First Church in Cambridge, Congregational UCC
4 July 2004
Mother of Exiles
In our first reading today, the prophet Isaiah imagines a day when no idolatrous oppressor will ever again be able to carry God's people into exile, enslave them, lay waste to their land, occupy their cities, or corrupt their religious life. In that new day, God's people will have learned to worship rightly, marrying justice to their praise, and mercy to thanksgiving. God will heal their wounds and (we read uncomfortably) severely punish all those whose injustice, violence and indifference have made them evil in God's eyes.
Isaiah also paints an image of the holy city of Jerusalem in that new time. She will be like a gigantic mother, large enough to carry all the people in her lap. He imagines her dandling the nation on her knee and nursing the whole world at her breast—the hope and consolation of all who have been imprisoned, expelled, deported and abused. This image of Jerusalem as a mother is also a maternal image of God; indeed, towards the end of the passage we hear God say, "As one whom a Mother comforts, so I will comfort you."
Some national leaders call on their people to be patriots, to love the Fatherland. Isaiah seems to be calling on his to be matriots. To his imagination what it means to be "one nation under God" is to have all the lost children gathered up in safety and contentment onto a large woman's "glorious bosom". It means to be mothered by one of those mega-moms you don't mess with.
Now, maternal images have their problems—it's a small step, for example, from being mothered to being smothered, and no one likes to be infantalized; but when the alternative is a stern, rampaging patriotism that comes dressed in uniform armed to the teeth, this maternal image, idealized as we know it is, increases in appeal.
Our nation has just such a maternal image in New York harbor. She is the green colossus we call the Statue of Liberty, also known as Lady Liberty, or Miss Liberty, although if you have seen her powerful face up close you know that she is no Miss and no lady. She has another name, however. It is a name we rarely hear and never use, the name that poet Emma Lazarus gave her—"Mother of Exiles".1
Lazarus wrote the sonnet that is inscribed on the statue's base. Many of us learned it by heart when we were kids in grammar school. Today when we read it we may sense in the poem something we missed back then—a certain arrogance that pits a young, bounteous America against an old, spent Europe, and a subtle condescension towards the immigrants and exiles it wants to help, an attitude that shaped discrimination against them for generations, in the name of Anglo-Saxon Protestant purity.
Lazarus' poem also does not mention the coalition of the unwilling, the millions of indigenous peoples wiped out or forced to the margins, or the millions who came in chains to lay down their lives and labor at the feet of the plantation economy. But the poem nonetheless conveys a strong conviction that this nation's greatness, indeed its uniqueness, rests in its generosity of spirit, its willingness to take in practically everybody sooner or later, to foster and adopt the "huddled masses yearning to breathe free."
At a minimum, both the poet of our second reading and the prophet of our first agree on this: a nation that is free, joyful and just—a godly nation, if you will—is that nation that opens itself willingly to a great human homecoming in which one group of people is always declaring to another that no matter where you once belonged, you now really could and truly do belong here. This is the American ideal we celebrate on July 4, and it is a quintessentially matriotic one.
Episcopal priest and missionary, Grant Gallup,2 has pointed out that this matriotic ideal was already weak as a mainstream sentiment in America before 9/11. After that terror, it is practically nonexistent. In a time of war, leaders cannot afford to rally us around a woman—unless perhaps it is a Stepford wife, pliant and pleasing—and especially not a Mother of Exiles, whose strong face is set towards welcome and whose lifted lamp lights the way for all the "wretched refuse" of other lands to come to her ample embrace. That old ideal is a problem now, and (as Gallup says pointedly) even the unmarried, maybe lesbian, Jewish literary agitator, Emma Lazarus, might herself be turned away at one of our borders, were she to come back from the dead and ask to come in.
These days the desire to remain true to the ideal of "world-wide welcome" is for some a sign that you do not understand or care how dangerous the world is. For some it says that you are not much of a patriot (which is ironic, since this instinct to fling wide the golden door is the one dimension of our nation's genius that has made me and others feel good about assenting to the ubiquitous public prayer that God might bless America). Yet nothing in our national character so nearly approximates the biblical God's plan for the creation as the intention to facilitate a great gathering-in of the "tempest-tost" and the wretched poor.
There is another image in today's readings that merits a mention, the image of fire. Isaiah speaks of divine rebuke and purgatorial flames, God's judgment on injustice and those who acquiesce in it. The fateful lightning of God's sword is to be both terrible and swift, as the Battle Hymn of the Republic says. And when God looses that sword, the Scriptures tell us that wicked people die in vast numbers.
