Litchfield Presbyterian

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This sermon was recorded on Pentecost Sunday. To listen to this Sermon Audio recording Click Here

This sermon was recorded on  Mother’s Day 2010. To listen to this Sermon Audio recording  Click Here

Genesis 11:1-9

Acts 2:1-21

The story of the confusion of the languages at the tower of Babel is itself quite confusing.  I mean, what is the problem here?  Why is God displeased that “nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.” ?  The usual explanation points to the Promethean impulse among humans.

Perhaps you know the story of Prometheus?  It is from ancient Greek mythology.   Prometheus is a kind of lesser God who challenges the great god Zeus.  Zeus has withheld fire from humans as a punishment for the inadequacy of the sacrifices humans offered to him.  Not out of compassion for the humans, but out of spite for Zeus, Prometheus steals fire from Zeus and gives it to the humans.  The Promethean impulse among humans is therefore, the attempt of humans to achieve for themselves what they should receive as a gift from God.

Rather than allowing God to make them great, the humans in the tower of Babel story labor to make themselves great through their own efforts.  God is displeased with this self-promotion of the human race, and frustrates their project by confusing their languages.  When someone asks the perfectly reasonable question, “why are there so many languages among the human race?” The tower of Babel story provides an answer.

There is something for us to learn here, no doubt, but I want to take the interpretation of this story in little different direction.  I believe that the stories of Genesis – the stories of the beginnings – the stories of creation are not merely about what happened long, long ago.  These of stories, we may say inspired myths or legends, that help us understand how God is urging, drawing and calling us into our highest selves right now.  These are stories about our human becoming in our relationship to the source of being, the goodness of life that is God.  These are stories that are meant to help us become what God means for us to be – right now in our lives as we live from day to day.

It is in that light that I want to interpret the tower of Babel story, and the story of Pentecost in the second chapter of Acts will help me do this.  Something happens in the Pentecost story that sheds a great deal of light for us.  At first I was tempted to see the Pentecost story as a kind of reversal of the Babel story.  In one languages are confused so that people can not understand each other, and in the other the apostles ecstatically speak in a variety of languages so that people from all over the world heard in their own languages.  But as I thought about this, I realized that this is not really a reversal of the multiplying of the languages, is it?  I mean the languages remain separate and distinct so that people each hear the apostles speaking in their own language.  What happened is not that the diversity of language is removed, but rather that the diversity is embraced and the apostles are empowered by the Holy Spirit to bring a unity of understanding through the diversity of the languages.

The message of the Babel story, in the light of the Pentecost story is this: humans are constantly tempted to make themselves great by creating unity through sameness.  But God intends the richness, the greatness of humanity to be realized as we experience unity of spirit in and through our diversity.

Let me unpack this a little.  Humans are constantly tempted to make themselves great by creating unity through sameness.  Human history is replete with examples of the human tendency to enforce conformity, sameness and orthodoxy.  The thinking seems to be, “if only we could get everybody to conform, to think and believe and behave the same way then we could really be great, we could really accomplish something.  Heterodoxy, non-conformity, and differences or opinion and belief are seen as threats.  Power is understood as the ability the make people conform.  A few examples from relatively modern history will suffice.

In 1976 the communist Khmer Rouge un Pol Pot took control of Cambodia.  At the time, about 85 percent of the population followed the Theravada school of Buddhism. The country’s 40,000 to 60,000 Buddhist monks, regarded by the regime as social parasites, were defrocked and forced into labor brigades.

Many monks were executed; temples and pagodas were destroyed or turned into storehouses or jails. Images of the Buddha were defaced and dumped into rivers and lakes. People who were discovered praying or expressing religious sentiments were often killed. The Christian and Muslim communities also were even more persecuted, as they were labeled as part of a pro-Western cosmopolitan sphere, hindering Cambodian culture and society.

The Roman Catholic cathedral of Phnom Penh was completely razed. The Khmer Rouge forced Muslims to eat pork, which they regard as forbidden.  Many of those who refused were killed. Christian clergy and Muslim imams were executed.

In Ireland from 1695 through the middle of the 19^th century, the British enacted a series of penal laws specifically designed to subjugate the large Irish catholic majority.  Among other restrictions, Irish Catholics were banned from owning land, they could not own a horse worth more than £5, they could build no new churches and priests could not say mass without specific permission, parents were not permitted to educate their children at home, and it was made illegal to write or speak the Gaelic language.  All this was designed to force the majority into subservience to the British crown.

