One Nation Under God

     VOLUME 1                     ISSUE 24

                  

              “ONE NATION UNDER GOD'

Courts possess very potent powers, both coercive and moral.
Although that power is asserted over an entire culture it is not
dramatic because it proceeds incrementally, but since the
increments accumulate, it is all the more potent for that. What
Judges have wrought is a coup d'etat-slow-moving and genteel,
but a coup d'etat nonetheless.   Robert Bork
                

          Each day, after a moment of silence, over 47,000 children enrolled in the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County School system begin the day by standing with their hand over their heart, facing the flag of the United States of America and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. It is the policy of the school system, a requirement for every class.  “One nation under God” each child proclaims.  For the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, the Constitutional rights of these children are being violated.  Circuit Judge Alfred T. Goodwin, wrote in a recent opinion:

In the context of the Pledge, the statement that the United States is a nation ‘under God’ is an endorsement of religion. It is a profession of a religious belief, namely, a belief in monotheism. The recitation that ours is a nation ‘under God’ is not a mere acknowledgement that many Americans believe in a deity. Nor is it merely descriptive of the undeniable historical significance of religion in the founding of the Republic. Rather, the phrase ‘one nation under God’ in the context of the Pledge is normative. To recite the Pledge is not to describe the United States; instead, it is to swear allegiance to the values for which the flag stands: unity, indivisibility, liberty, justice, and — since 1954 — monotheism. …A profession that we are a nation ‘under God’ is identical, for [constitutional] purposes, to a profession that we are a nation ‘under Jesus,’a nation ‘under Vishnu,’ a nation ‘under Zeus,’ or a nation ‘under no god,’ because none of these professions can be neutral with respect to religion. 

         

          Newdow vs. Elk Grove Unified School District *will soon be decided by the United States Supreme Court.  It is a curious case.

          The Pledge of Allegiance was the authored by Francis Bellamy, who was both a socialist and a Baptist minister.  In 1892, while serving as Chairman of a committee of State School Superintendents, he introduced the Pledge to celebrate of the 400^th anniversary of the discovery of the New World by Christopher Columbus.  The word “equality” was omitted from his original draft in deference to a widely held belief by some that equality toward African Americans and women was not required.  In 1954, after a campaign by the Knights of Columbus, Congress added the words “under God”.   

Michael Newdow, an atheist, is the estranged father of an eight year old student in the Elk Grove California school district. Believing that the school system was promoting religion, Newdow filed suit. Despite the fact that his ex wife has legal custody of their child, he claims that his fundamental right to direct the religious education of his child is violated by the school opening each day with the Pledge. The child, a Christian who actively participates in her church, does not object to the daily recitation . Nevertheless, the Ninth Circuit considered “the coercive effect” of the Pledge upon the elementary aged child reason enough to declare it unconstitutional.

The First Amendment of the Constitution was adopted in 1789 and reads as follows:  “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”   Several states, including North Carolina, refused to ratify the Constitution until this Amendment was adopted. Considering the worship of God to be an unalienable natural right and owing to the fact that nine of the twelve original states had some form of established state religion, no one was in favor of a national religion.

 The Amendment prohibits Congress from making any law inhibiting the free exercise of religion.  Further it mandates that the Federal Government refrain from favoring one religion over another or  from discriminating against any citizen on account of religious belief.

Religion has always been intertwined with American government.  No serious study of the history of our Republic could conclude otherwise.  Reverent appreciation of the blessings of God toward our country has been a part of our Government since its inception.  America has been and remains a religious nation. The disestablishment of religion was a practical response to the government of a pluralistic society. It enabled citizens to reach a moral consensus concerning government without being distracted by theological differences.  It never was intended to create a secular government indifferent to the blessings of an Almighty God.

Over the years in one case after another, the Supreme Court has steadily moved our nation from its religious roots toward a secular indifference to religion. Historian Thomas West points to the obvious consequence of this movement: “Government's ban on God is particularly striking in light of this fact: the Declaration of Independence says liberty is our inalienable right only because we are "endowed" with that right by our Creator. Our principles supposedly require us never to breathe a word to school children about where those principles come from. But if we refuse to acknowledge that foundation of our principles in "the laws of nature and of nature's God," what do our principles rest on? If liberty is not the gift of God, it must be the gift of government. But what government gives, government may take away. As Jefferson said: without God, liberty will not last.”

 Liberty is not a creation of a secular world.  Liberty is a self evident expression of God’s love for mankind.  John Foster Dulles correctly observed: "Our nation was founded as an experiment in human liberty. Its institutions reflect the belief of our founders that men had their origin and destiny in God; that they were endowed by Him with unalienable rights and had duties prescribed by moral law, and that human institutions ought primarily to help men develop their God-given possibilities.”

