What Happened To That City Upon A Hill?

Sermon preached by John C. Hall on November 6, 2005
Texts - Deuteronomy 7:7-11

7 It was not because you were more numerous than any other people that the Lord set his heart on you and chose you-for you were the fewest of all peoples. 8 It was because the Lord loved you and kept the oath that he swore to your ancestors, that the Lord has brought you out with a mighty hand, and redeemed you from the house of slavery, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt. 9 Know therefore that the Lord your God is God, the faithful God who maintains covenant loyalty with those who love him and keep his commandments, to a thousand generations, 10 and who repays in their own person those who reject him. He does not delay but repays in their own person those who reject him. 11 Therefore, observe diligently the commandment-the statutes, and the ordinances-that I am commanding you today.

Matthew 5:14-16

“You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hid. 15 No one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house. 16 In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.

As you just heard, Jesus told his followers, “You are the light of the world. A city upon a hill cannot be hid.” This was how the first New England Congregationalists thought of themselves, so I thought I'd take some time this morning, since it is Founder's Day, to describe the vision they had in mind, and what their idea of the true church was.

During the 1620s and 1630s thousands of English Puritans boarded ships, sailed across a treacherous ocean, and entered what they called a howling wilderness. Winters, then, were a lot more severe than they are now. They built drafty homes out of logs. There were no wood stoves. It was a very harsh life; death was all around for everyone to see.

The obvious question is: What drove them to make that journey? Most of us were probably taught in school that they were escaping religious persecution, and that's part of the answer. During this period, Puritans were involved in dethroning and executing King Charles I, so there was probably a basis for some suspicion against them. These Puritans were among what are called the “radical Protestants” - Protestants who wanted all Christians to move as far away as possible from anything that even looked Roman Catholic. Their goal was to purify the established church in England.

To give you an idea of what they had in mind: they were against reciting the Lord's Prayer in unison. That was too rote. They were against religious images of any kind. Stained glass windows and vestments were definitely out. Church life and community life outside the church was to be based solely on Scripture. These convictions made them a big nuisance to the established church leaders who called them “non-conformists.”

I also remember hearing, in my school days, that these Puritans came for the sake of religious freedom, but their idea of religious freedom was a lot different from ours. Religious freedom for them meant freedom from competing options. There was no place in the Puritan mind for religious tolerance or religious pluralism. There was only one way - their way - and they came to New England to build a new society around and to enforce it. Worship attendance was required. To become a church member you had to testify that you'd had a genuine conversion experience. And only these converted church members could vote, not just on church matters but on civil matters like raising taxes.

They saw themselves as building the Kingdom of God on earth. They were the City Upon A Hill that Jesus talked about. They were the light of the world, and they believed that when the rest of the world saw them, and especially when the folks back in England saw them, they would follow this Puritan congregational way.

Well, it didn't exactly turn out that way. England didn't follow. In fact, England went in the opposite direction, the monarch was restored in 1660 and that caused a bit of a crisis of faith for the New Englanders.

But they were a truly heroic generation. They had intense convictions. They lived their convictions in the face of terrible hardship. And they established a tradition of intellectual rigor and moral rigor that left a deep mark on the American psyche.

Now we come to Middletown. We just recited the First Church Covenant of 1668. By this time, the church leaders were second generation Puritans - the children of the people who came in the ships. And the reason I find these second generation Puritans so interesting is that, already, the original enthusiasm was wearing off. Ministers complained about a lack of zeal. The people were backsliding. There weren't as many conversions. The reason is took from 1650 when Middletown was settled until 1668 when the Covenant was signed may have been that it took 18 years to accumulate the minimum number of true converted Christians needed to form a new congregation.

Notice in our covenant the words, we will be subject to ye Government of Christ and observe all those lawes yt he hath established in his Kingdome …And yt … we will obey them that are over us in the Lord … Those words are in there precisely because many people weren't submitting to the government of Christ. They weren't obeying those who were over them in the Lord. Non members weren't showing the proper respect for the ministers and church elders. So the city upon a hill was already losing its former glow.

Here we are today, 355 years later and it's hard to see anything in that original vision that remains. We do like the line about “walking one with another” and we like their allowance that God might have other things to reveal in the future. But they would be horrified to see this architecture. All of this looks much too much like the Church of England. They would be horrified by how comfortable we are with religious diversity. They'd be sure we're all headed for the pit of fire.

But I think there is something quite basic that remains. We are still “congregational” in a deep way. We still feel that the local congregation, this group of people we are, is where the action is, religiously speaking. It's here, on Sunday morning, when we're with each other, that our collective religious life emerges. It isn't passed down to us through bishops. It's in our relationship to each other in this local place of ours - in singing hymns and praying together, pondering the Bible together, and pondering our history and future as a church and a nation that our faith is lived out. This is where we hear about each other's sicknesses and deaths and struggles. This is where we learn that we're not alone with those struggles.

When I think of those second generation Puritans hanging on to a form of religious life that they saw slipping away, I actually find some comfort because we're hanging on to a form of religious life that we value. What we're hanging on to is very different from what they were hanging on to, admittedly.

At the Inquirer's Class yesterday, I was saying that one of the things that bind us together at First Church today is that most of us are somewhat skeptical, or very skeptical, of too much religious certainty. A lot of horrible things have been done in the name of religious certainty. We don't believe in forcing or threatening people into some religious mold. This is what makes us liberal. The world is just too culturally diverse to make religious uniformity plausible or even desirable.

Today, this liberal way of ours, this combination of religious feeling and a rejection of religious arrogance, seems to be becoming more and more of an endangered species. Most people today are either totally anti-religious or too sure of their own religious ideas. Humility and caution aren't the sort of thing that stirs up zeal.

But I believe that this liberal voice, this voice that challenges those who do claim to have the Truth straight from God, is a voice that's very much needed in our world.

As a congregation, we're in the midst of discerning our own future. Where are the forces of history pushing us today? For example, just to take one very practical example, are we a congregation that will continue to support two full time clergy? I'd like to think we will, but our pledges are $12,000 behind schedule at the moment, and we started the year with a budget that was already $16,500 out of balance. We're coming to a moment of truth.

Today after worship the Stewardship Committee is going to hand out pledge cards. What we put on those pledge cards, and what we give, will be a collective statement about what kind of church, how active and visible a church, we want this to be.

I believe in this church and our way of being religious. And for that reason, Robin and I will make our pledge to First Church for next year at $600 a month. Not everyone can give at that level or would want to give at that level. And you'd expect this congregation to mean a lot to me. This is where my life is. It's my livelihood. And we reached this level of pledging only slowly over many years.

But I hope First Church means a lot to you too. Being the church has always taken some courage. It has always taken some faith and trust. It has always taken some sacrifice - to use a word that seems to be disappearing from our national vocabulary. It takes some conviction about what's really important.

I hope you will think about what kind of church you would consider worthy of your sacrifice. And I hope you will pray about what pledge you can make that you would feel good about and what pledge would represent what this community of faith means to you.

The mission of First Church is to engage and support people in worship, learning, fellowship, and service, so that all may find in our community the Spirit of the living Christ.  We are an Open and Affirming Church: All are welcome into the full life of our community regardless of their race, age, gender, nationality, marital status, economic situation, mental or physical ability, or sexual orientation.