February 5, 2023

Isaiah 58:1-9a; Matthew 5:13-20

No one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house.

This is not intended as practical advice about illuminating one’s home. It is about how we are to act in this world. Not only to follow the ways of Jesus, but to let the world know what that means through our behavior.

In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.

Historical accounts from the time of early Christianity suggest that Christians faced discrimination at the hands of the Romans. That was partially true in a few places at a few times. It was not widespread however and did not endure long periods. Why then all the stories about Christian persecution and being fed to the lions? That did happen periodically, over two centuries. But in 313, the Edict of Milan was passed which permitted all religions to be permitted and tolerated in the Roman Empire.

Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished.

This is what Jesus called for as set forth in the Gospel of Matthew. All the laws remain in place and must be followed until heaven and earth pass away. However, even a casual glance through the Hebrew scriptures would reveal a wide range of laws that the typical Christian does not follow. Why this contradiction?

Leaf through the letters of Paul and you would hear a different message. Paul advised Christians to put aside the laws and many of the traditions of the past. Notably, Paul’s letters were in most cases written before the gospels were set down. Paul did not want to restrict converts to Christianity with burdensome rules from Hebrew law. Peter and James wanted to continue with those rules, but they were persuaded to follow along with Paul’s plan.

Therefore, whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others to do the same, will be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.

I realize it is much easier to place aside the Hebrew scriptures and their many culturally remote teachings and practices. We as Christians do not have to follow any of that. Well, actually, we do not have to do any of that, unless we decide it is convenient do so. Some modern pastor searching about for a Biblically based reason to wag a finger at someone. We’ll come back to that.

Anyway, today’s sermon has a theme. We will consider the role of yet another culture on the formation and development of Christianity. And today we will consider the role of the Irish and how they have changed the way we behave to this day.

I must first confess that when I was planning for this Sunday, I had something else entirely in mind. There is a book you may have heard of, How The Irish Saved Civilization. It is a great title; one I remembered many years after I heard about the book. And I wanted to use that as the premise for explaining how the Irish had served as a fortress of knowledge, storing away libraries of ancient knowledge from the Greeks and the Romans while ravening hordes of barbarians sacked and looted across Europe. Civilization saved from the Visigoths and the Ostrogoths, the Franks, and the Saxons. In case you were wondering, those barbarians turn into the Spanish and the Germans, the French and the English.

That would have been a great premise for the sermon, but for one problem. It is probably not true. The Irish may have saved some documents in their remote monasteries, but this book took some liberties. For example, there are detailed descriptions of Saint Patrick and his efforts, which is problematic because there are few verifiable facts about Saint Patrick. I will even let you in on a secret, he was not Irish. He was most likely British, though that meant someone from the British Islands which in the fourth century were still a part of the Roman Empire. The book was alas historically flimsy and I could not bring myself to offer its conclusions as anything more than a mild diversion this morning.

Fortunately for my sermonic purposes, the Irish did indeed play a role in the development of Christianity. They also figure prominently into the history of the United Kingdom and the United States. And that outsized role stems from a few important factors.

First and foremost, the majority of the Irish have historically been Roman Catholic. Catholicism was the dominant religious tradition in Europe for many centuries. That changed after the Protestant Reformation, with many kingdoms and cultures becoming associated with the new upstart tradition.

The further north you go in Europe, for example, the more likely you are to find Protestant influences in a country. Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and many areas of Germany became Lutheran. A few smaller areas followed the Reformed tradition of John Calvin, such as Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Scotland. And eventually, the English would break away from Catholicism and establish their own version of Christianity, known as Anglicanism. Our own prayerbook owes much to that tradition while our Unitarian forebears arose from the Puritans’ Calvinistic theology.

Large areas of Europe remained Catholic, such as Spain, France, and Bavaria, along with the many small Italian city-states. And of course, Ireland. Religious tensions would develop across Europe. In some places like France, Protestant minorities known as the Huguenots were subject to persecution and deadly violence. And in Britain, control of the English crown became an ongoing and bloody conflict between Protestants and Catholics. Millions of people died over the centuries fighting over what religion would be followed in a particular area.

One effort to reduce the fighting was the notion of “Cuius regio, eius religio,” which is a lovely bit of Latin meaning “Whose region, whose religion.” The religion of a region was determined by who ruled the region. If the king was Protestant, everyone was Protestant and if the king was Catholic, everyone was Catholic. How they imagined this would solve their religious problems boggles the modern mind. But it was a principle of that time that allowing diverse religious belief would weaken the kingdom.