Today we have mostly stopped believing that God rights wrongs in so unedifying a way. This image of God seems more in line with the barbarism of Al Qaeda, and even, sadly, with the war-glorifying rhet0ric of the current administration. But it is not as foreign to us as we like to think. The desire for God (or the police or the government, or someone) to right wrongs violently wells up fast in most human hearts when, say, a child is preyed upon. You hear it all the time on the news from the lips of "ordinary people," parents and friends—"I want that monster to rot in hell," they say without the least hesitation, and they mean it. "I want him to suffer like my child did."
But you don't need to think about others. You need only be honest and consider what you would like to do to someone who abused your child if you were not restrained by law and your own convictions. Then you might begin to understand why the Bible depicts God as full of murderous anger at people who wreak harm on the little ones for whom God has such a passion—first the poor, the homeless, the wretched refuse, the vulnerable; and indeed, when all is said and done, all of us, God's people, God's creatures, God's own.
The image of God's flaming vengeance is not a happy one, in part because it reminds us too much of the way we human beings do business. It is meant to awaken us to the seriousness of evil in the world and in our own hearts. It is not, however, something on which we should build theories about what God actually does or might do to evildoers, although that can be a fruitful meditation for those of us who have become accustomed to living a Christian life that entails little demand, a lot of self-appointed mercy, and few consequences for deliberate sins.
All the same, it is not an image on which we are meant to dwell for long, giving rise as it eventually does to complete skepticism about God's goodness and outright dislike of God, or to the wrong kind of "fear of the Lord." And any meditation we undertake on God's fiery wrath has to be accompanied by a longer and deeper one on the sin-erasing flames of God's endless love and mercy. God has many kinds of fire at God's disposal.
In our readings this morning we find one more kind of fire—the lamp. Emma Lazaraus writes of a lamp lifted beside the golden door, a beacon to the world seeking to find its way into the embrace of our country. But if this national lamp has any prayer of shedding more than a superficial and symbolic glow in our world these days; if it is to become a meaningful sign of continued hope and not a permanent sign of contradiction, it is people like you and me, poor sinners all, who must keep it kindled.
Not because of our merit but by grace alone we have been given another, greater and more necessary lamp to see by, the lamp of the gospel. Imperfect and complicit as we may be in the many terrors of our world, we are commanded by Christ nonetheless to take that precious and powerful gospel light from under the baskets where we seems always to hide it, and to put it on a stand to make the whole world shine.
Friends, we are in a season of political decision. We all know that there is no such thing as religion without social concern, faith without politics. But figuring out exactly how they go together is another matter. We have not been provided with an archdiocesan scorecard. There is no political litmus test for membership in this congregation. (And I do not intend to divulge our parish list to either presidential campaign.) All we have is the gospel. The way we read it here together and digest it in our daily lives must influence the way we size up this current national contest and cast our votes in November.
Again, it is important to note that this is no easy thing to do, since appeals to the gospel have justified and covered a multitude of sins since it first burst upon the world, and many Christians claim its authority for all kinds of cross-purposes. Nonetheless we must not decide our vote without a prayerful consideration of what we understand to be its overriding concerns—economic justice, the inclusion of outcasts and strangers, the knowledge of God as unmerited and unending mercy, and an invitation to place one's life at the service of the least, the acceptance of which is the key to a joy no circumstance can alter.
I know that I do not need to twist your arms to get you to study and discuss the political choices ahead of us; this is a thinking and conscientious congregation! I wonder, however, if even those of us who think the choice is a no-brainer, who have our minds already made up, would be inclined to pray about our choice, to place our decision in the hands of God, imploring the light of the Spirit, and to ask that every citizen might be so thoughtful and deliberate this coming November.
I don't know, but just in case, let me urge us all to take our civic duty seriously enough to reflect upon it in God's presence, and to pray earnestly all the while for our nation, its leaders, and its electorate; to pray for all who live here—citizens, residents, undocumented people, temporary visitors—that we may become a nation true to the best hopes of America's founding vision. Pray that we might all become the most fervently matriotic people God gives us the grace to be.
God bless us all. God bless our world. God bless America.
1
"The New Colossus", by Emma Lazarus (1849-1887)
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.
2Some ideas in this sermon were suggested by one of his, written for this same Sunday.
© 2004, J Mary Luti