Repeatedly in the 1880s, the U.S. government required all instruction for Indians to be in English. Traditional Indian ceremonies, such as the Sun Dance of the Plains Indians, were banned. Students entering government boarding and day schools were reclothed, regroomed, and renamed. Locked rooms were used as “jails,” and corporal punishment was employed to enforce school rules that usually included a ban on tribal languages. In his autobiography, Indian Agent, long-time teacher, school administrator, and Indian agent Albert Kneale reported that Indian students in Indian schools “were taught to despise every custom of their forefathers, including religion, language, songs, dress, ideas, methods of living.” The alternatives for Indians were annihilation or assimilation.

These are just the tip of the iceberg of the many historic, and  I’m sad current instances of forced conformity.  All this in the name of achieving human, and often Imperial greatness by means of unity through sameness.  This is not God’s way.  It is impoverishing to the human race and destructive of the human spirit.

Sadly, tragically, the Christian religion has been one of the worst offenders on this score. Intolerance and suspicion of those who believe or worship differently has been the hallmark of many Christian groups from the beginning.  Catholics and Protestants alike have burned so-called heretics at the stake. The Pope burned John Huss in Germany and John Calvin burned Michael Servetus in Geneva. Anglicans persecuted Puritans in England and Puritans persecuted Quakers in New England. Everybody burned witches wherever they could including a few not 50 miles from here in Salem, Massachusetts.  Fundamentalists condemned modernists and vice versa.  On and on it goes.  This does not please God.

To be one people, with one language and one ideology and one religion, is not what God wants for humanity.  The ancient story of the tower of Babel makes this clear.  God wants people to be different – a rich and multi-colored mosaic of diversity.  But this does not mean that God wants people to be divided.  The message is clear.  God indeed intends unity, but not sameness.  Is this vision, this dream of human community impossible?  Is it beyond hope, beyond reach?

It may be for us, perhaps, but not for God.  The means of achieving unity in diversity is through the Holy Spirit.  That is one of the great messages of Pentecost.  When Peter interpreted what had happened on that day, he turned to the message of the prophet Joel.  The outpouring of God’s spirit on all people makes possible unity in diversity by causing people to re-think their understanding of humanity and to dream dreams and have visions – dreams of humanity as a race of loving souls – visions of the world as a community of compassion and inclusion.

Jesus had such a vision – he called it the kingdom of God. The reign of love.  It is a peaceable kingdom when reconciliation reigns.  In the world according to this vision, the outsider is invited in.  The ones who are different are cherished, not in spite of their differences, but because of them.  Strangers are welcome here, and the least of these are treated with the greatest honor.  In the vision of God’s reign of love, there is no gossip; there are no grudges. When one stumbles or falls, all hurry to be supportive.  Enemies won over by love.  Sinners are not condemned, but gently corrected and restored.   This is how Jesus saw humanity and how he lived.  His vision, his dream, his manner of life came from God.  It is God’s will.  And it is what the followers of Jesus proclaimed and how they sought to live.

In 1963 a young Baptist preacher stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and delivered a sixteen minute sermon.  He said, “I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.  I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today!”

That is the dream of God, that is the vision of Pentecost – that is the purpose of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on all flesh.  It is not a dream that we may all be the same, not vision that our differences will be eradicated, not a hope that we will conform to some fixed standard or be converted to one religion or one system of belief. No, it is instead a vision of common humanity.  It is a dream of mutual respect.  It is a belief that love is more powerful than hate, that hope is stronger than suspicion, that forgiveness is greater than sin.

Clearly we are not there.  We have not yet arrived.  But just as clearly we will never get there without a vision.  We can never arrive without a dream.  The outpouring of the spirit of God – the same spirit that moved Jesus in all he did and said – that is our only hope.  After Peter preached on the day of Pentecost, his hearers “were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the other apostles, “Brothers, what shall we do?”  Peter replied, “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. The promise is for you and your children and for all who are far off—for all whom the Lord our God will call.” Let us also receive this forgiveness and open our hearts to the gift of the Holy Spirit – the gift or a dream, the gift of a vision.  Amen.

This sermon was recorded on  Sunday, March 28, 2010. To listen to this Sermon Audio recording  Click Here

This sermon was recorded on  Sunday, March 21, 2010. To listen to this Sermon Audio recording Click Here.

This sermon was recorded on  Sunday, March 14, 2010. To listen to this Sermon Audio recording Click Here.

This sermon was recorded on March 7, 2010. To listen to the audio recording of this sermon Click Here.

