Teddy Roosevelt, Sitting Bull, and Jeremiah in Heaven"
Rev. Gerald Bertsch
Jeremiah 17:5-10, St. Luke 6:17-26
The key word for today is "Heaven!" "Everybody talkin' ?bout hebben ain't goin' there!" an old spiritual has it. The slaves, of course, were referring to their masters gathered in their churches on Sunday morning singing lustily about going to heaven as when they gave to order to whip, beat or lynch one of their slaves. Those on the receiving end of the whip knew the truth about heaven.
I must confess that I've always been a bit of a skeptic about the notion of heaven?especially as I heard it taught in the church of my childhood and as it lingers in popular American Christianity as something resembling pie-in-the-sky-when-you-die?a kind of reward for being nice to God.
As I matured in faith I didn't discard the notion of heaven but came to understand that it was more about how we live here on earth than some mythical reward in an afterlife. No, it isn't about buying our way into paradise with good deeds, but more like tasting its reality in ordinary daily life when we spread its joys around so more people can enjoy it now. As for the next life, we simply leave that to God!
When Jesus taught his disciples to pray "Your will be done on earth as in heaven," he was drawing the realms of heaven and earth into one spiritual reality. During my 35 years in the ministry, I encountered many saints who lived simultaneously with feet on clay and hearts in heaven as one writer put. I can't go into these latter stories because I would be telling tales out of school, but there are many stories of people who were an open book and whose examples bring heaven to earth.
I have three stories to tell about the power of heaven to shape life on earth. They will be brief as is the nature of sermons. What binds Teddy Roosevelt, Sitting Bull and Jeremiah into a common understanding of God's reign on earth as in heaven is the land as a sacred trust from God for all generations.
I first met Teddy Roosevelt through our local public library. I was failing all my classes in grade school, and, on the advice of my teacher, my parents began taking me to the community library once a week to check out all the books that I could carry at one time. I needed no encouragement to read them and by the next Saturday morning I was ready for more. During my retirement I've returned to Teddy Roosevelt. There's been a revival of scholarly interest in Teddy Roosevelt in the past several years. Given the lack of rectitude in American politics since Richard Nixon, that's not surprising, is it?
Teddy Roosevelt was reared in a family that attended the Dutch Reformed Church of the latter half of the 19th Century. Reformed Protestantism of that stripe held that true faith demanded an outward expression of this-worldly righteousness. The love of God was to be expressed through practical deeds of charity and acts of human compassion?through deeds of justice, kindness, equality and fairness in daily life. Teddy called it efficiency. High talk of good intentions was wasted time that could be far better spent in action. If one's cause was just and righteous, he believed there was no use in wasting words on it. Just do it! Being a youth of the 1960s, that resonates with me.
His critics said he sounded boastful and arrogant, lustful for power, and narrow-minded. He would oppose all sides in a dispute if they were equally wrong as he did in the conflict between the owners of the anthracite mines in Pennsylvania and striking miner's union. In order to break the union the owners were willing close the mines regardless of the cost in human suffering as winter approached.
Labor, on the other hand, was willing to tolerate the radical elements within its ranks that were engaged in violence against scab laborers and mine property. So he made contingency plans to call in the U.S. Army to seize the mines from the owners and operate them directly so that the urban poor wouldn't have to go without heat. He didn't have, to but he was ready.
President Roosevelt's achievements are many, but it is his love of the land that counts most clearly as his legacy. He created five national parks, 51 federal bird refuges, and 150 national forests. He was an explorer, ornithologist, a big game hunter, a rancher, author of more than 30 books, a New York City Police Commissioner, and a Governor. To that we add a civil service reformer, a colonel who led his regiment of volunteers into battle, a conservationist of the first order, Nobel Peace Prize winner, and one of our most admired Presidents.
Teddy believed that the poor and weak in society deserved a helping hand upwards and he embodied this ethic throughout his years of public service. For him there was small distinction between heaven and earth and he had little patience with those who asked others to wait for their happiness. He championed women's suffrage and the equality of the races.