In the case of England, Henry VIII made the kingdom Protestant. The Anglican tradition was hammered out as an accommodation between Protestant theology and many aspects of Catholic liturgy. But this blend of traditions was still not Catholicism and many British Catholics resisted the effort, leading to their exile, imprisonment, and death in many cases.

During this same timeframe, the English had conquered Ireland, with Henry assuming the Irish crown. And as we know “whose region, whose religion,” so Ireland was to become Protestant. This led to four centuries of resistance and revolution by the Irish and escalating repression against Irish Catholics by the English.

Notice I said, “Irish Catholics.” Not all the Irish were Catholic, and Irish Protestants grew in power and influence over time. Some of you may have heard the term “Scotch-Irish.” Many of the Irish Protestants were not Anglicans but in fact Presbyterians. When England tried to force them into religious compliance, they decided to emigrate to the New World. The term “Scotch-Irish” is uniquely American. It denotes someone who emigrated from the northern Irish county of Ulster, someone who was typically Presbyterian. These folks numbered in the hundreds of thousands before the founding of the United States.

Eventually, however, emigration from Ireland increased dramatically after the Great Famine in the 1840s. These new immigrants were Irish Catholics. And Catholics were not welcomed in these United States. Not at all.

You may be wondering why I am going through this extended history lesson about the Irish and Europe. You see, in the United States those who came to settle had their own religious beliefs and perspectives. Some of them were English Puritans and they settled here in New England. Some were Scotch-Irish and many settled around the Appalachian Mountains. Some were Anglicans who settled in the Carolinas, Virginia, and Georgia. Some Catholics even made it to the colonies and they settled in what would be called Maryland, named after King Charles I wife, Queen Henrietta Maria of France who was Catholic.

Eventually, the American colonists decided they wished to break away from the British, leading to war and in time freedom. They needed an operational document under which they would function as a nation, the U.S. Constitution. That document would be amended and the Bill of Rights would be added. That included the First Amendment, which most people know to be about freedom of speech. That is the third right listed in the amendment. Here are the first two: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

Why did they add this pair of rights about religion? It is very simple. These Puritans and Presbyterians, these Anglicans and Catholics, these Quakers and Baptists who founded our nation, they did not trust each other. They did not trust each other when it came to religion. And so, they tried to protect themselves from themselves.

This change was proposed in 1789. For nearly three hundred years, Europe had been fighting wars over religion. Protestants were still subject to persecution in France and Catholics were subject to persecution in England. And the newly minted American citizens were trying to find a way to avoid fighting over religion. And it has helped, but it has not always worked perfectly.

Many early American laws effectively outlawed Catholicism. For example. a Catholic priest was subject to the death penalty in the northern colonies. And one of the Intolerable Acts that had sparked the American Revolution was the so-called Quebec Act, which had given greater religious freedom to French Catholic settlers in the province of Quebec. Religious freedom for Catholics was apparently intolerable.

There were few Catholics in much of the United States, so at first it was not an issue. But the Great Famine in Ireland led to mass migration of Irish Catholics to the U.S. And how did those already here react? Badly.

For example, many English Protestant residents of Boston decided to move out because they were becoming hemmed in by Irish Catholics. Many of the Boston suburbs owe their founding to this shift in population and that includes our own neighborhood of Chestnut Hill. To stop Protestants from fleeing the city, Boston’s leaders decided to build a spiffy new neighborhood of their own. They would call it the Back Bay and it would be a grand place with wide boulevards, public gardens, and beautiful mansions. The city filled in marshes along the Charles River and then sold off the lots, making a vast sum of money. They imposed strict construction budgets on buyers, making sure these were new buildings of high quality and style.

However, it is important to point out that none of that new land was permitted to be sold to anyone who was Catholic. And no Catholic church was allowed to exist there. And with one or two exceptions over time, not a single Catholic church has ever been built in the Back Bay.

Getting back to the initial question, how have the Irish influenced Christianity over time? In both England and the United States, the Irish have been sizeable minorities struggling against Protestant majorities. In England that led to repressive laws that made it illegal for Catholics to hold office, go to university, or join many professions.

In the United States, one would have imagined that the religious freedom spelled out in the Constitution would have made everything a lot fairer. Bear in mind, however, that the Back Bay project began in the 1850s long after the Constitution went into effect. The First Amendment prevented the federal government from imposing a religion on the people or interfering with religious practices. The states could do whatever they wanted. And they did.