The sovereignty of God is not affected by the removal of religion from the classrooms of this country.  It is the sovereignty of the people who are challenged by the omission. Only someone unfamiliar with religion could ever conclude that the historically descriptive phrase “one nation under God” is a prayer. Yet, if it is a prayer, let us hope that it is a prayer answered.  If it is religious coercion, let every citizen be so compelled. God speaks to the heart of mankind in a voice too loud to be muffled by the dictates of the Supreme Court of this land. Liberty is the legacy of our forefathers and the means by which life, justice and equality are secured.  For how shall we pass the blessing of liberty to the next generation?  How can “this nation, under God, have a new birth of freedom - and the government of the people, by the people, not perish from the earth” without each new generation understanding from whence our liberty comes?

As the Supreme Court considers this case,* will you pray with me a graduation prayer ruled unconstitutional in 1992:

God of the Free, Hope of the Brave –

For the liberty of America, we thank you.

May our children grow up to guard it.

May each of us strive to fulfill what you require of us: To do justly,

to love mercy,

to walk humbly with the Lord, Our God.

(* the case never reached the issue of whether the pledge contains a prayer in that it was ruled that the Plaintiff had no standing to sue- prayer answered I guess)

** Atticus penned this column years ago but with recent discussions of the Pledge in school I felt it appropriate to re-publish) 

The True Meaning of Christmas by Frederick Beuchner

First Sunday of Advent

“The house lights go off and the footlights come on. Even the chattiest stop chattering as they wait in darkness for the curtain to rise. In the orchestra pit, the violin bows are poised. The conductor has raised his baton. In the silence of a midwinter dusk, there is far off in the deeps of it somewhere a sound so faint that for all you can tell it may be only the sound of the silence itself. You hold your breath to listen. You walk up the steps to the front door. The empty windows at either side of it tell you nothing, or almost nothing. For a second you catch a whiff of some fragrance that reminds you of a place you’ve never been and a time you have no words for. You are aware of the beating of your heart…The extraordinary thing that is about to happen is matched only by the extraordinary moment just before it happens. Advent is the name of that moment.”

— Frederick Buechner, Whistling in the Dark

Frederick Buechner, "The Annunciation"

"In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God to a city of Galilee named Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgin's name was Mary," and that is the beginning of a story – a time, a place, a set of characters, and the implied promise, which is common to all stories, that something is coming, something interesting or significant or exciting is about to happen. And I would like to start out by reminding you that this is what Christianity is. If we whittle away long enough, it is a story that we come to at last. And if we take even the fanciest and most metaphysical kind of theologian or preacher and keep on questioning him far enough – Why is this so? All right, but why is thatso? Yes, but how do we know that it's so? – even he is forced finally to take off his spectacles and push his books off to one side and say, "Once upon a time there was...," and then everybody leans forward a little and starts to listen. 

We want to know what is coming next. There was a young woman named Mary, and an angel came to her from God, and what did he say? And what did she say? And then how did it all turn out in the end? 

The story Christianity tells is one that can be so siimply told that we can get the whole thing really on a very small Christmas card or into two crossed pieces of wood. Yet in another sense it is so vast and complex that the whole Bible can only hint at it, a story beyond time altogether.

Yet it is also in time, the story of the love between God and man. There is a time when it begins, and therefore there is a time before it begins, when it is coming but not yet here, and this is the time Mary was in when Gabriel came to her. It is Advent: the time just before the adventure begins, when everybody is leaning forward to hear what will happen even though they already know what will happen and what will not happen, when they listen hard for meaning, their meaning, and begin to hear, only faintly at first, the beating of unseen wings.

from The Magnificent Defeat

by Frederick Buechner

Christmas is not just Mr. Pickwick dancing a reel with the old lady at Dingley Dell or Scrooge waking up the next morning a changed man. It is not just the spirit of giving abroad in the land with a white beard and reindeer. It is not just the most famous birthday of them all and not just the annual reaffirmation of Peace on Earth that it is often reduced to so that people of many faiths or no faith can exchange Christmas cards without a qualm. 

On the contrary, if you do not hear in the message of Christmas something that must strike some as blasphemy and others as sheer fantasy, the chances are you have not heard the message for what it is. Emmanuel is the message in a nutshell. Emmanuel, which is Hebrew for "God with us." That's where the problem lies.

The claim that Christianity makes for Christmas is that at a particular time and place "the high and lofty One who inhabits eternity" came to be with us himself. When Quirinius was governor of Syria, in a town called Bethlehem, a child was born who, beyond the power of anyone to account for, was the high and lofty One made low and helpless. The One whom none can look upon and live is delivered in a stable under the soft, indifferent gaze of cattle. The Father of all mercies puts himself at our mercy. Year after year the ancient tale of what happened is told raw, preposterous, holy and year after year the world in some measure stops to listen.

