"O Beautiful" (sermon, May 29, 2011)

This weekend is the prelude to Memorial Day, or formerly Decoration Day – an occasion for the solemn recognition of the gifts and sacrifices of those who died in service to their country, or of veterans who died after their service. You probably know that the holiday was instituted, for the recognition of service by Civil War veterans, from a grateful people.

First Congregational Church of Webster Groves has their share of people to be remembered on this day...

Everett R. Belt, Jr.

Thomas Harkey

William K. Holaday

Ted Meyer

Wesley Perkins

Glenn Loren Moller, Jr

There is just at this moment a certain temptation to sing, "Onward, Christian Soldiers," as was done rather often, from the late 1800s until about thirty years ago, very often on the Memorial Day holiday. But the song isn’t about soldiers, really – at least not in the customary earthly sense of the word.

Most mainline clergy nowadays find the martial imagery of the hymn grossly distasteful. The notion of "Christ the royal Master [leading] against the foe" with any armament of death-dealing is an offense to most of our sensibilities. As a result you won’t find it in any mainline Christian hymnal published since 1985.

The song is both more and less than what most people imagine it to be. It was written in one night by a schoolmaster, Sabine Baring-Gould (later, Rev. Baring-Gould), in Wakefield, Yorkshire, England, in 1865 as a new marching song for the boys of his school to sing in a parade. The tune to which it was originally sung – a melody of Haydn’s – is not the one which we associate it with. "St. Gertrude," the tune to which we sing it, was composed by Sir Arthur Sullivan – yes, of Gilbert and Sullivan!

And though the lyrics may resonate with the ironic armor imagery found in works of the apostle Paul and others regarding the strength and the fortitude we discover by the grace of the Holy Spirit’s presence in our lives, the fact that we would sing it on a day when we are speaking of real soldiers makes for some very dicey stuff.

The whole point of Paul referring to "the whole armor of God" is the thickness of his irony, as here in Ephesians 6. The apostle surely meant to indicate that the power of having God in one’s life should so thoroughly enliven one’s spiritual well-being that the very instruments being used by the Romans to oppress and persecute Christians should remind the faithful of their own inner strength.

Such fortitude is especially necessary for some, through the challenges they face just by being different. Christians on the margins tend to have a taste of what it might have been like for all Christians in the First Century. (I wonder whether the recipients of the words of Psalm 144 and Ephesians 6 would have read or heard both those passages and taken them with the grain of salt that most of us do. Or would they have found comfort? It’s hard to say.)

But what is easy to say is that the conditions of persecution persist, and those of us who do wear "the whole armor of God" have an obligation to defend the plight of the downtrodden, and to expose what formerly had been hidden – especially when it reflects profoundly well on individuals from oppressed groups. And so, that is what I am about to do with you now: to expose what formerly had been hidden.

Are you ready for this? Because I am obligated by my commitment to the liberation we may all come to know through Jesus Christ, to help to liberate the oppressed.

Surely all of us have sung the familiar song, "America the Beautiful." In 1931 it was in contention with "The Star-Spangled Banner" for adoption as the national anthem. It lost out, but not for anyone’s lack of love for it.

"America the Beautiful" has a story that goes with it which few people know. You may have heard some of the story, namely, that its writer composed it during a visit to Pike’s Peak. The rest of the story is not only interesting but, actually affirms the different-ness that has existed among the American people for some time and now is finally beginning to be celebrated.

Katherine Lee Bates was author of the poem, "America the Beautiful." She was the daughter of a Congregationalist minister. When she penned it, Ms. Bates also was a professor of English at Wellesley College in Massachusetts – a school for women.

She was unmarried, but Dr. Bates did live in a relationship that, for historians, is somewhat enigmatic. There are powerful indications of what the relationship was like – very loving letters between herself and another professor at Wellesley, and a book of poems Dr. Bates wrote upon her companion’s death.

For twenty-five years Katherine Lee Bates lived with Dr. Katharine Coman, from 1890 until 1915 when Dr. Coman died. Dr. Coman was the founder and chair of Wellesley’s Department of Economics.

There were other such relationships during the time which have not escaped the notice of history. They were called, "Boston marriages." In a Boston marriage, two career women chose to live together rather than to become wives and mothers. There is some argument about whether these were indeed lesbian relationships, but the commitment of the participants invariably bore a marked resemblance to the cohabiting we see now between same-sex partners who unabashedly confess to the nature of their relationship.

The foremost among Boston marriages was probably that of Frances Willard, founder of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, and her twenty-two-year companion, Anna Gordon. But Jane Addams and Mary Rozet Smith, who made Hull House in Chicago possible for more than twenty years, were also remarkable in that regard.

This was the period Susan B. Anthony came to call, "the epoch of the single woman."

For Dr. Bates it was also 1893, and Wellesley College paid its faculty at that time $400 a year plus meals and laundry. Well, it turns out, $400 a year didn’t go very far. So, to supplement income faculty would write books, do lecture tours, or take summer jobs teaching at other institutions. Dr. Bates had taken the summer of 1893, to teach at Colorado College in Colorado Springs. While there, she and some colleagues decided to scale the 14,000 feet of Pike’s Peak.

 "We hired a prairie wagon," Bates would later recall. "Near the top we had to leave the wagon and go the rest of the way on mules. I was very tired. But when I saw the view, I felt great joy. All the wonder of America seemed displayed there, with the sea-like expanse."

The opening lines of a poem, celebrating "spacious skies" and "purple mountain majesties," formed in her mind. Like Sabine Bering-Gould in composing "Onward, Christian Soldiers," she completed the poem in one sitting, though she perhaps with a bit more sophistication.

She submitted the poem to The Congregationalist, the national periodical of the Congregational-Christian churches, and it first appeared in the issue of July 4, 1895. The poem finally caught the eye of the nation in the Boston Evening Transcript in 1904. Shortly after that, it was set to the music of Samuel Ward’s "Materna," and the rest (as they say) is history.

We enjoy a rich culture thanks to the contributions of folk whom the mainstream have very often elected to ignore. Granted, sometimes this may be because those same folk have elected to hide in plain sight, like Dr. Bates. Still, this wide variety of people makes America beautiful in a rich diversity of ways and colors and cultures. And, surprising as it may sometimes seem, we have men and women willing to live and die for that same rich culture full of such a variety of people expressive of themselves in such a multitude of ways!

If there is a great desire of God among us in this day and age, I believe it may be that we grow to appreciate and even embrace that very diversity in which we have been created and in which we are being creative ourselves.

I may have difficulty singing "Onward, Christian Soldiers." In fact, I DO have difficulty singing, "Onward, Christian Soldiers," but that's my problem, not yours. And I cannot deny how it has stirred the hearts and minds of so many faithful, perhaps even you. I rest in that, despite myself.

I will never sing "America the Beautiful" without remembering that it was written by a woman who, from all appearances and by any modern-day measure, was a lesbian. I rest in that, as well.

On this prelude to Memorial Day, as we honor those who have gone before us in service, or who having served have then gone on before us, as we pray that they may rest in peace, let us pray for the living that we may rest in peace as well.

Vietnam

World War II