Text: "Your heart was proud because of your beauty. You corrupted your wisdom for the sake of your splendor." Ezekiel 28:17
On Tuesday we will celebrate the anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence-the 224th if I have calculated correctly. Anniversaries are always somewhat bittersweet occasions when they are thoughtfully considered: a time for looking back to recall moments of joy and achievement, but also a time to review our mistakes and difficult times as well. I will always savor the refreshing honesty of a friend who once addressed a group of friends who had gathered to celebrate his and his wife's wedding anniversary. "Ruth and I have enjoyed 20 years of marriage," he began. "And 20 out of 24 isn't bad!"
Americans like to celebrate the 4th of July with a bang, with fireworks, parades, and patriotic speeches. But those of us who gather to worship on this day do so in a slightly more reflective way. It is not our task to be cheerleaders for the American way. We will kindly leave that to the politicians. Our task is to reflect on this great project, this experiment, this work in progress, that we call the United States of America. "We hold these truths to be self-evident," says our most famous political document, drafted by one of our most eloquent statesmen, Thomas Jefferson, "that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Those words still have the power to stir us. But we are chastened when we reflect that in its own context, "all men" referred literally to males, and with few exceptions, to white males only. It has taken the better part of two and a quarter centuries, not to mention a savage and extravagant civil conflict, to extend that definition to include all citizens-a process, we are reminded, that is to this day still incomplete.
So when we gather in places of worship to reflect on this occasion, we choose to do so not from the perspective of all the indicators by which we measure our successes and our blessings-our military triumphs, the Dow-Jones Industrial Average, the Gross National Product. Indeed we have much for which to be grateful, for we are living in an era of unprecedented material prosperity that staggers the imagination, even if it is still not yet equitably distributed. But religious folk are guided by a different set of principles, different sets of criteria for measuring our relative successes and lack of success. While the United States leads the world in many economic categories, it also ranks among the lowest among the industrialized nations in infant mortality rates, adult literacy, and breadth of health care coverage. For our criteria Christians, Jews, and Unitarians alike have traditionally turned to the great Biblical themes, to the prophetic tradition of Israel-Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel- and especially to the claims of justice.
In our society justice is represented most prominently by the figure that stands atop the Supreme Court building: the woman who holds in her hand the scales by which to balance competing claims. She wears a blindfold to signify her impartiality. That is the Classical world's contribution to our image of justice: the blind lady with the scales. But in the Bible the image of justice is represented quite differently. It is the prophet Amos who speaks of the great plumb line that God holds against all human institutions, and all human undertakings. Not an impartial blind lady with scales, but a God who sees and who holds all creation accountable against a fixed standard--a plumb line. Or as another in Israel's rich prophetic tradition, the prophet Micah puts it: "What cloth the Lord require of you, O people, but to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God." And we take to- heart these searing words first addressed by the prophet Ezekiel to the ancient city and kingdom of Tyre centuries ago:
Your heart was proud because of your beauty, you corrupted your wisdom for the sake of your splendor.
And to hear these words as if they were addressed to us. Here. Now. Today!
"Corrupted!" That is a tough word. It is not one with which we feel comfortable having to wrestle in our midst. We associate "corruption" with a kind of moral debasement, an impairment of integrity. I do not have to remind you that the past couple of years have been a really difficult time in American public life. It was embarrassing to watch our President twist and turn while trying to evade the truth about his personal behavior that was at the very least silly and juvenile. Nor was it amusing to observe the machinations of a special prosecutor who began to resemble a cross between Inspector Javert and Captain Ahab. There was an air of corruption that lay all over this past year's impeachment proceedings, whichever side you found yourself. Though it provided the late-night comedians with exquisite fodder for their monologues, it was not really very funny, more sad and embarrassing than anything else.
But whatever you may personally think about Mr. Clinton, or the leaders of either of the major political parties, this was not, I think, the kind of corruption that Ezekiel had in mind when he addressed these pointed words to the kingdom of Tyre. Our word "corruption" derives from a Latin verb-rumpere-that means literally "to break," and by implication, "to break faith with." It does not have a whole lot to do with a descent from good to bad morality. Rather it means to alter from the original plan, version, or vision. It is in this sense that I believe Ezekiel uses the term. And in this sense it applies equally well to us as it did to this ancient city. He was speaking not about individual morality, but about something that was deeply rooted in the fabric of the entire society. And it reminds me of what Rabbi Abraham Heschel, the late professor of the Hebrew Bible at Jewish Theological Seminary, used to say about one of the central messages of the prophetic tradition: "In a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible."
