THE MINORITY WINS
August 7, 2005
Texts – Psalm 85: 8-13
I Kings 19: 9-18
I wonder if you recognize these words –
“Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
They are the opening lines of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. Some of us struggled to memorize and recite them in the now long distant past, didn’t we?
“Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure,” Lincoln said. “It is for us the living,” he concluded, “. . . to highly resolve . . . that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, (and) for the people shall not perish from the earth.”
Are young people today still required to commit such words to memory? I hope so. I hope so.
I’ve been reading a book this summer entitled On the Heels of Freedom by Joyce Hollyday [Crossroads Publishing Co., 2005]. I picked it up while attending our United Church of Christ’s General Synod in Atlanta last month. It is the story of the American Missionary Association (the AMA) – a gathering of New England Congregationalists who came together one hundred and sixty years ago to work on behalf of enslaved African Americans. In the years immediately following Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address the AMA sent out thousands of missionaries to set up over 500 schools and some 200 churches for the newly freed slaves of the South. One of our own members – General Oliver O. Howard – figured prominently in that work. In fact, our Church History which we published last Fall (“In the Center, Reaching Out”) reports that as early as 1867 special offerings to support the AMA’s work were being collected every December by our congregation, and that the AMA’s Annual Meeting was held in this very sanctuary in 1908. It is a compelling story of courage and wonderfully vibrant faith at work, and yet . . . and yet . . .
When Abraham Lincoln delivered his now famous remarks on November 19, 1863, his was a minority point of view. Only a fraction of the public supported him; he despaired of being reelected and of keeping the Union together. Even though the war was successfully concluded less than two years later, “the proposition that all men are created equal” remained a contested one for at least another one hundred shameful years in our nation’s life. Indeed, in her book Joyce Hollyday tells the story of the Reverend Thomas Steward, who in the early 1870s was the pastor of the First Congregational Church of Marion, Alabama, and the principal of the newly formed Lincoln Normal School. “When some local whites threatened to kill the church’s pastor,” Hollyday writes,
“the AMA sent stacks of rifles and Bibles from New York. The accompanying note read: ‘Mr. Steward, it is our profound hope you’ll have greater use for the Bibles.’” [p. 160]
Now the point is simply this – Majorities may decide elections, and armies may determine the outcome of wars, but neither one singlehandedly shapes the future. That’s a task for a different sort of force. Most of the religious and political liberties we enjoy today, certainly, originated not in glorious consensus but from contested views originally held by a devout and demanding minority. Think of the early Puritans. Think too of those who founded our nation. The colonists were a small band taking on the world’s greatest superpower, but no more than twenty percent of Americans were ever willing to fight for the Declaration of Independence.
Over and over, the lesson seems to be this – in the long run, over the long haul, it is the minority which wins . . . but not just any kind of minority. The minority which always wins, this old book says in page after page, is the one which is in tune with the God of Justice and Mercy.
I recognize that this is an idea – a proposition – out of step with the mainstream of our culture. You know and I know that everything now seems to depend on the will of the majority. Right and wrong . . . good and bad . . . these are determined today not by reasoned discourse (with or without reference to the will of God), but by the sampling of public opinion and the increasingly blatant appeal to self-interest.
At our General Synod meeting in Atlanta last month, the delegates (of which I was one) overwhelmingly embraced a resolution calling for equal access for gay and lesbian couples to the rights and responsibilities of marriage in our civil society. In so doing, we became the first and only governing body of a mainline Protestant church in this country to take such a position. It is of course controversial. A member of our extended family clipped a newspaper article reporting that action and sent it to Donna and me. “Can this possibly be true?” he wrote in red ink in the margins; “did Bob attend this convention?” Now we’re really going to have something to talk about at our reunions!
“God is still speaking” is the by-word in our denominational family these days. There is a profound element of truth within that phraseology.
$ Our Protestant forebears parted ways with the Holy Roman Empire because they believed the Bible’s word about submitting in obedience to duly established authority was not God’s last word on the subject. “God is still speaking” they said in so many words.
$ Our Puritan and Pilgrim ancestors separated themselves from King and Country for exactly the same reason. “God hath yet more light and truth to show forth from His Holy Word,” is the way they put it.
$ Our Congregational predecessors here in Vermont were proud to place in our State Constitution an absolute ban on the practice of slavery, even though the Bible said then as it says now: “slaves be obedient to your masters.” God was still speaking, they argued.
$ When Antoinette Brown was ordained in 1853 as a minister of the First Congregational Church of Wayne County, Ohio, thereby becoming the first woman to be ordained in the United States by a mainstream Christian denomination, it was in direct violation of the Biblical command that women should be silent in Church and always subservient to men. “God is still speaking,” they said nevertheless.
Now this, to my way of thinking, is a proud procession of faithful women and men who in every instance were the minority of their time and place, but who sought to be faithful to a higher power and a deeper truth than either popular opinion or political expediency. No ecclesiastical organization or denomination exclusively “owns” such a heritage, but every last one of us ought to strive to be worthy to be called its heirs. By its vote last month, I believe our General Synod took its place in that long line of courageous women and men.
It is hard to be a minority voice; it is lonely and discouraging. “I have been very jealous for the Lord, the God of hosts,” Elijah complained; “the people of Israel have forsaken thy covenant, thrown down thy altars, and slain thy prophets with the sword; and I, even I only, am left; and they seek my life, to take it away.” [I Kings 19: 10] He was ready to quit; he was mired down in despair. The voice he heard in the silence did not chastise him; rather, it sought to remind him that he was not alone and that his job was not yet done. I am still in charge here, God said to him in so many words, and I am still acting. I need you, God said, to join me – “Go, . . . anoint Hazel to be king over Syria; and Jehu . . . to be king over Israel; and Elisha . . . to be prophet in your place. . . . There are yet seven thousand (faithful ones) in Israel.”
The God under whose providence we live as individuals and as a people, whose grace has brought us to this day, more often than not works through the minority – the remnant, the humble few, the small but faithful band. It was so in Elijah’s day. It was so in Abraham Lincoln’s day. It was so in the struggles of our forebears in the AMA. If that is our call in the twenty-first century, shouldn’t we thank God for the privilege at the same time that we earnestly pray for the strength to be faithful?