Today I want to offer you an interpretation of the earliest years of this congregation.  It’s certainly not the only interpretation possible, but it makes sense to me and it is, I think, quite instructive.  It has become cliché to say that those who do not learn from the past are bound to repeat it.  Cliché notwithstanding, it is in the hope of gaining some useful insights from our past that I ask you to turn your attention for a few minutes to the very brief career of the first minister settled in this town, the Reverend Mr. Joshua Tufts.

Tufts was not the first minister to preach to the people of Naticook – as this area was first known. There are indications that at least three ministers preached here in the 1730’s.  Nor was Joshua Tufts the townspeople’s first choice for a settled minister.  Mr. Josiah Brown and Mr. Isaac Merrill (see Rev. Newhall’s Address) both were extended calls to settle here, but both declined.  Maybe they were just not the right men for the times.  Maybe Joshua Tufts was.  The story goes like this…

Late in 1741, two riders pulled up their mounts in front of the house of the aging Reverend John Tufts of Newbury, Massachusetts.  One rider represented the voters of Merrimack, New Hampshire on the west side of the river and the other represented the voters on the east side in Litchfield.  The two constituted a committee invested with the authority to treat with the elder Mr. Tufts for permission to extend a call to his son Joshua (recently graduated from Harvard College) to settle as the preacher at the newly erected meetinghouse in Litchfield.  (Being slightly fewer in number, the residents of Merrimack were obliged to cross the river on the Sabbath to worship on the Litchfield side – an arrangement, I might add, that was not much to their liking.)  Now, you may think it strange that the father’s permission should be solicited in this manner, but in those days, a male child under the age of 21 could not legally work outside the home without it.  Even after reaching 21, it was considered a common courtesy to seek a father’s permission to employ his young adult son.  The elder Mr. Tufts consented, and the riders returned to Litchfield with the news.  Shortly thereafter a second delegation was sent from Litchfield, this time leading an extra horse, upon which the young Mr. Joshua Tufts rode for the return trip up the river.  Joshua arrived at the steeple-less meetinghouse, where he was to be examined for his fitness to preach.  And what an examination it was!  We can well imagine that the young man may have – or perhaps should have – had some serious misgivings about accepting the call.  I will explain, but first a little context.

To understand the religious situation in Litchfield in 1741, and the difficulties faced by the congregation and young Mr. Tufts, we must first understand the religious climate in the New England colonies in those days.  As you well know, the Plymouth Plantation and Massachusetts Bay colonies were settled for the most part by dissenters from the Church of England.  Puritan leaders like the preacher John Cotton, the poet Anne Bradstreet and the politician John Winthrop (by the way both Cotton and Bradstreet were ancestors to Tufts,– his grandmother was Mercy Cotton and his mother was Sarah Bradstreet) in any case, the Puritan leaders believed that they were on an errand from God, to establish a shining “city on a hill” in the New World.  Though they never did become the model of Christian charity that some had hoped for, the early New England colonies were brimming with pious Puritan zeal.  But generations passed and by 1720 – a hundred years after the first Pilgrims stepped off of the Mayflower – the fires of Puritan passion had cooled considerably and Puritanism had settled into a dull and formal orthodoxy.  Then, in 1727 a strong earthquake shook New England and church attendance surged.  But anxiety about the impending end of the world soon faded and church attendance resumed its gradual decline.  Jonathan Edwards famously described the situation.  “… it seemed to be a time of extraordinary dullness in religion,” he wrote.

As the colonies expanded, worldly concerns often trumped heavenly ones.  On the New Hampshire frontier which included the town of Litchfield, for example, settlers were not only preoccupied with their crops, or with the harvesting of local timber, but they were greatly concerned about the ongoing boundary dispute between the Massachusetts Bay and New Hampshire colonies and its impact on the validity land titles and consequently their economic survival.

All in all, by the end of the 1730’s the times were ripe for a revival of religion.  It was then that itinerant evangelistic preachers began to appear – and they had tremendous appeal.  Men like George Whitefield, James Davenport and Gilbert Tennant, drew crowds in the thousands. People flocked into public squares and farmer’s fields to hear them preach their extemporaneous sermons.   The messages of these preachers, many of whom were Presbyterian, were highly emotional (“enthusiastic” as their critics called them) and extremely effective.  Many of their listeners came under the powerful conviction of their sinfulness and need for a “new birth.”  Stories of dramatic conversions, healings and awakenings of faith circulated through every church.

