The Shoulders of Giants
Jeremiah 31:31-34
October 30, 2011
The title of today’s message comes from Isaac Newton, whom many consider the greatest
scientist who ever lived. He developed the Universal Law of Gravitation; you’ll remember the
legend says he was sitting under an apple tree when an apple dropped on his head, and he got to
thinking about why. For someone who invented modern physics, Newton was a pretty humble
guy, and he said this in a letter to a friend: “If I have seen a little further, it is by standing on the
shoulders of giants.” That is, he had his ideas, but they rested on the work of a whole line of
thinkers who had gone before him.
It may seem odd to think about that metaphor in the context of our faith. In one sense, the
only shoulders we stand on belong to Jesus. When God chose to be born into the world in human
form, to live and die and be resurrected to show us the full truth of God’s love for humankind,
that pretty much settled things. If we worship God through Christ and leave it at that, we will be
plenty good Christians.
But the church is a human endeavor, and we do indeed stand on the shoulders of giants of
our faith. Today on the church calendar is Reformation Sunday, a day when we recognize and
remember that good people have given their best – and in some cases given their lives – to free
us to worship God in the way our conscience calls us to do.
If you remember your European history, you’ll recall that the Protestant Reformation was
a series of events in the 16th century, initiated by Martin Luther, John Calvin and other early
Protestants. They were pushing back against the all-powerful Roman Catholic Church for what
they considered false doctrines and abuses of church authority, such as the selling of clerical
offices and the selling of indulgences, in the worst cases a Get Out of Hell Free card for the rich.
You’ll remember the dramatic moment when Luther nailed the 95 Theses to the door of the
Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany, a grand gesture of complaint that galvanized reformers
of the church. The result was the establishment of the Anglican Church, the Lutheran Church,
and our own forebears, the Reformed churches, based in Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands
and Scotland.
Luther, Calvin, Ulrich Zwingli, Philipp Melancthon – these are heroes of our faith. These
are the giants upon whose shoulders we stand. On this Reformation Sunday, we need to give
thanks for their courage and for their insistence, among other things, that we can have direct
experiences of God through prayer and through studying scripture on our own – we don’t have to
depend on priests and saints to mediate between us and God. It’s the essence of Jeremiah’s
message that Mike read for us – that the Word of God will be written on our hearts, so that we
are as close to God as our very heartbeat. A hopeful and loving vision.
The story of the Protestant Reformation is a familiar one. But today I thought we might
look at some other heroes of the faith, other giants with big shoulders – some of the great figures
in the history of the United Church of Christ.
First, a quick church history lesson. Our denomination is one of the oldest, and one of the
youngest, in the United States. Youngest because the UCC was formed in 1957, not all that long
ago in historical terms. Oldest because the denominations that joined to form the church – the
Congregational, Christian, Evangelical and Reformed churches – have roots that stretch back to
the beginning of our nation. It’s those roots that I want to acknowledge today.
So I’m going to give you just the barest capsule biographies of five of these heroes of the
faith, and it’s my hope that their lives and their witness will do two things for us. One is that
they’ll help us to recognize that we didn’t invent all you see around you, we inherited it from
some visionary thinkers. The other is that these lives will inspire us to think more deeply about
our own commitment to Christian discipleship, and to think about how we measure up, or don’t,
to the faith that these people lived.
First up is John Robinson, the “pastor to the Pilgrims.” The Pilgrims were extremists,
really – a congregation in the wonderfully named English village of Scrooby, Nottinghamshire,
that was dissatisfied with the pace of religious reforms in England, so they broke away from the
Anglican church. They moved first to Holland – just up and left their hometown – and lived in
Holland for a dozen years before finally deciding that they didn’t like the Dutch culture, and so
about 35 members of the congregation boarded the Mayflower and set sail for Cape Cod in 1620.
John Robinson, their pastor, didn’t sail with them; he stayed behind with the majority of the
congregation. But he gave a famous farewell speech in which he spoke these words: “I charge
you before God and his blessed angels that you follow me no further than you have seen me
follow Christ. If God reveal anything to you by any other instrument of his, be as ready to
receive it as you were to receive any truth from my ministry, for I am verily persuaded the Lord
hath more truth and light yet to break forth from his holy word.” Or as we say it in the UCC
today: God is still speaking. The title of the hymnal in the pew with you, Hymns of Truth and
Light, comes from this farewell speech.
