11/21/54

Scripture: Hebrews 11: 1-16.

The ancient Psalmist wrote, with genuine thankfulness, “The lines have fallen to me in pleasant places; yea, I have a goodly heritage...... Therefore my heart is glad, and my soul rejoices; my body also dwells secure.” [Psalm 16: 6, 9]. Here is an expression of great faith in the love and providence of God. It is a faith that is not dependent upon the outward circumstances of life -- for Hebrews and Christians have held to that faith, in fair weather and foul, in comfort and in misery, in slavery and in liberty. It is not an economic order, nor a state of bodily health; it is not a reflection of the abundance or the destructiveness of nature. It is a state of mind and spirit in the individual soul, and, to a degree, in the people of the religious community.

That Psalmist was not without sorrow and suffering. Numerous psalms refer to sorrows, to sufferings, to injustice and hatred. The writer knew, and had endured, adversities. But he was conscious of God’s presence, both in the sunlight of daytime and in the long watches of the night.

The Psalmist was glad for the great heritage of faith. And so may we be glad for that heritage in our time. So far as we people of this community and nation are concerned, we may well be reminded that Thanksgiving Day can be held as a Day of Remembrance for those heroic people who paved the way, so laboriously, and at such cost and sacrifice, for generations to follow afterward. Such a day may be dedicated not alone to prayers of gratitude for blessings of abundance and of inheritance, but to rekindled faith in the Giver of blessings and to recharged lives. We might briefly think of a few of these forefathers is spirit to whom we owe so much of the character of our religious and national heritage.

1) William Bradford was born in England in 1590 in the village of Austerfield, in Yorkshire. He was an orphan boy, thoughtful, studious, venturesome. By the time he was 12, he had become a faithful reader of the Bible. As a youth, he walked ten miles distant to Babworth to listen to the young Puritan preacher, Richard Clyfton. And he became a member of the worshipping fellowship gathered in the home of Postmaster William Brewster, in Scrooby. It was under the influence of these men, and of John Robinson, who was to become his pastor in Amsterdam and Leiden, Holland, that Bradford gained his vision of the church as a fellowship of Christian believers, free, and pledged “to walk in his (God’s) ways, made known, or to be made known unto them, according to their best endeavor, whatsoever it should cost them.”

After the moves to Holland and to the new colony at Plymouth, William Bradford was elected governor of the Plymouth Colony, and served 31 years. He was a community builder, a man of action who learned by experience that “all great and honorable actions are accompanied with great difficulties and must be both enterprised and overcome with answerable courages.” (There’s a lot in that for us in our times and our enterprises.)

Bradford was official leader of the colony, giving his services without salary, caring for innumerable administrative details, dealing wisely and humanely with the Indians, and continuously filled with his boyhood vision of the Beloved Community, the church of his utmost devotion. In his book, History of Plymouth Plantation, he wrote these lines:

From my years young in days of youth,

God did make known to me his truth,

And call’d me from my native place

For to enjoy the means of grace.

In wilderness he did me guide,

And in strange lands for me provide.

In fears and wants, through weal and woe,

A Pilgrim passed I to and fro.

2) Another of these forefathers was Thomas Hooker, who was born in 1586, four years earlier than Bradford. Hooker, who became one of the distinguished company of English Puritans, was educated at Cambridge. He became a minister. But his outspoken and effective advocacy of the Puritan cause brought upon his the wrath of Archbishop Laud, and he had to flee to Holland. From thence he and his congregation came to New England in 1633 (13 years after the Pilgrims). They settled in the neighborhood that is now Cambridge, near Boston; but in less than a year moved to Connecticut.

One of the reasons for the move to Connecticut appears to be that Hooker disagreed with the Massachusetts folk over the fact that the franchise was restricted to church members, whereas he thought each responsible adult male should have the vote. He was primarily a preacher of outstanding ability. But he was also a statesman whose ideas became potent in the thinking of all the colonies. His theories are preserved in a sermon of 1638, in which he said: “I. That the choice of public magistrates belongs unto the people by God’s allowance. II. The privilege of election, which belongs to the people, therefore must not be exercised according to their humors, but according to the will of God. III. They who have power to appoint officers and magistrates, it is in their power also to set bounds and limitations of the power and place unto which they call them.” Hooker’s political ideas were very much in advance of many other leaders of New England; for he advocated the democratic principle that all adult men (not the church members alone) have the right to elect officers.

But the voters are not to exercise this function “according to their humors” or whims. They are to be guided by “the will and laws of God.” Hooker would not agree with a great deal of our voting habits, which too often are “according to humor” indeed!

Here then is the remembrance of two of our forefathers in American life whose faith, ideas and action lent inspiration to the first democratic constitution, and the founding of our Republic. The heritage of faith which brought this nation into being is a religious heritage -- the kind of religious faith that went into action. That little band of Protestant exiles who came to Plymouth in 1620 brought that for which subsequent generations can be lastingly thankful. Unlike Spanish explorers of the time, who came to new lands to plunder and exploit, those Pilgrims came “with flame of freedom in their souls, and light of knowledge in their eyes.” They came to build homes and schools, to pursue honest industry and agriculture, and to develop religious living.