The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth. A dream as old as time. If it is true, it is the chief of all truths. If it is not true, it is of all truths the one that people would most have be true if they could make it so. 

Maybe it is that longing to have it be true that is at the bottom even of the whole vast Christmas industry the tons of cards and presents and fancy food, the plastic figures kneeling on the floodlit lawns of poorly attended churches. The world speaks of holy things in the only language it knows, which is a worldly language.

Emmanuel. We all must decide for ourselves whether it is true. Certainly the grounds on which to dismiss it are not hard to find. Christmas is commercialism. It is a pain in the neck. It is sentimentality. 

It is wishful thinking. The shepherds. The star. The three wise men. Make believe. 

Yet it is never as easy to get rid of as all this makes it sound. To dismiss Christmas is for most of us to dismiss part of ourselves. It is to dismiss one of the most fragile yet enduring visions of our own childhood and of the child that continues to exist in all of us. The sense of mystery and wonderment. The sense that on this one day each year two plus two adds up not to four but to a million. 

What keeps the wild hope of Christmas alive year after year in a world notorious for dashing all hopes is the haunting dream that the child who was born that day may yet be born again even in us. 

Emmanuel. Emmanuel.

Those who believe in God can never in a way be sure of him again. Once they have seen him in a stable, they can never be sure where he will appear or to what lengths he will go to or to what ludicrous depths of self-humiliation he will descend in his wild pursuit of man. If holiness and the awful power and majesty of God were present in this least auspicious of all events, this birth of a peasant’s child, then there is no place or time so lowly and earthbound but that holiness can be present there too. And this means that we are never safe, that there is no place where we can hide from God, no place where we are safe from his power to break in two and recreate the human heart because it is just where he seems most helpless that he is strong, and just where we least expect him that he comes most fully.

For those who believe in God, it means, this birth, that God himself is never safe from us, and maybe that is the dark side of Christmas, the terror of the silence. He comes in such a way that we can always turn him down, as we could crack the baby’s skull like an eggshell or nail him up when he gets too big for that.

God comes to us in the hungry man we do not have to feed, comes to us in the lonely man we do not have to comfort, comes to us in all the desperate human need of people, everywhere that we are always free to turn our backs upon.

It means that God puts himself at our mercy not only in the sense of the suffering that we can cause him by our blindness and coldness and cruelty, but the suffering that we can cause simply by suffering ourselves. Because that is the way love works, and when someone we love suffers, we suffer with him, and we would not have it otherwise because the suffering and the love are one, just as it is with God’s love for us.

 Frederick Buechner, The Hungering Dark

Christmas itself is by grace. It could never have survived our own blindness and depredations otherwise. It could never have happened otherwise. Perhaps it is the very wildness and strangeness of the grace that has led us to try to tame it. We have tried to make it habitable. We have roofed it and furnished it. We have reduced it to an occasion we feel at home with, at best a touching and beautiful occasion, at worst a trite and cloying one. But if the Christmas event in itself is indeed—as a matter of cold, hard fact—all its cracked up to be, then even at best our efforts are misleading.

The Word became flesh. Ultimate Mystery born with a skull you could crush one-handed. Incarnation. It is not tame. It is not beautiful. It is uninhabitable terror. It is unthinkable darkness riven with unbearable light. Agonized laboring led to it, vast upheavals of intergalactic space, time split apart, a wrenching and tearing of the very sinews of reality itself. You can only cover your eyes and shudder before it, before this: “God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God… who for us and for our salvation,” as the Nicene Creed puts it, “came down from heaven.”

Came down. Only then do we dare uncover our eyes and see what we can see. It is the Resurrection and the Life she holds in her arms. It is the bitterness of death he takes at her breast.

Fredrick Buechner--Whistling in the Dark 

A Christmas Prayer | Frederick Buechner

Lord Jesus Christ, thou Son of the Most High, Prince of Peace, be born again into our world. Wherever there is war in this world, wherever there is pain, wherever there is loneliness, wherever there is no hope, come, thou long-expected one, with healing in thy wings.

Holy Child, whom the shepherds and the kings and the dumb beasts adored, be born again. Wherever there is boredom, wherever there is fear of failure, wherever there is temptation too strong to resist, wherever there is bitterness of heart, come, thou Blessed One, with healing in thy wings.

Savior, be born in each of us as we raise our faces to thy face, not knowing fully who we are or who thou art, knowing only that thy love is beyond our knowing and that no other has the power to make us whole. Come, Lord Jesus, to each who longs for thee even though we have forgotten thy name. Come quickly, Amen.

