On the evening of
September 11, 2001, the church that I served at the time was full of members and neighbors who had found their way, mostly by word-of-mouth to a special worship service. I remember very little about what was said that night – just an overwhelming feeling of shock and grief. I do remember, however, just as the service ended, that one of our members sitting in the front row, a good friend, raised her hand and asked, “Roger, can we sing ‘God Bless America?’”
I thought I could get out of it by pointing out that we don’t have “God bless America” in our hymnals, but she insisted that we could all sing the first verse from memory. She was right. We could and we did.
Now you may be wondering what kind of Godless liberal, freedom-hating, terrorist-loving preacher could possibly object to singing “God bless America”?
I don’t. I like hearing a recording of Kate Smith singing about how we are almost 100 million strong as much as the next person. But it just didn’t seem like the right song for that night in church.
It wasn’t the right song for that night because it’s bouncy, upbeat, confident tune just didn’t match the feeling of unbearable horror and sorrow that we felt that night. Admittedly, the repertoire of American patriotic music probably doesn’t offer a song that expresses sorrow. We are an upbeat, positive-thinking, optimistic nation, which is one of the great things about this land, but it also means that we have a hard time dealing with the fact that bad things sometimes happen in good countries.
We need a new David, the great song-writer of the bible, who could shout with joy at the victories the Lord gave him over his enemies, but who could also write the saddest songs in the world – one of which, “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me” was even sung from the cross. We need a patriot like David, who in our first reading this morning, laments Israel’s defeat in battle at the hands of its enemies, the loss of his best friend, Prince Jonathan, and of Jonathan’s father, King Saul.
We do not have any Davids in America. It’s almost as if tears are unpatriotic. The problem with that is that when patriots don’t know how to cry for their land and what has happened to it, they stop being human and when we stop being human as a nation, we start adding to the long, sad story of man’s inhumanity to man. One of the oldest and most universal insights of the collective wisdom of the world is that human beings never make good decisions when they are only using their heads or only using their hearts. Wisdom is the product of a deep and long conversation between the head and the heart.
That wisdom that combines both the head and the heart is known as “prudence”. “Prudence” has nothing to do with the kind of prudishness that the novelist John Le Carre’ once described as “the ability to spot a sin even before it happened.” Nor does it have anything to do with the over-cautiousness that we often associate with the word. Prudence Is the very practical, situation-based wisdom that chooses the right means to achieve a good end.
David was weeping for a king who was not prudent. Saul, the first king of Israel, is a representative of the mystery of human leadership. Why is it that it is often the leaders with the best credentials that make the worst failures? One only has to reflect on the fact that the three men who came in to the office of President of the United States with the best credentials – who were by far the best prepared to take the reins of leadership – were John Quincy Adams, Herbert Hoover and Richard Nixon.
Saul had all the gifts that a king needed. He even looked like a king. He stood head and shoulders above everyone else. He was brave. He could be cunning. But he was not prudent. Like Richard Nixon, his paranoia got in his way. David was the bravest, most gifted and probably the most loyal of his military commanders, but Saul was jealous when the crowds shouted that Saul had slain his thousands and David his tens of thousands. So Saul plotted to do away with David.
Jonathan, the king’s son, loved David and warned him of his father’s plans. So David fled and lived as a kind of Robin Hood outlaw on the frontier between Israel and the land of the Philistines. Twice, David had a chance to kill Saul. David refused to harm Saul, because Saul was “The Lord’s Anointed” – in Hebrew, the Messiah.
David, too, as we heard a couple of weeks ago, had been anointed by the strange Gandolf-type figure, Samuel, when he was a little shepherd boy growing up in Bethlehem. He believed; everyone, including Jonathan, believed that David would be king someday. But David did not believe in taking history into his own hands. David was prudent. He would not achieve a good end by foul means. In doing so, he only added to his stature when he finally became king.
David’s lament for Saul and Jonathan and the defeat of the Israelite army at the hands of the Philistines is a model of prudence and shows us the path to prudence in public life. Because in his lament David recognizes the fact that bad things do happen to good countries. Especially when they are imprudent. Saul had, as I said, fired his best military commander. He had managed to go from being wildly popular to having really, really low approval ratings. He made a lot of bonehead decisions and never learned from them. He talked a lot about God; he was publicly pious, but he never understood that he was God’s servant, not the other way around.
That, in fact, is the essence of prudence, as we understand it in the Christian faith. We are God’s servants, not the other way around. Think for a moment about those three words, “God bless America”. An English teacher would tell you that sentence is imperative – and those who say it are being imperious. An English teacher would also point out that the sentence should have a comma after “God”. We are saying, “God, bless America!
That’s one of the reasons we don’t sing, “God bless America” in church. We are waiting for someone to write a song that begins, “America, bless God.”
Singing a song like that, of course, would require humility, another virtue that is seldom associated with patriotism in America. Raising the possibility that we might sometimes be wrong, as a nation, is almost grounds for a charge of treason.
In writing the “Battle Hymn of the Republic”, Julia Ward Howe was very sure that the Union armies were doing God’s work by inflicting God’s wrath on the slaveholding states of the Confederacy.
Lincoln was not so sure. Shortly after the embarrassing and costly Union defeat at the Second Battle of Bull Run, Lincoln sat alone and wrote on a fragment of paper a few lines, that he probably kept for awhile, believe it or not, in that stovepipe hat that he wore. His secretary, John Hay, found it in his effects after Lincoln’s assassination and entitled it a Meditation of the Divine Will
“The will of God prevails. In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be, wrong. God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time.
In this present civil war it is quite possible that God purpose is something different from the purpose of either party . . . “