Within 5 months after landing, half of that little band of 101 Pilgrims had died. They faced all types of danger and sorrow and suffering. Just to read of their hardships is painful. But when spring came, and the Mayflower returned to old England, with its comforts for all who would conform, not one Pilgrim boarded the returning ship. All chose to remain in a new homeland. They founded one of the most remarkable colonies the world has ever known. In their Mayflower Compact, we have the spiritual origins of our American system of government, and our concept of responsible political freedom.

The way of life of those Pilgrims, and of the Puritans, was not American democracy completed. It was only a beginning. They worked out the democratic ideals slowly and often painfully. Let it be remembered that their achievements were wrought by people whose chief aim in life was to glorify God. Others with strong religious persuasion came along to add their testimony in faith and action. There was Baptist Roger Williams of Rhode Island. There was the liberating influence of the Quakers. As early as 1650, Jewish refugees came to America to escape the cruel Portuguese Inquisition and to find somewhat more safety in Peter Stuyvesant’s New Amsterdam. Colonies all up and down the Atlantic seaboard brought to fruition the faith of the Hebrew-Christian tradition in vital, venturesome form.

They were like Abraham who had faith to go out, not knowing whither he went, because he was sure it was right, and the will of God for him. They were like Paul who launched his great missionary journeys, not knowing what the next day would bring to him but confident in the love and power of God. That is a faith to live by.

A popular magazine, a few years ago, carried an article entitled “The Churches Rise Again.” It called attention to new types of church building; to an increase in total church membership; to current church attendance; and to what it inferred was the robust health of the religious enterprise. One of the interesting themes of the article was that what appeared to be going on is not really new. It is a requickening of religion and the place the church in American life had in America’s formative years. The church at the center was the pattern then, with its building located on the village green or the town square, and its life at the core of experience in the community. Any renewal of vital religious interest and activity is both a forward surge and a reassertion of appreciation of our heritage.

We got careless, for a long while in America, of the truth that our national greatness had its foundation not in excellent natural resources, not in productive and inventive genius, nor in any innate superiority of the “genus Americanus” over other people and races, but in religious and moral conviction! Perhaps it takes the threatening spectacle of a malignant materialism fanatically surging ahead in Russia, China, Eastern Europe and parts of the far East and Africa with vocal minorities elsewhere, to shock us into the recognition of what we are, and ought to be! We are to walk not by knowledge alone, not by political connivance alone, not by military might alone, not by economic success alone, but by faith that God has a will and a way for all these things and that we are to trust His way.

Not only are we to trust, but we are to move with decision. Abraham trusted God by moving ahead into the unknown land. Paul went ahead with plans to get the Christian gospel planted all over the Roman empire. Those Pilgrims moved, to Holland and to New England, and having arrived at Plymouth they stayed there and dug in. An active faith is both trust and decision. If faith be only supine trust it becomes impotent.

That astutely able and salty old layman, Shailer Mathews, who was for many years Dean of the University of Chicago Divinity School, has given us an arresting definition of hell. “Repeatedly,” he wrote, “I have thought that hell might be pictured as an everlasting committee meeting on a good cause that could never be brought to pass.” The paralyzing knowledge of just why a thing can’t be done brings to naught the visions of far too many, making, in Kipling’s words, “the perfectest hell of it.”

When I was a student, one of my tasks in preparation for the degree which I sought at the University of Chicago, was to write a thesis. A distinguished professor counseled me to do a lot of reading and preparation. When I found it hard to get my ideas crystallized in one of the chapters, he suggested that I needed to do yet more reading and researching. He was in no hurry for me to get the thesis written, but he did want me to keep moving with the searching and thinking and knowledge that would bear fruit in a thesis that he could approve from a candidate for that degree. But he also gave me another most valuable piece of counsel. He told me that when I had done a worthy amount of preparing, the best way to write was to get started. Organize those ideas, pick up a pen and begin writing! It will need correction and revision, but begin and move, said he. Such was the faith of one professor in the academic world. And it is a practical part of any effective faith, anywhere.

The man of faith must live by it! He opens his own inquiring mind and will to the will of God. And then when he knows, or even thinks he knows, the will of God for him, he will do it with his might. He will not be governed by expediency, or the popular trends of the day. Though public opinion polls are significant to him in understanding others, he will not let them be his god. He will act on the basis of his own faith in the good and loving will of the Eternal. His morals will not alone be the customs or “mores” of his group, but his conviction of what God decrees is right. His confidence will remain in the power and goodness of God, the Eternal God.

And such a man or woman is not to be disheartened or cast into despair, because he is confident that the issues of life are with God. It is this kind of trusting, vigorous, active, moving faith that characterized the forefathers, whose character and achievements we hold in recognition at this Thanksgiving season. It is this kind of faith by which we ourselves propose to go ahead.

“We hold the challenge of a noble line,

God grant us grace to give the countersign.”

---------------------

Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, November 21, 1954.