Texts

Deuteronomy 26:5b- 9

‘A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous. When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, by imposing hard labor on us, we cried to the Lord, the God of our ancestors; the Lord heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression. The Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with a terrifying display of power, and with signs and wonders; and he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey.

Matthew 5:14-16

‘You are the light of the world. A city built on a hill cannot be hidden. 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. 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.

These texts were important ones for Middletown’s earliest settlers. As English Puritans, they came to New England with a high sense of calling. They saw themselves not just as “New Englanders” but the “New Israel” crossing the sea to a “New Canaan,” a “New Promised Land.” I spoke about the Puritans’ place in the larger Protestant Reformation last week.

Today, we want to focus more on Middletown in particular. What brought these English to this particular place, and what were some of the issues they brought with them? What was going on in their minds?

The first Puritans Congregationalists came to America to get away from a bad situation back in England. The 1500s and the first half of the 1600s was a period of turmoil all over Europe, including England. In England, there was a religious civil war, between Roman Catholics and Protestants, over what the official religion should be. (At the time, it seemed critical that everyone should have the same religion.) This civil war brought economic and social chaos, as war always does. It was a very stressful time. There was a lot of sickness and death.

So the Puritans wanted to get out of there, start over, and create a new society. This was their special calling from God. It would be a society with the True Church, the Puritan Congregational Church, as its foundation. The Puritans didn’t come here to promote religious tolerance. They were not tolerant. This was to be a theocracy, rule by the church. They saw themselves as God’s true Chosen People.

And when they arrived in New England, they found something to confirm that sense of chosen-ness. They were surprised to find, in America, large areas of forest already cleared and even cultivated into farms by the native Americans, but the native Americans weren’t there. The land was developed, but relatively empty of people. This must have been a strange experience, but what the colonists didn’t know was that the native people had already died out from diseases brought by European traders and fishermen in the century before.

The colonists interpreted their finding all this tilled, vacant land as proof that they were God’s chosen people: it was God’s Providence! God had prepared the way in the wilderness for them, and now they had a all this vacant country where they could spread out.

One wrinkle in the picture was that some native Americans were still around and somewhat hostile to having their land occupied. The first meeting house of this congregation was a log cabin up in the North End, we believe somewhere near Riverview cemetery behind O’Rourke’s Diner. It had a stockade fence around it, so armed guards could protect the worshippers inside.

But for the most part, the Puritans did very well. Back in England, it was very crowded and unsanitary. Many children died in infancy, maybe as many as a third or half of the children born to a family. Here, almost all the children survived and grew up. Families became very large, and this too was seen as proof of God’s favor.

Why did they come to Middletown? Initially, of course, the Puritans settled along the coast of Massachusetts, but soon they fanned out to Connecticut as well. They settled in New Haven, Guilford and Saybrook along the coast. But there was also a great river highway going right up the middle into the interior, so they migrated to Hartford, Windsor, and Wethersfield. They settled where they found cleared land, those meadows and fields to plant crops and raise their sheep and goats.

When those places got crowded, they looked for new places, and they came here, in 1650, just 30 years after Plymouth. Here at the great bend in the river, they found more of those meadows all ready and waiting. Middletown was named for its location in the middle, halfway between Saybrook and Windsor. And they prospered here.

But they did bring with them, from England, a certain anxiety. As I said, because there had been so much chaos, violence, destruction, and physical suffering back in England, once they got here, order was very important. Everyone was supposed to get in line and stay there, follow the rules, obey the authorities, and agree with the authorities. Because disagreements had torn England apart, here disagreements were something to stomp out right away.

Puritans figured: if God is speaking to us, and if we are listening and hearing, how can we possibly disagree? Today, we have no problem believing that God can tell one thing to one person and another thing to another person, depending on who those people are and what they need and what their situation is. The Puritans didn’t see it that way. God’s Word was God’s Word. It was One Word. It had to be the same for everyone. There should be uniformity of thought. Wouldn’t that be nice? Well, maybe not.

