington was the first of our nation's leaders to be arrested according
to religious law. On a Sunday morning in December, 1789, he was arrested
on his way to church. According to a report in the December 16 Massachusetts
Centinel, Washington lost his way riding through Connecticut. Having
agreed to attend worship in New York the next morning, he awakened early,
mounted his horse, and took off at a fast clip toward the New York-
Connecticut border.
What
Washington neglected to consider -- or chose to overlook -- was that
riding at full speed in Connecticut on a Sunday was against the law.
Before he crossed the border, an alert tithingman (a religious cop)
halted the president, and cited him for violating the local Sabbath
statutes.
My
guess is that President Washington did worse things than this during
the course of his presidency, but I am grateful that Kenneth Starr was
not the tithingman. For when the tithingman discovered that it was the
president who had sinned, he let him go.
Back
then and almost until today, the president has often been above the
law. Even the special prosecutor who was looking for dirt on Richard
Nixon left much of it under the rug.
Yet,
in President Clinton's case, his crimes are close to being underneath
the law -- lying about a sexual indiscretion in a civil case that was
subsequently thrown out of court, and then repeating that lie to a special
prosecutor who received the information in a questionable way. Fortunately,
most Americans get away with such low crimes and misdemeanors.
But
today's tithingmen are different than in Washington's time. They are
more like God's prosecuting attorney in the Book of Job. He tried first
to do in Job by destroying his wealth, then his family, and finally
his heath. A good enough prosecutor can get anyone on something.
Finally
Job broke and cursed God. God's prosecuting attorney, Satan, had won
his case.
If
Bill Clinton is not as good a man as Job, we can certainly hope that
Ken Starr doesn't turn out to be as good a prosecutor as Satan.
Watching
the House Judiciary Committee hearings, I couldn't help but feel as
if I were falling down a rabbit hole and through a looking glass. We
are back with Alice in Wonderland. Yes, our President is "Reeling
and Writhing," which is far from a pretty thing to see. But in
the Mock Turtle's school ("Once I was a real turtle," he admits),
the President's detractors are hell-bent on teaching a heroically resistant
American public the different branches of impeachment Arithmetic: "Ambition,
Distraction, Uglification, and Derision."
Before
we succumb to their logic, we might examine it's most glaring inconsistency.
Many right-wing critics hold a president of their own country whose
politics and behavior they find despicable to a far higher standard
than they hold another country's president whose crimes were exponentially
greater, but whose politics they find congenial.
Our
president is not the only president in trouble right now.
Consider,
as many of President Clinton's critics are reluctant to do, the high
crimes and misdemeanors of Augusto Pinochet. In Great Britain for medical
care, the eighty-three old general and past president of Chile was arrested
two months ago following an extradition request by a Spanish judge.
His crime was not lying under oath about a sexual affair. The charges
against him are murder, torture and genocide.
In
a governmental coup twenty-eight years ago, General Pinochet overthrew
Salvador Allende, the elected president of Chile. Allende was not a
good president. I trust that most commentators, especially conservative
critics of our own president, would consider Clinton a boy scout in
comparison. But the people had spoken, even as the people of our country
have spoken. And if Allende makes Clinton look good, Pinochet made Allende
look even better. Not only did General Pinochet subvert the people's
will, but in the process, a process that continued long after he seized
office, President Pinochet orchestrated the murder of more than three
thousand Chilean citizens.
No
one, not even President Clinton's strongest critic, would dare suggest
equivalency between Bill Clinton's sins and President Pinochet's. Yet
some of Pinochet's most prominent defenders number among Bill Clinton's
most arduous detractors.
Take
William F. Buckley for instance. He won't cede an inch of moral ground
to our openly contrite president, yet with respect to Pinochet, a man
who admits to none of his crimes, dismissing his prosecutor's as "liars,"
here is what Mr. Buckley has to say: "the General Pinochet business
really burns us conservatives up. The reason being that it is, above
all things, an act of ideological malice."
Speaking
of ideological malice, consider the party line votes in Congress for
Impeachment. And then consider how some of these same critics of our
president come down squarely in favor of President Pinochet.
We've
all heard about self-hating Jews and self-hating Gays. He might not
recognize himself as such, but Bill Buckley and other Clinton critics
who happen to be apologists for Pinochet are self-hating Americans.
Our president lied under oath about sex. To liberate our country from
sin they want to drive him from office. President Pinochet is guilty
of murder, torture and genocide, and they want to protect him from prosecution.
Dismissing the Spanish government's appeal for extradition, Buckley
concludes that "Every Spaniard with a sense of history should be
giving thanks every day for having had an Augusto Pinochet in their
past."
In
Wonderland, Alice forgot her name. In frustration, she swore that she
should "never try to remember my name in the middle of an accident."
If we in this country don't remember our name very soon, if we continue
to ignore the legacy of prudence and restraint we have received from
our founders, we may pass the Mock Turtle's course, but having forgotten
our history and thus perverted our heritage, we will fail as Americans.
© All Souls 1998
