November 16, 2003 - 23rd Sunday after Pentecost – Pilgrim/Puritan Heritage Sunday
Matthew 5:14-16
    NRSV KJV CEV

“A Modell of Christian Charitie – Revisited”

“You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hid.” Jesus’ words to his disciples had a profound impact on those aboard the Arbella. They were heading across the Atlantic, on their way on an “errand into the wilderness” to join those who had made the Pilgrimage earlier to Plymouth and then Salem colonies. Their preacher that morning, who had taken those words as his text, was not a minister, but an attorney, John Winthrop. He was the elected governor of a colony that had not yet set foot on land, but he knew that there was work ahead and that unless he spoke to them about the deep reason for their journey “over this vast Sea” it would be a fool’s errand. So he spoke to them and offered a Modell of Christian Charitie in the hope, no doubt, that the people would heed and work together to build the colony. They did and three hundred and seventy three years later we still hear the echo of Winthrop’s words.

The Pilgrims and the Puritans, spiritual ancestors for those of us who continue to walk the Congregational Way, laid the groundwork for our nation. The other day I was in a store and what should I see? Little light-up figures of what was supposed to a Pilgrim man and woman. I won’t go into my tirade on what one of my colleagues has dubbed, “HallowThankMass,” but I offer it to you as proof of the continuing power of their story and their example. Those of us who are their spiritual ancestors are, then, more than just keepers of the memory and guardians of the Pilgrim/Puritan mythos. We are the descendants of those who were inspired and moved to make a difference and covenanted themselves with God and one another to do so. We are more than an antiquarian society with funny hats and buckled shoes – we, like them, are keepers of the covenant.

Our spiritual forebears read their world through a number of lenses, the chief one being the Bible. Their concern for a learned ministry was because they themselves wanted to be a literate laity. As they looked through the Bible they saw the theme of the covenant repeated again and again, until finally it was brought to fulfillment in the person and the work of Jesus Christ. It should be no surprise to us, then, that they would pick up the ancient typological understanding of the church as the “new Israel of God” and apply it to themselves and to their errand across the Atlantic.

The covenant that formed Israel into a nation came to them as a result of the Exodus event. They heard the voice of God calling them out of Egypt to go into the wilderness and through that wilderness to the Promised Land. The Puritans – and the Pilgrims are part of the Puritan movement – read those stories, heard them preached, and saw themselves. They had heard the voice of God speaking, “Come out from among them!” Now they were going to go where they could accomplish “reformation without tarrying for anie” – as Robert Browne had exhorted. They would go and show what a pure church, gathered in covenant could look like and show, too, what a holy commonwealth could do to advance the cause of Christ and the good of humanity. So, as Perry Miller, the late Harvard historian described, they undertook this “errand into the wilderness.”

An errand means that there is a purpose. The Pilgrims came because they couldn’t do otherwise. They couldn’t stay in England because of persecution for their views and they couldn’t stay in Holland lest their children forget their true heritage. So, they came to America and set up Plymouth colony – in what they thought was Northern Virginia. Those who came on board the Arbella took passage for a different reason than did the folk on the Mayflower. They came on an errand. They came to set up a church and a government that would meet their view of how life should be in accordance with the Gospel – and I fear they were not entirely kind in their thoughts.

To Winthrop’s mind the “city set on a hill” that the “eyes of all people are upon us” was there only for those who had entered the covenant. It was not the “land of opportunity” that you and I think about. They wanted religious freedom, but only for themselves and they persecuted the Quakers and the Roman Catholics. They drove Roger Williams, the founder of the Baptists, out of Massachusetts Bay into the “cesspool of vice,” that we now call Rhode Island. The errand was not one of toleration, unfortunately.

However, it was one based on the Gospel and because of that, sooner or later, the truth, the wonder does get through. There is abiding wisdom in what Pastor Robinson said to those departing Pilgrims, “The Lord hath yet more light and truth to break forth out of his Holy Word.” That we sit here this morning, still followers of the covenant, but doing so with an eye to broad toleration and with a firm grasp on the need for freedom of individual conscience testifies to that truth. The city set on a hill was built, the lamp was lit, but that doesn’t mean that the city’s boundaries are absolutely set, or that the light is confined to a few.

