Proclaim Liberty                                                                    12/3/44

 

Scripture:  Read Isaiah 40: 3-18

 

Text:  Leviticus 25: 10;  “...And proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof....”

 

Amid a mass of detail regarding a proper observance of sabbatical years, rest for the land, and so on, there appears this phrase which is currently heard as the opening theme, each Sunday afternoon, of a fine radio program: “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.”  The words are taken from the book of Leviticus, the 25th chapter, at the 10th verse.

 

The book of Leviticus contains a mass of detail on the worship and religious life of early Hebrew people.  To the modern casual reader, its title and contents sound a bit dry.  I think of my first sea voyage and my first religious service on shipboard when I think of the word.  Mrs. Kingdon and I were on the way to Hawaii, with Robert then a child of only 9 months (and his father younger than that as an ordained minister!)  It was his, and my, first crossing - though not Mrs. Kingdon’s.  The ship’s physician fell into conversation with me on the deck on Saturday afternoon and apparently discovered what he had not known before - that I was a young minister headed for a pastorate in the Islands.  He excused himself shortly, and a few minutes later the purser stepped up to me with a most cordial invitation to conduct “divine services” the next morning.

 

It seems that the ship’s physician was the crew member on that ship to whom fell the responsibility of reading a service on Sunday morning if no clergyman were found among the list of passengers.  The rest of the officers called him “Leviticus” - and somehow he looked it!  He was a kindly, courteous man, who did us the honor to call at our home some months later when his ship was calling at our port in Hawaii.  But his dry manner lent color to that nickname tacked onto him by his fellow crewmen.  Of course none of them were rising to the opportunity to conduct Sunday services!  Theirs only to poke a bit of good- natured fun at another!  Well, quite aside from superficial impressions of men of the sea and of ancient Hebrew accounts, a gem of a phrase stands out here in the book of Leviticus - the words that were chosen for inscription on the Liberty Bell in Independence Hall:  “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land, unto all the inhabitants thereof.”

 

That is a glorious inscription to have on a bell.  The thought that every swing and peal of a bell sends that message out to all hearers in a great land should lift the imagination of everyone whose soul is alive to the marvelous blessing of a land like ours.

 

Of course that bell has a crack in it.  Apparently it was not easy to cast a bell of such size so perfectly that there should be no flaw in it.  And under the pounding of the weighty clapper, it cracked.  I believe that guardians of the bell tried, at least once, to have it recast, only to watch the crack open again.  They take extreme care that it shall not be broken more.

 

In the same spirit of watchfulness, the citizen guardians of our national liberty need to stand guard lest any crack in our precious liberty be dangerously widened.  How stands our liberty at this crucial hour?  We, and all the world await, intently, for the decisive hour to strike.  Men will yet die in the duties falling to them in the latest and greatest army the Republic has known.  Is the liberty for which they struggle and sacrifice sound?

 

I believe that it is sound at the heart.  Our nation, in the midst of terrific warfare, has recently come through a hotly contested election for the post of president and all other elective offices.  The election involved the question of who was to be the commander-in-chief of the military forces for the rest of this struggle.  Yet the people of this land are free to make such a choice at their voting polls and secret ballot boxes.  Where else could it happen?

 

The churches of our community have been engaged in a fine, United church canvass this past week.  With complete freedom, they have presented the case of their churches to their membership and the cause for which their churches stand to the community.  No one has said, or even wanted to say, “you must” or “you must not.”  Government, even in hard pressed war time, has had nothing to say about it, and government officials as individuals have been as free to appreciate and cooperate in the canvass as anyone else.  It is not so in the enemy nations where the church has been attacked, and throttled and regimented - its leaders given a required line to follow and often thrown into prison or, in some cases, put to death.

 

The ways in which our freedom is solidly evidenced could be multiplied as we might count them.  At its center the bell is sound.  There is a vast difference between life under the Stars and Stripes and that under the swastika or the rising sun banner.  There is even a marked difference between life here under our flag and that under the banners of some of our allies!

 

There are some Americans, of good intentions, who get so agitated over those repressions and injustices that exist among us that they forget to appraise and appreciate the freedom that we do have.  They note that even 80 years after our Civil War between the States, Negroes are not yet free of economic serfdom which dogs their steps with the mere circumstance of black birth.  They call attention to the mockery of the right to vote of the poorest in the land unless our freedom engenders an order that shall give the poor worthy jobs whereby they may live unafraid and in self-respect.  They are concerned that American citizens have been deprived of liberty and possessions and forcibly detained in concentration camps, due not to any overt act proved against then in the courts of justice, but rather due to the fact that they were born of Japanese parents.

 

All of these conditions undeniably represent a “crack in the bell;”  serious flaws in our liberty.  But they should not blind us to the assurance that the bell is still sound at the center.  There is danger that, seeing and proclaiming the faults in our liberty, those who do see them be thought not to cherish the bell.