— “The Face in the Sky” in Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons

Hurricane Lamp - Matthew 5:16

Vol. 1                                                     Issue 23

“Let your light shine before men, that seeing your good works, they will praise your Father in Heaven.”  Matthew 5:16

Just outside of the back door of the R.J. Reynolds High School gymnasium in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, stands an oak tree.  On Friday evenings in the fall of 1973, this oak tree was the meeting place of high school football players attending pre-game devotions.  I don’t remember many of the devotions, but on one occasion the subject of the lesson was Matthew 5:16. The devotion was led by a senior tailback whose father was a Presbyterian minister. It was one of the first verses I committed to memory. 

What an awe-inspiring proclamation Jesus makes to the Disciples:  “You are the salt of the earth! … You are the light of the world! … Let your light so shine before men, that seeing your good deeds, they shall praise your Father in heaven.” (Matt.5: 13, 14, 16)

The order of the two pronouncements is interesting. The first is a proclamation of substance; the second is a proclamation of derivative effect.  A Christian must be something before he can affect others. A development of a certain quality of life must precede the dissemination of that life upon others. 

In the First Century,salt and light were essential and much sought- after commodities. Salt was an essential preservative. Meat, especially, would spoil if not salted soon after an animal was slaughtered. What a sad implication this description has for the rest of the world.  For if Christians are the world’s salt, the clear implication is that the rest of the world, absent the preservative, is nothing more than a rotting, decaying shell. 

What then is the purpose of salt?  Salt is an agent by which meat is preserved. It is an antiseptic temporarily preventing the natural putrefaction of a dead animal. Such is a function of a Christian in a dead and dying world. The presence of a Christian intermingled with the world will delay and sometimes even prevent the inevitable decay of morality.  Our presence alone reminds even the most degenerate of individuals of the principles of fairness, kindness and respect for others. 

Salt is also an element that brings out the flavor of bland and tasteless food.  The presence of salt changes the perception of food, making it more desirable. Similarly, disciples living in a cruel and uncaring world offer a different perspective to situations that most of the world finds tasteless.

Common perceptions often give way in the face of abundant- living disciples.  To Christians, death is not to be feared, but celebrated.  Service to others is not some burdensome obligation, but instead a joy. The vituperation of enemies is not met with retaliation, but with prayer.  Forgiveness as an essential part of life removes the clutter of grudges and vengeance.

The presence of Christians in the world is that of a good infection, healing wounds, relieving pain and suffering, and making the quality of life, even in the most miserable of places, joyful!

We become luminaries only as a result of the development of a saltiness in our life.  For a Christian, light is the natural derivative of salt. How the Christian interacts with those living in a dark world is the true measure of our discipleship.

In an age void of electricity, darkness was the curse of mankind.  All activity ceased without the presence of light. If Christians are light, the implication of a world living in self-imposed darkness is abundantly clear.

Observe how it is our light - our works, rather than our personalities which draws others to God.   We are beacons revealing the paths to God, but the same light exposes the ugliness, the pettiness and the evil of the selfish world in which we live. 

Last Sunday, Reverend Kevin Frack delivered the meditation before the communion service at Ardmore Moravian Church.  He held up a lantern to illustrate the point of his lesson. He explained that railroad workers and lighthouse keepers used this kind of lamp.  Even in the midst of driving rain storms, the light contained in the lamp would shine forth, protected by glass encasement.  Once he lighted the lamp, he waved it around to illustrate his point.  The flame shined forth.  Nothing he could do would affect the beacon.

It seems that this lantern was known as a Hurricane Lamp, for once lit, the light was quite safe from the elements.  Neither wind, nor rain would affect the beacon. Even in the middle of a hurricane, this lantern’s light would shine brightly.  Only impurities in the fuel could weaken the flame, and only mud or debris covering the lamp would obscure its beacon.  The Hurricane Lamp was a personal lighthouse for all who carried it, lighting paths in the dark night and providing warnings to unsuspecting travelers.

Our faith, then, observed Rev. Frack, is like a Hurricane Lamp. As the only light in a very dark world, the illumination Christians provide is what the world sees of us. Only impurities – the contamination caused by our sins – will ever diminish the flame.  Only the debris of life can obscure our beacon.  His meditation was an exposition of Matthew 5:16, a verse I learned beneath an oak tree some 30 years ago.

It was a fitting end to a busy week for me.  On Tuesday, I was in Washington, for the ceremony honoring the opening of the 109^th Congress* and the beginning of the term of Richard Burr as United States Senator from North Carolina. I recalled Matthew 5:16 on that day as well.  For you see, the tousled haired tailback, who led the devotions beneath the oak tree in 1973, is now the junior Senator from the State of North Carolina.

Being certain that good works are sure to follow the tenure of Richard Burr in the United States Senate, let’s make sure that praise is not given to the government he represents, but to the God he serves.

*(This article was written in January 2005...much time has passed Senator Burr is now the senior senator from North Carolina having been re-elected in 2010)