Corruption, of course, in American history is not after all a new phenomenon. It has been with us from the very beginning. Even before we got off the boat Governor John Winthrop was warning us how we were likely to behave, but called us to a higher purpose, something akin to the Israelites mission to become "a light to the nations:"
It is the essence of every society to be knit together by some covenant either expressed or implied....For the work we have in hand, it is by mutual consent, through a special overruling providence....Nor must we think the Lord will bear with such failings at our hands as He cloth from those among whom we have lived [in our native lands].... For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill: the eyes of all people are upon us.
Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards-remarkable preachers and theologians both- were deeply aware of the corruption in the society in which they lived. William Lloyd Garrison denounced the whole society when he declared that the Constitution was an agreement with sin and a covenant with hell because it legalized slavery. Abraham Lincoln came close to defining corruption when he said in the midst of the Civil War: "Intoxicated with our success, we have forgotten God." What all these commentators saw and addressed was not merely the abasement of personal morality-examples of which are easy to spot at all times-but something deeper, more profound. They sensed there was something in conflict at the very heart of the American project, something contradictory: a conflict between our ideals and our practice.
Perhaps the greatest and wisest of all observers of American life, Alexis de Tocqueville, sensed this contradiction as well. De Tocqueville visited the United States in the early 18th century and looked at this burgeoning democracy with an admiring but observant eye. He was hoping to learn lessons that could be applied to his native France following its revolution of 1789. What de Tocqueville observed still holds remarkably true for our time. He saw two great forces opposing one another in the American experience, and straining against one another. On the one hand he observed a great civic and public spiritedness, communities of people willing to reach out and help one another to prosper, a sense that we are all in this thing together. He saw that Americans believed that our very survival depends on our ability to transcend individual interest alone and to work together for the common good. As Montesquieu before him had observed:
A republic will survive only so long as its citizens love it. They will love it only so long as they participate in it and care for their neighbor's welfare as well as their own.
De Tocqueville found much evidence that American's passion for liberty included a public spiritedness that led them to care a great deal about their neighbor's welfare as well as their own. At the same time, alongside this civic consciousness, he also observed that Americans had from the very beginning something else intermingling but not identical. That something else was a radical individualism that was especially geared to a market economy. He foresaw that materialism, atomistic isolation, and privatistic withdrawal from society would be nurtured by an exclusive preoccupation with self-interest in the economic sphere. And, that if it advanced far enough it would erode and eventually destroy every one of our free institutions. For even the noblest forms of self-interest must be restrained by a higher morality.
What de Tocqueville further observed was a remarkable and lively institution far different than anything he had previously experienced. This institution, that included all of the churches and synagogues, was the one that consistently stood for a higher morality than self interest. Only there did he discover that indispensable concern for the public good upon which republican citizenship rests. That is why de Tocqueville so admired the religious constitution of America-"the nation with the soul of a church" he called it-so admired the protection of religious liberty here, and regarded religion to be the first among our political institutions. That was not because we had an established church (as in European nations), but because he believed the health of all the free institutions in this country rested upon the vitality of our religious life.
Listen again to what he had to say in the 1830's:
Upon my arrival in the United States the religious aspect of the country Was the first thing to attract my attention, and the longer I stayed there the more did I perceive the great political consequences resulting from this state of things, to which I was unaccustomed. In France I had almost always seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom pursuing courses diametrically opposed to each other; but in America I found they were intimately united and that they reigned in common over the same country.
And, he continues:
Religion in America takes no direct part in the government of society, but nevertheless it must be regarded as the foremost of political institutions of that country, for if it does not impart a taste for freedom, it facilitates the use of free institution.... I do not know whether all Americans have a sincere faith in their religions, for who can search the human heart? but I am certain that they hold it to be indispensable to the maintenance of republican institutions. This opinion belongs to the whole nation and to every rank of society.
It is highly unlikely that were he to visit us today de Tocqueville would find such a consensus of opinion about the validity and vitality of our religious life. But I do not need to remind you that we have come a far distance in the direction of privatization and withdrawal from public life in the past two hundred some years since he first predicted the trend. One singular mark of that trend has been the enormous strength and growth of a consumer economy. We spend infinitely more every year on advertising than we do on all of the churches, schools, and universities combined. All of this is dedicated to a single purpose: to stimulate ever more desire for ever more material goods.
So as we celebrate this 4th of July, let us indeed be grateful for all the blessings of this land, for our material well being, for the physical and natural beauty of this land. But let us also remember and give thanks for this church and all the churches, for all of those who sacrificed so much to protect our religious freedoms. And let us continue to pray for the vitality of religious life in this remarkable land of ours. Nor let us ever fail to be chastened, or fall too far from those other words of that distinguished statesman Thomas Jefferson: "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just." Copyright AllSouls 2000.