It's these notions of moral solidarity with all the people and humanity's intimate ties to the land that introduces us to our next personality, Sitting Bull. He was the great Sioux leader of the United Tribes of the Plains who distinguished himself during the years leading up to their last stand against the encroachment of the European settlers on native ancestral lands. My own immigrant ancestors settled on what was once Indian land within a year or so of the time that Sitting Bull bought his people in to the reservation from the free life on the plains. They settled about 50 miles east of his burial place at Fort Yates, ND.
Stanley Vestal, in his deeply moving biography of Sitting Bull, tells how the fate of the Sioux was already determined by the time he was born. The Lewis and Clark expedition had effectively closed the book on the native way of life. (Ironically, it was the natives along their route that more than once saved them.) Sitting Bull led his people to resist as long as possible and in the end acted to preserve his people's future. He took them towards peace even though it meant they'd have to learn to farm in the white man's way on a reservation. The land was a source of life. He took up farming near Fort Yates, ND only seven miles from where I spent the first four years of my early childhood. When he led his people to the reservation, he was staking a new kind of claim for them on the future of America. He refused to surrender his love of the land or his faith in his heritage.
It's the way that he loved freedom that distinguished him. His story of self-forgetfulness soars high above the petty individualism of our time. He sought no advantage for himself or the privileges of power over others. To live peacefully on the land with his people was heaven for him. It was this account of himself that he was prepared to give to the council of the ancestors in the next life.
Like Teddy Roosevelt, our last hero, Jeremiah, came from what we'd call an aristocratic family. From his earliest youth Jeremiah knew that he was born to speak God's truth to the self-indulgent congregation of Judah. Now, if you've ever had to speak truth to an audience that is too pleased with itself and proud of its accomplishments, you might be able to begin to understand Jeremiah. It's sort of like grounding your Prom Queen daughter on prom night. God's truth tasted bitter to Jeremiah's mouth and sounded hateful to the ears of a pampered church. Hadn't King Solomon taught them to "Be Happy?" Why do they have to listen to this impetuous youth that won't be quiet when they tell him to and won't go away when they threaten him with prison and death? He's a nuisance of the highest order?this boy Jeremiah of good breeding, social prestige and landed family wealth! What's he got to complain about? But somehow he understood that Judah had gotten it wrong about paradise. We hear echoes of Jesus' teachings in his moral perspective. Life is not about what you can do for yourself but what you can do for others. That's what matters ultimately.
The life of prayer that Jeremiah was calling his people was to bear the fruit of a practical social ethic that re-unites God's people to their true vocation. They had been called to be the community that establishes the reign of God's justice in the land. Instead, they preferred to think of themselves as a privileged nation rather than as humble servants of God. They forgot their covenant with God: "I will be your God and you shall be my people." Worse still?they forgot how their God had served them by leading them out of slavery in Egypt.
When we forget whose we are, we won't know who we are or where we ought to be going. Judah fancied herself one of the great political players of the world. Didn't their leaders sit at table with the high and might in Babylon, Damascus and Cairo? Didn't their trading ships ply the high seas and bring back more wealth for the wealthy from Europe as did their caravans from deep in Africa and far away Persia and India? What could possibly be so wrong with that, they wanted Jeremiah to explain? But here was Jeremiah counseling surrender to Babylon and they weren't even at war with her. Sheer madness!
But God had shown Jeremiah how the congregation had sold its soul to power, privilege and wealth by turning religious practice into a way to justify their privilege and their disregard for social justice. They were so busy saving themselves, or rather laying up treasures for themselves on earth, that they couldn't see how they had forsaken their moral mandate to be the protectors of the poor, the widow, and her children. Then, when Judah did lose her land to the invader from the north as Jeremiah had promised would happen, he repents of his angry message of punishment and offers hope and consolation by buying the family farm back from those who had stolen it.
Yes, we are saved by grace through faith as St. Paul's taught! But the gift of salvation, as a practical matter, is the power of righteousness to overcome human wickedness and, by our submission to the mandates of righteousness in the here-and-now, to direct our lives towards doing justice and acting with high good purpose.
No, heaven cannot mean waiting for pie-in-the-ski-when-we-die. It must mean living without reservation or hesitation for others while still here. If there's more, it means trusting it to God. All happiness on earth and heaven is derivative of this understand of God's reign. Our prayer today: May it become increasingly difficult for us to do anything except what is good and right!