A contemporary account tells it this way:

“In 1739 [there] arrived among us … the Reverend Mr. Whitefield, who had made himself remarkable … as an itinerant preacher. He was at first permitted to preach in some of our churches; but the clergy, taking a dislike to him, soon refused him their pulpits, and he was obliged to preach in the fields. The multitudes of all sects and denominations that attended his sermons were enormous, and it was a matter of speculation to me, who was one of the number, to observe the extraordinary influence of his oratory on his hearers, and how much they admired and respected him, notwithstanding his common abuse of them, by assuring them that they were naturally half beasts and half devils. It was wonderful to see the change soon made in the manners of our inhabitants. From being thoughtless or indifferent about religion, it seemed as if all the world were growing religious, so that one could not walk thro’ the town in an evening without hearing psalms sung in different families of every street.”  Benjamin Franklin

Franklin, who was an admirer of Whitefield though never a convert, once conducted an experiment.  Starting from the place where Whitefield stood preaching in a field, he walked away from him until he could no longer hear him distinctly.  This procedure he repeated in several directions.  After careful calculations, he arrived at the conclusion that 30,000 people had heard Whitefield at that one meeting!  An incredible claim!

Settled preachers in many churches adopted the energetic style of the traveling evangelists and not a few congregations were stirred from spiritual lethargy to renewed religious passion.  But, as Franklin remarked, not all ministers were favorably impressed by what came to be called “The Great Awakening.”  When established orthodox ministers – many of them Congregationalists – were directly challenged, accused of being unconverted and of being tools of the devil leading their congregations to hell, they declared war and struck back.  Pamphlets and tracts were published denouncing the revivalists as excessively emotional, over-excited and manipulative.  James Davenport was literally banned from Boston.  Prominent among the counter-revivalists was Charles Chauncy, the “Old Brick,” who launched his counter-attack from the pulpit of the First Congregational Church of Boston.  Chauncy and the establishment clergy were known as the “Old Lights” as over against the revivalist “New Lights.”  Chauncy’s famous booklet, Seasonable Thoughts on the State of Religion in New England, published in 1743, was a point-by-point refutation of the teachings and perceived excesses of the traveling evangelists.  In July that same year a convention of “New Light” ministers gathered in Boston.  As a reply to Chauncy, they signed and had published in the newspapers a statement entitled “The Testimony and Advice of the Pastors of the Churches in New England” in which they supported the revivals as a genuine movement of God.   We’ll hear more about both Chauncy’s “Seasonable Thoughts” and the rebutting “Testimony and Advice…” in a few minutes.

The first half of the 1740’s was a time not only of turmoil, but often of outright chaos in the churches of New England.  From 1740 to 1744 most churches in New England aligned themselves with either the “New Light” revivalists or the “Old Light” traditionalists.  The split was about 50/50 with a few congregations attempting to remain neutral – usually without success.  Controversy and ill-will abounded.  Some congregations split in half.  Many congregations tended “New Light” while their pastor tended “Old Light” and vice versa.  In those cases, the pastor usually got sacked, or if he managed to stay on, large contingents of the congregation often abandoned him to attend, or even start up, another church more to their liking.

In Londonderry, the newly formed West parish was led by the charismatic “New Light” David MacGregore, and the established East parish was led by “Old Light” William Davidson.  The two ministers held each other in tremendous contempt and refused to speak one to the other.  The whole town drew up sides and squared off against each other.  On every Sabbath “Old Light” residents of the west side of town defiantly marched right past the front door of the West parish meeting house to go clear across town to worship at the “Old Light” East parish.  And equally outraged “New Light” residents of the east side streamed past the nearby East parish meeting house to worship with the “New Lights” in the West Parish.    According to E.L. Parker’s history of Londonderry, “This unhappy division was productive of evils long felt in the town, not only occasioning alienation of feeling, and often bitter animosities between the members of these two religious societies, but also preventing all ministerial and even social intercourse between the ministers.”     This situation was not unique to Londonderry.  Such was the state of affairs in many New England towns when the young and inexperienced Joshua Tufts was examined for his fitness to preach in Litchfield.

