July 5th, 2009

Proper 9
July 5th, 2009

Americans have always sung their faith.
From native American songs, drums, and flutes, through the harmonies of Anglican psalm singing at churches like Old North Church in Boston and Bruton Parish in Virginia, to Roman Catholic Gregorian chant in Spanish Florida and California; to the cries of lament and longings for freedom of African slaves; to the boisterous praise songs of camp meetings and revivals, Hebrew chant and now Hindu and Muslim and Buddhist sacred songs—Americans love to sing their prayers!
Today, mindful of this weekend’s celebration of our country, I want to look at four hymns as lenses to focus on some of the strands that have uniquely formed our spiritual lives as American Christians.

Processional: “The Spacious Firmament on High” Blue hymnal #409.
Not officially an “American” hymn. Joseph Addison was an English poet who never ventured across the Atlantic to the colonies. The poem itself, based on Psalm 19, was published in an English literary newspaper in 1712.
I chose it for this morning because it reveals an important strand of American spirituality in the English colonies and in the first years of kind United States. This strand—we still get this in New England—is a kind of “gentlemanly distance” from God.
Joseph Addison held a point of view very important to Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, and other Founding Fathers.
They were “deists”—That means that they believed in God, yes, but not a personal God. In their minds, God was the “great clockmaker,” the creator who had set the world going, but then stepped back and let it work itself out according to laws of nature which were just being discovered by Isaac Newton and others.
This attitude was not un-religious nor un-spiritual. It expresses deep reverence and awe which comes from what one of my professor’s used to call “the size gap” between God and God’s world:
Let’s read aloud together the first verse. As you read the words, try and feel in your imagination the holy awe the writer felt toward the Creator of such a perfectly lawful and orderly uiniverse: . . . .

This “gentlemanly reserve” toward God was quite prevalent in colonial times and in the early days of the United States.
But the 19th century gave rise to two urgent and powerful movements towards a greater intimacy with God.
Gospel: “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen” LEVAS 175
African slaves, pushed to desperation by captivity, cruelty, disruption of families, had nowhere or no one to turn to beside God. This was the God who had freed the Israelites from slavery in Egypt and that gave them hope.
But sometimes all they could do was lament: “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen, Nobody knows but Jesus.”
There’s no size gap here, no, not at all-- no reverent distance,no philosophy or complicated theology—the slave is crying from his or her very bones to the only One who might possibly listen..
Offertory: “In the Garden” LEVAS 69
Meanwhile waves of religious fervor were burning through white communities in the United States during the 19th century in a series of what were called “Great Awakenings.” Women and men sang their hearts out at huge revivals.
The God of the revivals was not at all the distant and disinterested Clockmaker of the Revolutionary War period. On the contrary, God, especially in the person of Jesus, was vividly, emotionally present, saving them right there in the church or tent or open field, healing their bodies and forgiving their sins.
For many individuals the fervor of revivals eventually gave way to a quieter, but maybe even more intimate, sense of God or Jesus as a personal friend. These people felt perfectly comfortable talking with God and confidently asking for help..
“In the Garden,” written in 1912, expresses this radical sense of intimacy. Some of us may love this old hymn. And I suspect that others of us, it’s embarrassing, because it’s so off-the-charts sentimental.
And yet . . . , and yet . . . , isn’t there something gripping in the idea that you and I can walk, like Mary Magdalene after the Resurrection, with Jesus himself beside us? Anywhere? Any time? What if it’s really true that Jesus won’t put up any barriers between us.
I have just read a history of Alcoholics Anonymous which points out that this has been the favorite hymn of many recovered alcoholics over the years Why?. Because only such a sense of intimacy with Jesus/God/their “Higher Power” that allows alcoholics and other addicts to make the leap of faith and surrender their lives to a God who truly cares for them.
Let’s pray this hymn, saying verses one and two with the chorus, and while we’re speaking, imagine that we’re walking with Jesus in a July garden:

Recessional: “America the Beautiful” #719.
Written at the top of Pike’s Peak by a young woman professor from Wellesley College in 1893.
She’d just traveled west by train for the first time. She’s seen the “alabaster city” of Chicago all spruced up for the Columbian Exposition. She’d watched the “amber waves of grain” as the train crossed Kansas on the 4th of July.
On the top of Pike’s Peak, Katherine Lee Bates’s heart burst out in a prayer for her country. I love this hymn: it doesn’t express uncritical admiration nor a jingoistic thanksgiving for a perfect nation. Rather, Bates’ prays that her country’s physical beauty may be matched by moral and ethical beauty.
Each verse concludes with a prayer, one of which is repeated—“America! America! God shed his grace on thee, and crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea,” and this, which deserves to be prayed before every deliberation of every governmental body in this nation: “America! America! God mend thine every flaw, confirm thy soul in self-control, thy liberty in law.”