July 4: Reflecting on The Common Good by The Rev. Dr. Frank G. Kirkpatrick
Posted on
July 3, 2016
Seventh Sunday After Pentecost
Trinity Church, Hartford
Galatians 6:(1-6)7-16
The Gospel: Luke 10:1-11, 16-20
This is the Sunday closest to July 4, a time to celebrate the events and persons who helped to shape the new nation that emerged from the revolution that was instigated by the American colonies in July of 1776 against an unresponsive and unrepresentative mother country, Great Britain. From an often chaotic set of relationships between divided colonies eventually emerged a united set of states comprising a single republic under a common government. On this July fourth weekend there is much to celebrate in our nation’s history and as Christians we should share in that celebration. But, there is also much to be wary of as we join in that celebration. As Christians we must pay heed to Paul’s injunction in his letter to the church in Rome, where he tells us that we are to be subject to the governing powers of whatever nation we are citizens of for these powers have been instituted by God for our benefit. At the same time, we are to avoid turning our nation into an idol, something beyond criticism and reform.
America and its people, us, are as prone to sin and arrogance as any people on earth. As the great Christian ethicist Reinhold Niebuhr pointed out nation-states will use their collective power to defend national interests against other groups, both domestic and foreign, and to do so they will resort to actions that will not meet the highest of moral standards. Nations have to coerce their own citizens to do certain things that they would not do in the absence of coercion, such as paying taxes. Such coercion is less likely in smaller communities, such as families, where most members will freely give what they have to in order to meet the needs of other members of that family. But in nations it is rarely the case that people will voluntarily give more of their wealth to support the needs of the poor unless they are legally required to do so. And establishing those legal requirements for taxation is usually resisted vigorously. We often overlook this coercive side of our national experience because we tend to think of our national experience as one of being a righteous nation increasing the spread of goodness throughout the world. Over time many Americans have come to believe that our nation is an exception to the rules that seem to govern the histories of other, less-divinely favored nations. We believe that we provide more freedom to individuals; we have more robust expressions of democracy; we are richer and more productive with a more vigorous economy than many other nations. And yet our national pride is often tarnished by our failure to achieve other moral goals. We spent years as a nation denying rights to women and most egregiously denying freedom to the millions of Africans we had enslaved. And we paid for that denial by a bloody civil war just to restore unity to a fractured country. Today we still pay a price for many of our injustices which are built on the back of great accomplishments. Our vigorous economy, while producing enormous wealth for some has also contributed to a growing disparity in wealth and income among our citizens. While a small portion of the population has seen its wealth increase exponentially, vast numbers of the poor and middle class have seen their wealth remain stagnant or even decline in recent years. We even have the dubious honor of a kind of negative exceptionalism: we have poorer health outcomes and greater disparities in our access to health care than most of the other developed countries in the world. We have more gun violence and more access to guns than most of our neighboring countries. Exceptionalism can cut both ways.
But today should not be a time to weigh up two sides of a ledger of American greatness and failure. Rather it should be an opportunity to recapture one of the most important motifs in a storied American history: a theme which was present at the creation of the nation in 1776 but which is in danger of being forgotten or ignored in the midst of the clamorous rhetoric of the political campaign which is now deep upon us. It’s the theme of America as a people who emerged from disorderly division to choose to live together within the bonds of a united society, sharing their goods and fortunes with each other so that all could prosper. As the eminent American historian Gordon Wood put it in his book on the creation of the American republic, “the sacrifice of individual interests to the greater good of the whole formed the essence of republicanism and comprehended for Americans the idealistic goal of their Revolution.” It is what made their actions in 1776 truly revolutionary. They wanted to establish a commonwealth in which the common good, not simply the pursuit of the private good, would be the primary objective of government, government being the legislative will of the people as a whole. And we should acknowledge that much of the idea of what is called the common good came from the Jewish and Christian tradition in which God’s kingdom was to be established by the principles of justice for the sake of the community, the people as a whole, and especially the most vulnerable. Over time the utopian vision of the founding fathers and mothers gave way to a greater emphasis on satisfying the wants and desires of the individual, leaving the needs of the community as a whole to the vagaries and personal generosity of the successful. Meeting those needs was not to be the object of governance, or of social policies requiring citizens to give justly to meet the basic needs of their neighbors. President John F. Kennedy’s call in 1961 to ask not what your country can do for you but rather what you can do for your country is now a distant memory which has little resonance for a society in which the personal unlimited acquisition of goods seems to be the only driving force behind all that we do.
But a nation whose sole or overriding purpose is to satisfy the personal desire for the virtually unlimited acquisition of material goods is a nation which is in the process of betraying its rich and bountiful heritage of working for the common or public good. If we want to be a truly exceptional nation, without the pitfalls of arrogance or overweening pride, perhaps we might recall what it meant in 1776 in a steamy humid room in Philadelphia, for men of privilege to be willing to pledge their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honors to the cause of the revolution and its promise of a new and united nation in which the general welfare, not the privileges of the few, would be the guiding star of the government of the new republic. These so-called founding fathers asked the people to join them in an experiment in self-government in which the common good would take precedence over individual pursuit of gain. We did at least briefly in the first years after 1776 take seriously Paul’s injunction this morning to bear one another’s burdens because we were one people born out of many diverse locations, occupations, and personal interests. We pledged ourselves to E pluribus Unum: from many comes one. But that vision of unity or oneness eventually required a violent civil war as the nation struggled with the division caused by the continuation of slavery. We have paid for our precious unity with blood, sweat, and tears.
Today we face similar threats to our national unity as does the European Union, another unity born out of division and war, a unity under threat as member states begin to separate from it. And the threat comes in the form of fear of the immigrant, the other who threatens our superficial identity as a people defined by a predominant skin color, religion, or ethnic origin. But when those identifying markers turn out to be multiple, different, and diverse, then our unity, our common good, must be found elsewhere: it must be found in a deeper common humanity because we are all equally the children of God. As Paul says in this morning’s epistle, “if those who are nothing think they are something, they deceive themselves. All must test their own work; then that work, rather than their neighbor's work, will become a cause for pride. For all must carry their own loads.”
The test, as Paul puts it, for our nation on this Fourth of July weekend is a commitment to do the work of justice in the cause of unity. What works are we as a nation going to do building on the accomplishments of the past in order to advance the common good today? How will we meet the needs of the poor for a robust and equitable health care system, safe housing, sound education, reliable infrastructure, employment at a living wage and freedom from the threat of gun violence? How will we tend to the needs of the refugees who come to our shores in order to share in the good things we have produced over the decades? How will we deal with the persistence of racism and homophobia which erode the fabric of our increasingly fragile unity as a nation? Even more parochially, how will we meet the challenges of the common good here in our own parish which is starved for financial resources in order to carry on the ministries we have declared to be part of our congregational identity and mission?
This July 4 is an opportunity to rethink what our national and local priorities are: it is a time to re-imagine what it would mean to embody the spirit of 1776, to sacrifice individual interests to the greater good of the whole, to the common good. It is time to set aside divisions and exclusions based on race, class, religious difference, sexual identity, and ethnic background. The common good is what God intends for all of us and God knows, as we should also, that if we attend to the common good the private good will also be met because the meaning of God’s creation is simply this: we were made for each other and only in the good of the whole can we find the individual good for each and every one of us.