So, what do we learn from this “second wave” that undertook the “Great Migration” to New England? Well, we learn from them the importance of the common good. The “Modell of Christian Charitie” stressed again and again that the covenant they had entered implied a sense of commonality and mutuality that has framed our understanding of what it means to be Americans. If we have difficulty in our country and find that our culture has become problematic, I would venture to say that it is because we have exalted the individual and individual needs over the concern for the common good. Look at any newspaper, listen to any broadcast and the scandals you see going on with the financial industry, the difficulties in business, or the government and you see people exalting their own wants, their own desires, their own needs without thought to those of others or to the good of the whole. I revisited Winthrop’s model because we need to revisit it, not to return to a narrow, doctrinal position, but to regain our sense of self, of commonality, as a people. That recovery begins, as Winthrop knew, not in a broadcast fashion, but in the lives of individuals who discover the covenant and what the common good means.

Listen to what Governor Winthrop told his people about the need to work together:

If we do not restrain our individual appetites and ambitions, and put the good of the whole before the good of the self; if we are unable to share abundance with those in need; if we are unwilling to take our public responsibility more seriously than our private convenience, then this new society we are seeking to create will be no better than the one from which we are trying to escape. We will be an embarrassment to ourselves and to the world. We will be laughed at as fools on a foolish errand, and we will deserve the ridicule and derision. If we cannot flourish together, we will never flourish privately.

There you hear the essence of what a Christian society should be. The covenant community exists for the common good – we are to flourish together. It goes back to what I told you several weeks ago when I quoted Alexis de Tocqueville, “America is great because America is good. When it ceases to be good, it will cease to be great.” That goodness he saw in the early nineteenth century was the fruit of that errand to plant this wilderness. That it continue to blossom, to grow, and to bear fruit is now our errand.

I don’t think I can improve on Winthrop’s thoughts, possibly because he’s simply drawing from the Scripture.

Now the only way to avoid this shipwreck and to provide for our posterity is to follow the counsel of Micah, to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God, for this end, we must be knit together in this work as one man, we must entertain each other in brotherly affection, we must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities for the supply of others necessities, we must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience, and liberality, we must delight in each other, make others conditions our own rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our communion and commonality in the work, our community as members of the same body, so we shall keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace, the Lord will be our God and delight to dwell among us, as his own people and will command a blessing upon us in all our ways…..

There is the description of a covenant community gathered for common good. There is what we are to be for God and for one another and then reach beyond the walls of this meetinghouse to the common good of this community of which we are a part. If it sounds prosaic or simplistic, it’s not. If it sounds as though it is work and that it is difficult, it is. If we are to “avoid this shipwreck” it implies that we pull together and serve, as God would have us serve to be a community mercy, of justice, and of love.

The image of the “city set on a hill” has stuck with us. The sociologist of religion, Robert Bellah, would even coin a term for what it engendered – “the civil religion” or “the religion of the republic.” We Americans have an exalted sense of ourselves and of what our republic, our way of life and government means – and we should have. However, to quote Jesus elsewhere, “to whom much has been given, of whom much will be required.” We need to revisit the model of Christian charity because it is only that basis that this “errand into the wilderness” will ever really succeed.

We cannot accomplish this mission as individuals. We can only accomplish the goal of this great errand as a community drawn together for the common good. Churches like ours all across our land need to revisit the model of Christian charity and put aside the differences, the theological and political nuances that divide us and hold before all people the example of mercy, of justice, and of love that is the charter of our salvation and the source of our hope. The city set on the hill, the light shining for all to see is there not to call attention to itself, but to accomplish a purpose. It is a place of refuge, a safe haven, for all who seek to know truth and live in freedom. It shines so that others may see not it, but themselves and the world in which they live. As Governor Winthrop concluded, so will I:

Therefore, let us choose life, that wee, and our Seede, may live; by obeying his voyce, and cleaving to him, for hee is our life and our prosperity.