But for the Puritans, unity of thought was the ideal, and that meant that anyone who disagreed with the church’s version of the official Word from God must be listening to some other voice, probably an evil voice, like the devil. That’s why people like Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson were kicked out of Boston and settled Rhode Island, or “Rogue Island” as it was called. They also had a hard time with what we would call “eccentric” people, especially eccentric women. There were some incidents in the early days involving “witchcraft.” We don’t know any details of those incidents, such as how they resembled or differed from the famous cases up in Salem.

But you get the picture. There was certain social rigidity, based on the fear and recent memory of civil war over religion. Now we have an opportunity to make all of this very concrete. In a few minutes, we are going to recite the Covenant of 1668. This was written 18 years after Middletown was first settled, and 48 years after the great migration from England began in 1620. It’s a document from the 2nd generation of Puritans, when the intense zeal of the first generation was beginning to fade. It’s a very typical covenant, or community agreement, of the time.

What jumps right out of this covenant is this strong emphasis on order — phrases like “the rules of ye Gospell, … we will be subject to ye Government of Christ and observe all those lawes yt he hath established … we will maintain and diligently attend all his ordinances, obeying them that are over us in the Lord “; …Do you think we could get away with that today? I don’t think so.

This document reflects a time when the church, the church officers and clergy, were in control of not only religious life but civic life. The church appointed the civil magistrates whose business was taxation, including taxes imposed on everyone, even non-members and non-believers, to support the church. Property disputes, criminal behavior, roads, bridges, ferries — all of that was overseen by church officials, elected by church members, and to be a church member you had to prove that you were a true Christians by describing a true inner experience of God’s grace.

Not surprisingly, that emphasis on tight control and uniformity of thought didn’t hold up well over time. Even within the church, and even within families, different ideas appeared. Not everyone felt the same Christian zeal, and zeal does tend to fade with prosperity. Anglicans started moving in. Many good citizens were non-believers. They all had to be accommodated, so the system started to relax as it prospered and as people slowly gained confidence that civil war didn’t have to happen over differences in religion.

And before long, religious tolerance and pluralism did become foundation stones of the society we know today.

I said last week that, even though state-religion and religious conformity didn’t last very long, the Puritans did make a deep imprint on the American psyche. They valued the inner life. They and other early Protestants internalized morality in a way it had never been internalized before. A person’s conscience became extremely important. Outward obedience was required, but it wasn’t enough. This emphasis on the conscience led eventually to the idea of freedom of conscience that we value today.

But freedom of conscience and freedom of expression of that conscience can still be disruptive and disturbing. We don’t always like what others think or say. We can all name to ourselves politicians, news commentators, and gadflies of various sorts that we wish would shut up or go away.

Freedom of speech doesn’t mean you’re allowed to shout “fire” in a crowded theater. And it doesn’t mean that misguided, malicious, and slanderous or confusing speech should be given a microphone and an amplifier.

So freedom and the dangers of freedom, freedom balanced with the the need for order and safety, are still woven together in the fabric of our civil life and our religious life. So maybe our concerns and hopes aren’t so totally different from the Puritans’ as we might at first think.
 

The Covenant of 1668: (y = th)

We doe in ye presence of God, the Holy Angells and this Assembly, take acknowledge and Avouch the one and onely tru God, God the Father, Sone and Holy Ghost to bee our God, giving up ourselves and our children to him to be his people. Ingaging that we will walk with this God and one with another according to the rules of ye Gospell, Attending his Holy will made known to us in his word, that we will be subject to ye Government of Christ and observe all those lawes yt he hath established in his Kingdome, soe far as hitherto he hath or hereafter shall be pleased to reveale ye same unto us. And particularly yt we will maintain and diligently attend all his ordinances, obeying them that are over us in the Lord; that we will watch over one another and faithfully deale with and submitt to one another in case of offence according as ower Lord hath commanded. All this we promise lawfully to perform through the grace and strength of Christ.