February 10th “City Upon a Hill” Matthew 5: 13-16
We live in a great country here in America. We celebrate freedom and opportunity, patriotism, responsible citizenship, and generosity. Yes, we continue to face numerous challenges on issues as varied as gun control, our national debt and the economy, education policies, and climate concerns among others. We engage in debates about what powers are best left to the federal government and those best left to the states. On occasion the discourse can become acrimonious or even paralyzing. Yet the fact that we can even express differing world views and solutions to the problems that we face in a civic and political arena is a sign of our strength.
We do need to focus upon what unites us, however, rather than what divides us, and call upon the angels of our better nature to guide our life together, to borrow a phrase from Abraham Lincoln. That’s why I’ve chosen today to talk to you a little about Puritan John Winthrop and his vision for America. He has become famous for his application of a phrase from Jesus’ sermon on the mount cast as a description of America’s potential. And the phrase a shining “city upon a hill” has been used by both Democrat John Kennedy and Republican Ronald Reagan to portray an America filled with all kinds of people living in harmony and peace with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. So let’s take a look at the life and times of John Winthrop to understand what he meant by this phrase.
John Winthrop was a Puritan, a group that emphasized Bible reading and prayer and saw preaching, grace, devotion, and self examination as means to achieve both religious and civic virtue. Over the centuries the term Puritan erroneously came to mean a rigid strictness in morals and religious matters. But the Puritans did not dress in drab clothes or live in drab houses. Neither were they prudes or prohibitionists, for they loved life with its blessings. They did frown upon the celebration of Christmas, however, believing that Christmas as observed in England was too gaudy and commercial a holiday that robbed Christ’s birth of its true meaning.
Puritans came into conflict with the ruling Anglican leaders in England and faced discrimination in their desire for freedom of worship. Winthrop came in contact with organizers of what was known as the Massachusetts Bay Company, a large trading corporation with powers of ownership. Its leaders were Puritans and they discussed the possibility of emigrating to the new world. The company could create in New England the kind of society which they believed God demanded of his servants. They eventually boarded the Arbella, the flagship of the expedition, and 3 other ships. 400 men, women, and children departed on April 7, 1630. 600 more would join them later. On June 11 they finally arrived in Salem harbor in the midst of summer heat. The major tasks of building shelter and finding food lay ahead of them. Winthrop was asked to deliver a sermon before they left the ship. The sermon was called “A Model of Christian Charity” and the city upon a hill phrase was a section within the sermon.
Winthrop warned the people that the wrath of God falls upon people or nations who fail to do God’s will. And he said that the only way to avoid it was to follow the counsel of the prophet Micah, to do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with God. He said that the Puritans must love each other, care for each other, and “abridging ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others necessities,” that is, sharing of wealth where no one lives in luxury while others starve, delight in each other, make others’ conditions their own, and do all this to create a natural community of faith.
Winthrop urged his people to be loving and caring and selfless. He isn’t saying that they already are those things. He isn’t boasting about them. He is urging them to become loving and caring and selfless in the name of their godly mission so that they may succeed. There’s no narcissism or self in this for Winthrop. It’s all about serving God as a society and not about individuals becoming famous for their virtue.
He said, “For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill; the eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken and so cause him to withdraw his present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword through the world and shall shame the faces of many of God’s worthy servants till we be consumed out of the good land we are going.”
This wasn’t an idle concern. The colony of Roanoke became lost. Jamestown had many well publicized failures. And even the Plimoth Plantation, founded by Separatists in 1620, was hardly thriving. There was evidence to Winthrop that God had already withdrawn his support from previous English settlements, and the Puritans settled far from the Pilgrims.
And Winthrop also said, “But if our hearts shall turn away so that we will not obey, but shall be seduced and worship other Gods, our pleasures, and profits, and serve them, it is propounded unto us this day, we shall surely perish out of the good land whither we pass over this vast sea to possess it.”
Wow! Look at the high stakes here. See what Winthrop considers to be the threat, namely our pleasures and profits. Colonies were founded to make money. Everyone knew that. Even the Puritans would have to repay their investors. They were business people, many of them London merchants, and they would set about creating industry in New England. Being a Puritan was not about denial. It was about balance. Enjoy without attachment, enjoy without letting pleasure become your master. This was the Puritan ideal.
Winthrop’s sermon must have inspired the Puritans who heard it because it did not confirm their virtue but challenged it. It was an exhortation to do better than they normally would, to try harder and aim higher, because all the world would be watching.
It is not a smug declaration that they are the best people in the world. It is a call to virtue and effort, love and compassion, sharing and helping. In that sense it is the first of many great American calls to idealism and justice, like the Declaration of Independence, our Constitution, and Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, the 150th anniversary of which we have just marked on January 1 of this year.
For all of us gathered here today as Christians and as citizens, the issue is the problem of how to do right in a world that emphasizes wrong, and how to find genuine solutions to problems that beset us in a way that preserves both our individual freedom and our collective responsibility to each other. For America is a city on a hill, and the world is watching.