Even the school system was affected by this tension. The Bible was used for teaching in schools and students had to say the Lord’s Prayer. Catholics objected to these practices however because the King James Bible was used, a Protestant translation, and the Book of Common Prayer’s Anglican version of the Lord’s Prayer was expected to be recited. This led to decades of conflict and eventually American Catholics decided to set up their own school systems using their own Bibles and prayers. This is how Catholic parochial schools came into being in the U.S.

But the fighting did not end. Catholics asked that some of the public funds for schools be reallocated so they could run their new system. Many Protestants objected to paying for two systems when one public system was sufficient, albeit a system that taught from Protestant books and used Protestant prayers. Schools were not federally funded, so state money could be used regardless of these religious sensitivities.

One interesting development from this debate was a rallying cry calling for the separation of church from state. Which might sound odd given this Catholic versus Protestant dispute brewing. But that was not the logic at the time. Teaching from the Bible was not considered religious. Learning one version of the Lord’s Prayer was not considered sectarian. It was simply moral instruction. It did not matter if one minority objected to the choices made by the school board. A choice had to be made and Catholics had lost out.

In time, however, the First Amendment was applied against state governments. The 14^th Amendment required that people be treated equally across the states and the First Amendment was one of those equalizing laws. Which in the 20^th century led to Bible readings and prayer in schools being abolished. Some people still vehemently oppose this change and would like to see a return to the Bible and prayer being allowed in schools. Which leads us to the present day.

How do you all think this should play out? Should we get back to prayer in schools? But which prayers? Some states even formed committees to write bland sounding interfaith prayers, which were truly awful to be honest.

And what about the Bible? Perhaps we could teach the Bible as literature. However, many object to treating the Bible like it is just any other book. Choosing which version of the Bible is no easier now than it was 150 years ago when there were open riots on the subject.

And if you choose to teach the Bible, do you also teach the Qur’an? The Talmud? The Greek and Roman myths, which might lead some intrepid teachers to call certain religions nothing more than myths.

Well, what about separation between church and state. Let’s go with that.

Do not forget the third right listed in the First Amendment, the freedom of speech. How do you get people to stop talking about religion when they have the legal right to keep talking? It is a puzzlement.

One trend in the United States may change this dynamic but I am not sure it is a positive trend. Americans are becoming less religious and younger Americans far less so than older ones. There are many possible reasons for this change, but one reported reason is concerning. Religion as a broad category is seen as intolerant. Younger Americans tend to be more accepting of ethnic and religious diversity. They are also far more accepting of LGBT folks than older generations.

Some of you might say, that’s great. Let’s go out there and grab a few of these people to shore up our membership. But that is the problem. Religion generally is seen as intolerant, not certain denominations. We are no more likely to see some of these people in our pews than some fire and brimstone church. They see all religion as bigoted and corrupt.

In our Gospel reading this morning, Jesus called for his followers to be seen out in the world. In recent decades, that sort of religious visibility has been the province of conservative religious groups, some of whom have less than tolerant views about gays and lesbians or people of different ethnicities. Some are even openly racist or advocate for public policies that could be described as racist.

But that is not everyone. Not every religious person or group is like that. Why is everyone being painted with the same brush, tarnished with the actions of others? And yet that is what is happening.

No one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house.

Some of us are hiding. Churches that are religiously liberal and progressive stand by silently. They stay closed in on themselves, remaining insulated from social discord but also insular when it comes to their more inclusive messages.

And so, there is a choice that must be made. Do you avoid making noise in order to keep things nice and quiet? Or do you speak out and speak up against intolerance in the world? What do you do?

First, you have to ask what you believe. And if the answer leads to a desire to challenge intolerance, then you have to ask why stay silent, why hide under a bushel basket? Why let people suffer and why let intolerance go unchallenged?

If we look at the scriptures and the teachings of Jesus, the answer is clear—speak out. Speak out about loving God and loving one another. Speak out against hate, which is the opposite of Jesus’ teachings. No hiding. No silence. No holding back.

I could go on and on about separation of church and state, but it is simply a question of deciding what one believes and choosing to do something about those beliefs. To speak freely as protected by the Constitution and to act conscientiously as protected by the Constitution. The problem has never been the law. Maybe it is fear or self-consciousness or a desire not to stand out. But whatever the concern, we have been called upon by Jesus not to hide from his teachings, or from those opposed to those teachings, but to live them out.

We need to be an example of what it means to follow Jesus and what it means to be a member of this church. And if we cannot do that, then the assumption that religion is intolerant and corrupt goes unchallenged. And it is unlikely that anyone is going to come looking around on their own to overcome their doubts about church in general or this church in particular. We need to put faith into action and to uncover our light for all to see. Amen.