 

With this statement of the obvious, let us ask what are the major threats to our liberty?  These two may be mentioned as stated by Eugene C. Blake, a California minister.

 

1)  There is a grave tendency toward forgetting the God who is the only ground of our liberty.  I beg of you not to dismiss this as a preacher’s pious word.  It is not fanciful phrasing - it is fact.  The Hebrews, unusually God-conscious as they were throughout centuries, found that sincere recognition of and obedience to, the ways of God lay under all their security and well-being.  And they found, in bitter experience, that heedlessness of God and defiance of his ways led to grievous trouble - personally and nationally.

 

Our own nation’s character has been rooted in vigorous Christian faith.  That faith has been belligerent among the several communions, to our regret, but it has been vigorous and basic.  Our fundamental New-World American character can continue only on a basis of the recognition of God and the heeding of his ways.  It is not by chance that the text for a sermon on liberty is found in the Bible.  There is no place else to find it.  Our very conception of liberty came from God through the Bible.  The roots of it start way back in the Old Testament.  In this seemingly dry old book of Leviticus, Moses is pictured as saying to his people, for Jehovah, “Ye shall have one manner of law, as well for the stranger as for one of your own country, for I am Jehovah your God.”  It was a new idea in the face of “tooth for tooth” ideas of justice.  It is a new idea to those of our day who have never heard or heeded it.

 

The idea that the law with its protection as well as its requirements, applies to the foreign born as well as the native citizen is basic to America; and it is dangerous to our liberty to forget that the idea came from God!

 

Why not brush aside the legal rights of Negro, Jew, Nisei, alien if you can get away with it?  Haven’t the Nazis “got something” there as a means toward simplifying our problems?  There is one good reason - God doesn’t like it!  And God won’t have it!  The only reason given is in the last few words of that Old Testament statement - “For I am Jehovah, your God.”  But it is so potent a reason that those who flout the reasonable rights of others under the law, or try to set up separate laws for themselves and for others, find themselves sooner or later dangling in their own noose!

 

It is a major threat to our liberty that so many of us, so much of the time, forget God.  Only half of the Americans belong, even formally, to a church or synagogue, and only a third of that half - one-sixth or less of the total, bother to get to the services of their churches and synagogues regularly once a week to worship God, to seek and find his way for themselves.  The missionary word of the prophets ought to be on the lips and in the lives of every Christian person, laymen no less than clergyman, that heedless Americans must know God to preserve their liberty!  Not because any minister, priest or rabbi or even layman tells them they must, but because God requires it of our own free choice.

 

2)  A second, related, threat to our liberty is in the tendency to be concerned only with our own liberty or that of our own group, kind or interest.

 

By national inheritance and personal preference, Americans love freedom.  Any king or dictator would have a hard time taking it away from the sons of western pioneers, or from fans in the Brooklyn bleachers either!

 

Yet it was also unthinkable that the French peasant and shop-keeper, to say nothing of the French intellectual, should ever lose his freedom.  Yet he did, and has owed his liberation twice to foreigners.  And a mighty cause of his trouble has been the neglect of Fraternity in his formula for freedom.  Loving or neglecting his God, the Frenchman began to lose interest in equality for anybody but himself.  And that led him near enough to anarchy to be his almost complete undoing.

 

Unless we who are white are equally concerned with the liberty of white, black, brown, yellow or red, our own liberty is threatened.  Unless employer and employee are equally concerned over the rights of both, neither will continue long to enjoy the right of free enterprise.  Nothing better than anarchy or tyranny can come among members of a society in which each is concerned solely with his own liberty.

 

Liberty requires the risk that you may be imposed upon.  That risk is a price of liberty as surely as resistance to a tyrannous government at aggressive warfare requires the risk of life and limb of our soldiers. 

 

I do not know the solution of the problems of labor and management; of Negro-white adjustments; of Japanese-Caucasian relationships in America.  But I do know that unless we are all concerned about them in a personal way, the liberty for which our loved ones fight and die will be cracked worse than the crack of the Liberty Bell.  Self-interested Fascistic ideas are just as dangerous in the United States as they are abroad!

 

Christians ought to “stand up for liberty under equal law for all the inhabitants of the land.”  It isn’t a requirement of man.  It is a requirement of God.

 

With this week, we begin the Advent season, looking toward Christmas - the seasonal celebration of our Lord’s appearance on earth.  It is a remembrance of the greatest revelation of God’s will and ways expressed in a human life made divine.  Perhaps in our adoration and loving joy, we may feel an irresistible urge to the kind of perfect freedom into which Jesus led the way.

 

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            Delivered at Wisconsin Rapids, December 3, 1944.