Anne Hutchinson, our second hero of the faith, was a troublemaker in the newly settled
colonies of the New World. Daughter of a non-conformist minister from north of London,
Hutchinson was described as “a woman of haughty and fierce carriage [and] of voluble tongue,”
and boy, she could use that tongue. She interrupted preachers with whom she disagreed, and she
gathered women regularly in her own home – where she was busy raising 15 children, by the
way – and preached to as many as 50 people at a time, sometimes even men. Hutchinson took
issue with the idea that there was an “elect” group of people whom God had chosen to reach
heaven, and she argued that anyone could experience a direct revelation from God – that the
Bible was not the only way we can receive the truth of God. This stirred up all sorts of trouble,
and finally there was a kangaroo trial and Anne Hutchinson and her family were banished from
the Massachusetts Bay Colony; they ended up in Rhode Island. “The power of the Holy Spirit
dwelleth perfectly in every believer,” Anne Hutchinson said, “and the inward revelations of her
own spirit, and the conscious judgment of her own mind, are of authority paramount to any word
of God.” In some churches today she would be banished all over again for saying that. A brave
woman.
Jonathan Edwards of Northampton, Mass., a Congregational minister, became part of
the First Great Awakening, a religious revival that swept the Colonies from about 1720 to 1750.
This was a movement that spoke to people’s emotional experience and brought them to Christ
through tent revival meetings and music and all sorts of whooping and hollering. Edwards is
famous for one revival sermon he preached, called “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” a
Scared Straight message if there ever was one. Here’s a line from that sermon: “The bow of
God’s wrath is bent, and the arrow made ready on the string, and Justice bends the arrow at your
heart, and strains the bow, and it is nothing but the mere pleasure of God, and that of an angry
God, without any promise or obligation at all, that keeps the arrow one moment from being made
drunk with your blood.” Wow, huh? And yet Edwards was much more about the perfection of
Christ’s sacrifice for us. He was overwhelmed with the majesty and splendor of God, passionate
about his faith. And he studied Isaac Newton and John Locke, St. Augustine and Plato, and
integrated those ideas from science and philosophy into books of theology that are still studied
today.
Her family tried to dissuade her, and the Oberlin Theological School denied her the
degree she had earned, but Antoinette Brown showed ’em all – she received a call to serve as
pastor of the Congregational church in Butler, N.Y., up near Lake Ontario between Rochester
and Syracuse, and in 1853 she was ordained there – the first woman in the United States to be
ordained into Christian ministry. She didn’t serve long – she got married and later gave birth to
seven daughters. But she was a fierce advocate for the abolition of slavery (she called it
“malignantly aristocratic”), for temperance and abstinence from alcohol, and for the idea that the
Bible shows women and men to be full equals. She wrote nine books, and in 1920, when she was
95 years old, she cast her first vote. By the time she died in 1921, there were 3,000 women
ministers in the United States. “The sexes in each species of being,” she said, “are always true
equivalents – equals but not identical.”
And finally there is Reinhold Niebuhr, the most influential American theologian of the
20th century. Nurtured in the Evangelical Church – remember, one of the UCC’s four constituent
denominations – Niebuhr became the champion of a theology called neo-orthodoxy that tried to
reapply biblical teachings and truths to contemporary social problems, an attempt to counter the
declining morality of the time. He taught at Union Theological Seminary in New York City,
wrote a bunch of books, and spoke out as a public intellectual especially during the 1940s and
’50s, when he supported U.S. efforts to counter the spread of Communism around the world. He
argued with both religious liberals and religious conservatives; he contributed greatly to thinking
around when it is morally acceptable to enter into war, so-called “just war theory.” And all sorts
of people – Jimmy Carter, Madeleine Albright, Hillary Clinton, John McCain and President
Obama among them – have named Niebuhr as a formative influence on then. Oh, and he wrote
the Serenity Prayer: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to
change the things I can change, and wisdom to know the difference.”
These are extraordinary people, each of them. And what I hope we’ll take away today is
the realization that the attributes that made them extraordinary – a good brain, courage, faith, a
passion for God – these can be our attributes as well. We can develop these qualities in
ourselves. We stand on the shoulders of giants, but we too can be giants. We too can bring our
courage and our questions, our passion and our convictions, to the practice of our faith. As these
lives show, it won’t always be easy, but God calls us to bring our whole selves to the task. Let’s
not hold back.
May it be so. Amen.