BY F. FORREST CHURCH, MINISTER OF PUBLIC THEOLOGY, UNITARIAN CHURCH OF
ALL SOULS, NEW YORK, NEW YORK
Editor’s note: This sermon was originally preached on October 25th, 1992. You may find that the context of an Election Day sermon hasn’t changed all that much.
There’s a noble tradition in the ministry, going back to the 17th Century. One or two Sundays before an election, almost every preacher in the land would devote his sermon to the body politic. It’s a great literary genre. Often, the fire was so hot and the clay so fine that an Election Day sermon was the one sermon a minister might be remembered by.
There was a reason for that. No words were minced. He entered the pulpit and for the next two hours—count your blessings, folks—for the next two hours he proclaimed a jeremiad. As in Jeremiah, the great Hebrew prophet.
Here’s how it went.
The world has gone, or is about to go to Hell. The reason is simple. God is punishing you for your sins. Whatever is wrong in this world is wrong because you are wrong-headed, wrong-hearted, inattentive to God’s commandments, and God is watching and God is angry, and if you keep on messing up you will burn forever.
At least they burned for two long hours. But, nonetheless, by the end of the pastor’s jeremiad, almost everyone who listened did in fact feel at least partially responsible for everything that was going wrong. No more “throw the bums out”; the bums were us.
I won’t give you two hours worth of sermon, since the last man to truly fill a pulpit to capacity just before an election — I’m talking two hours and no doubts — has been gone for at least 150 years. I’m not going to tell you who to vote for. I’m not even going to tell you that everything wrong with this country is your fault, the result of God’s responsive wrath.
Both the candidates for office are flawed men. I accept that. In fact, I want a flawed person in the White House. One who knows that he or she is flawed. The reasons are simple. First, the president will be less dangerous. Second, we will be more accountable.
The president of the United States is not going to save us. The president can help us, can work with us and for us, but is not going to save us. Here the old Puritan preachers were right. The votes we cast for president are much less important than the votes we cast for our neighbors and ourselves, the votes we cast with and in our lives.
So here—that brief stab at a jeremiad behind us—I want to talk about us. Who we are and who we can be. If the United States of America is about anything it is about that. E pluribus unum. Not one for many, but out of many, one. It is finally far less important that the trains run on time than it is that the passengers are willing to take responsibility for one another’s welfare.
We won’t ever get it right; that’s not the goal. In passing judgment, the early Puritan preachers too often forgot the importance of forgiveness. Of loving kindness. Of self-acceptance. Of honest doubts. But they did remind us that we are accountable — that despite our failings we are accountable, not someone else.
So I’m going to make this election sermon a little more personal than usual. My subject is hope and fear.
First to define fear. Hate is not the opposite of love, fear is. When we are frightened, by others, by life itself, we cannot love. We can hide. We can fight. But we cannot love. Conversely, love casts out fear.
We are good at fear. That’s why politicians play on our fears. Fear gives power to others, and inspires us to try to take power away from them. Fear divides and then conquers us. It feeds on our weakness and envy and jealousy. It leads us to follow those who tell us we are victims. It closes hearts and poisons minds.
One of the ways fear drives the world today may, on its face, seem positive. Fear loves order and hates disorder. Fear will sacrifice justice and freedom for order in a minute. I’m not suggesting that disorder is good and order bad. Both are neutral in value. It depends on the ingredients which create them. But, in the spirit of our founders, controlled disorder is far more American than imposed order. Imposed order almost always rises phoenix-like from the ashes of scapegoats. Jews, gays, feminists, Blacks; take your pick.
But let me go back. Let me play with definitions for a minute. Paul said the three great virtues were faith, hope, and love. If the opposite of love is fear, using a similar paradoxical twist of logic, the opposite of faith is belief, and the opposite of hope is certainty.
Faith is confidence, a basic trust in being. Belief is a set of propositions that true-believers say make it possible for one to have faith. It works like this. If I believe, say, that the Bible is the word of God, that Jesus was born of a virgin and resurrected on the third day, my faith could be dashed. Which is precisely how belief kills faith. We believe something, or in someone, and it disappoints us or they disappoint us and we lose our faith.
Think about politics in America today. Surely each one of us has believed at some point in someone, but then times changed or we changed. Camelot came and went and we lost our faith. We become cynical.
Then someone happens along to make us believe again. He is different. She can do it. But they can’t do it. Only we can do it, all together. Think of how many ex-communists joined the Catholic church. The God who failed, fails again and again and again.
Faith should never be sacrificed to belief. Faith says yes to mystery, wonder, possibility, change.
Let me put it this way. I have faith in myself, but I certainly don’t believe in myself. You see the difference. Only faith gets us through a dark night of the soul. It’s the difference between a view and a fortress, the difference between horizons and walls.
As for hope, the opposite of hope is certainty. Hope says things can be different, be better, the world and ourselves strangely redeemed if only we win, align ourselves with life by doing what we can and being who we yet might be. Hopelessness is one form of certainty. Assurance is another. Both squeeze out the ambiguities of hope.
I don’t want my president to ask me to believe in him. I simply won’t. And I don’t want her to play on my fears of others. Believe me, I have such fears, I surely do. And I don’t want him to crush my hope by setting up an impossible dream, any more than I want to succumb to the cynics who have lost their ability to dream.
Instead I want my president to inspire hope. I want her to give me faith. And I certainly want him to encourage me to open my heart to love.
I know it is a lot to ask, but that is what I ask of my president. I ask a lot. Not belief, certainty and fear, but faith, hope and love.
It’s a religious request. I know that. But, after all, this is a religious nation, an experiment in religious freedom, founded in the spirit, not the letter of the scriptures. On Election Eve, I am no more ashamed of making a religious request than my forebears were when they fulminated for hours in just as sincere a desire that everything, somehow, would turn out right.
I ask a lot, because our founders and early leaders asked a lot of us. As Abraham Lincoln once said, “The question is not whether God is on our side, but whether we are on the side of God.”
The United States of America is perhaps the most ambitious, open, vital experiment in government that has ever been fashioned. Our responsibilities are equal to the promise of our dream.
I have great faith in our system of government. I love this country and its people. I hope that our future will fulfill the promise of our founders’ dreams.
Yes, I have my doubts. And I have my fears. All of us do. Yet my faith and hope are strong. We who already have so much will somehow muster the capacity to rise to historic occasions such as this one.
Soon we shall measure ourselves again. If we rise to the occasion, whatever it brings, November fourth will mark not the end of this election, it will mark its beginning.