Here is what we know about the circumstances surrounding the examination.  As everywhere, there certainly were in the Litchfield-Merrimack community divisions of opinion along “New Light” and “Old Light” lines.  I suspect that most of those on the Merrimack side of the river were “Old Light” Congregationalists while many of those on the Litchfield side were more sympathetic to “New Light” Presbyterianism.  It appears, however, that the voters who were to elect their first settled minister wanted to avoid the hostilities that existed in Londonderry and elsewhere, and so were not prepared to declare outright for one side or the other.   They certainly didn’t want their newly gathered church to be fractured before it was even established.  Accordingly, they insisted that their minister should satisfy both “Old Lights” and “New Lights” as to his fitness.  To that end, prior to the examination of young Mr. Tufts, the voters approached two nearby ministers and asked them to help.  Would they provide a series of questions that they might put to their prospective pastor?  After the candidate responded, the ministers could review his answers and help decide his suitability.  They proceeded to solicit a list of examination questions from the Reverend David McGregore, the decidedly “New Light” Presbyterian pastor in the West parish of Londonderry, and from the Reverend Thomas Parker, the staunchly “Old Light” Congregationalist pastor in Dracut.  The questions were then put to Mr. Tufts and, astonishingly, the 25 year-old Harvard grad, managed to answer them to the satisfaction of both the “New Light” McGregore, and the “Old Light” Parker.

Based upon his startlingly successful examination, the twenty-six male voters on the east side of the river and the twenty-five on the west, voted to call Joshua Tufts as their pastor. Tufts accepted the call and was ordained on Dec. 9, 1741, and with his new wife, he settled in Litchfield.  This was an auspicious beginning to his relationship with the people here, but it was only the beginning.

We don’t know many details of Mr. Tufts’ career in Litchfield.  We do know, however, that in 1742 as the publisher was preparing to print Charles Chauncy’s anti-revivalist “Old Light” booklet, “Seasonable Thoughts…” he gathered over 700 advance subscriptions.  In those days subscriptions paid in advance were used as a way of underwriting the production of books.  Among the subscribers were the Rev. Thomas Parker of Dracut, Tufts’ “Old Light” examiner, and … The Rev. Joshua Tufts of Litchfield.  Tufts’ subscription to the work placed him squarely among the “Old Light” anti-revivalists.  Less than a year later, in July of 1743, when the Boston convention of “New Light” ministers published their “Testimony and Advice…” supporting revivals, whose names should appear among the signatories, but the Presbyterian revivalist and ordination examiner The David McGregore of Londonderry – and amazingly, the Rev. Joshua Tufts of Litchfield!   Tufts blatantly and very publicly contradicted himself.  There could only be two reasons for this. Tufts was either entirely muddled, or he was making a deliberate statement.

So what shall we make of all this? Tufts was a brilliant young man, graduating Harvard Phi Beta Kappa and near the top of his class, but there are some anecdotal references by classmates to his unsteadiness and vacillation in his student days. I was at first tempted, therefore, to think that Tufts may have indeed been weak and indecisive.  I was also tempted to think that the church set him up for failure by setting him an impossible task.  The lesson in that case would be: “he who seeks to please everyone, pleases no one – not even himself.”

But upon reflection, I have come to think more highly of both Tufts and of the church.  I believe both he and the congregation, for the good of the whole community, were actually trying to preserve peace by steering a diplomatic middle course between “Old Light” and “New Light” sentiments.  I choose to think that the congregation wanted to avoid the kind of division that so disrupted all of life in places like Londonderry.  I believe that the people of Litchfield called Tufts to be a peacekeeper – and he tried his best to be just that.   His apparent self-contradiction was not a sign that Tufts was too weak or too indecisive to take sides – it was a sign that he deliberately chose not to.   And that was itself a definitive stand.

I choose to believe that Tufts was a man who actually saw value in the diverse perspectives of the “Old Light” traditionalists and the “New Light” revivalists.  He didn’t choose between them, but instaed chose them both, because in his mind both had merit.  Perhaps he genuinely believed in both the value of tradition and the necessity for change.  Perhaps he saw that both renewal and continuity had to be embraced.  I want to imagine that he saw that people forget their past at their own peril.  But I want to believe that he also recognized that it is equally perilous to be so mired in the past that we overlook new possibilities.  It may be that Joshua Tufts did the best that could be done for the fledgling church in Litchfield.  He saw them through a turbulent time and held them together until the heat of passion died down and the crisis passed.  He may have been called to the young church in Litchfield for just such a purpose as that.  I think the evidence points that way, but it’s not really possible to know.  Still, this address is not just a history lesson, it’s a sermon about the lessons of history – so I hope you will allow my speculations and we’ll all learn what we can.   What we do know for certain is that by 1744, the fevered revivals of the “Great Awakening” had run their course, and Joshua Tufts’ pastorate in Litchfield came to an abrupt end.  One cryptic record simply says, “He was dismissed in 1744.”  Why and whether at his own request or not, we are not told.

This sermon was recorded on February 14, 2010. To listen to the audio recording of this sermon Click Here.