Alexander City Civitan, March, 1994
How appropriate it is that we honor the spiritual leaders of this community. I have opportunities frequently to think of the importance of the work that our spiritual leaders do. After all, people do what they do because of what they believe. That’s a very simple statement, but when you think about it a little bit, it means that law and religion are closely related. Think about it. We do what we do because of what we believe. Do we ever act inconsistently with what we believe? The Bible talks about beliefs. The Bible talks about the fruits of what we believe.
I’m deeply honored to be here. I was here just a few months ago, and you may have invited me back too soon. Everybody might remember what I said last time, and I might say the same thing again! I always run that risk. When I was Conference Lay Leader for the Alabama West Florida Conference of the United Methodist Church, I didn’t ever have to worry about that. We had 700 churches down there, and I seldom went to the same one twice, so I really didn’t need but one speech. So, I just always said the same thing. It must be terrible to be a preacher and have to go back in front of the same people every Sunday and try to remember what you’ve said. And the longer you stay at one church, the more likely you are to use the same stuff twice, and there’s always some smart-alec who thinks he remembers what you said. But you can always say, well you haven’t done anything about it yet, so….
What we believe affects what we do. We live in a world that is deeply hurting. It is deeply in trouble. We hear about crime. Our President (Clinton) talks about the necessity of putting an additional hundred thousand policemen on the streets. We still hear about drugs. I can attest to the breakdown of the family. I can attest to the breakdown of community. I’m aware of the overcrowding of our prisons. I’m aware of the sky-rocketing medical costs, and of the sky-rocketing verdicts in civil cases. We are living in a troubled society.
It reminds me of a story that I always tell, ***(the first aid story)***
Now, folks, I’m afraid that sometimes that’s what the church does today. We may not even be applying a band-aid until the Great Physician can arrive, in a world that is broken and hurting and bleeding. In my judgment, all orderliness in our society comes from our system of beliefs—our system of faith. Science is not going to produce order for us or tell us how to live together. The ability to live life together comes from our faith system. Religion—which is an important part of our faith system—is about how we relate to each other and to God. Because, you see, we do what we do because of what we believe; and religion shapes our belief systems. That makes religion extremely important.
When we examine the history of our country, we immediately think about separation of church and state. Now, separation of church and state is a sound constitutional principle, but that concept is in trouble today. The founders of our country were not atheists. They were devoutly religious people. They protected freedom of religion. They founded this country with the assumption that the churches would be here and would do what churches are supposed to do and that the people would be deeply affected by religious faith. They put a clause in our United States Constitution which says that Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of a religion or preventing the free exercise thereof. That’s a powerful clause. In the hands of non-believers, however, it can become a real tool for the secular humanists in our society to go far beyond anything that the founders of our country had in mind in proclaiming the necessity for separating religion from everything that is important. While separation of Church and State is important, separation of law and religion is impossible.
The relationship between law and faith is not new. You remember that Christ had a few encounters with the law himself. He went through a corn field and his Disciples ate corn and got in trouble with the law. He healed a man’s withered hand on Sunday, and He got in trouble with the law. And He said man is not made for the law, but law is made for man. And confronting the law, He said that He had not come to destroy the law but to fulfill the law. But all through the Bible, there is a recurrent theme—and all through our civilization there is a recurrent theme—of the relationship between law and grace. How does fallen sinful human kind become a law-abiding, law-producing people? And that presents some rather interesting things to speculate about. Things that have troubled our theologians. Things that troubled St. Thomas Aquinas; things that troubled the Dutch-Calvinist Movement– Calvin and Luther and all of those individuals.
Throughout our history, our church leaders have struggled for a handle for the problem: How does sinful humankind produce an orderly society? If sinful humankind can’t do it, how do we justify a separation of church and state? St. James said that faith without works is dead, and he was talking about works of the law. But, of course, it is by grace that we are saved through faith. Not by our works. And that brings me back to the subject of faith.
In the fifth chapter of Matthew, Jesus said, “you will know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?” If we are Christians, we will produce good fruit. Law and an orderly society is a part of that good fruit. We do it not as sinful man turned away from God through Adam, but through the grace of God. The theologians have talked about a common grace that precedes the grace that is found through the Holy Spirit. I think that in these concepts, we find the basis and the only basis on which we can build an orderly society.
While separation of church and state is a very fine principle, it expresses itself in two or three different ways. One of the ways is when we talk about the Constitution and the Constitutional provisions that I’ve mentioned. I was running for office down in Macon County one time, and my opponent was for dog racing, and I wasn’t. And they questioned me pretty carefully about why I was not in favor of dog racing, and I told them that among other things, it violates the principles of my religion. And my opponent said you are not supposed to let your religion affect your politics. Now, folks, that’s not what separation of church and state means. If you’ve got any religion, it’s going to affect everything you do. So, my opponent, in my judgment, didn’t let his religion affect his politics. I lost that election. That was not a race for judge, and the people got a dog track.
Where does law come from? Why do we do the things that amount to law? I’m not sure that we can answer the metaphysical question “what is law.” But maybe if we explore it from a standpoint of human motivation–if we can determine something about why we do what we do– we can put it all together in a concept that we call law. To that end, I have studied a great deal about human motivation–why we do what we do. I agree with Abraham Maslow that we do what we do to get what we need. It’s a simple proposition. We do what we do to get what we need. We need meaning and purpose in life. St. Augustine said “my soul was restless until it found rest in Thee”. And we cannot find that kind of meaning anywhere except in the right relationship with God Almighty. That is the basis of family; that is the basis of the church. We have to keep the institutional church and the institutional state separate, for sound reasons, but when it comes to individuals who do everything that is done, law and religion cannot be separated. We act consistently with our beliefs, and we do what we do to get what we need. We cannot separate law and religion at their fountainhead in human motivational force. To do so would be to embrace something akin to schizophrenia. Now, there’s danger of that very thing happening. There’s the danger that people can sit in church on Sunday morning and smile and not have religion affect the way they live their lives at all.
Now, the challenge before this group is tremendous. I think that we need to do two things. We need to say we appreciate what you’re doing and what I’ve tried to say tonight is “I understand.” I understand that sacred burden that you carry. Perhaps I understand as no one else here understands the importance of what you’re doing, because I experience that broken world that you are trying hard to mend. I know how important your work is. It is time that we pause and express our appreciation to you for all that you do. Abraham Lincoln paused in the middle of the Civil War at Gettysburg and said “we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground, for the brave men, living and dead who fought here have already hallowed it far beyond our small ability to add or detract.” And the same is true of your sanctuary. The fight that you are making, the battle that you are waging, is of critical importance.
I think sometimes about those old Methodist preachers of the last century–the circuit riders. It might not have been so much their hell fire and brimstone sermons as the fact that they rode those old horses hundreds of miles to get there that caused them to be so successful. If anybody rides a horse hundreds of miles and comes across mountains and through floods and through all sorts of other problems, the people are going to listen at them when they get there! Because the people are going to figure, if he thinks it’s that important, there must be something to it! How important is our dedication to our work? Very important. So, we are here to recognize you; we are here to encourage you; and we are here to tell you that the fight is not over yet. We’ve got to move forward from this point.
I do what I can in this endeavor. I served my church as Conference Lay Leader for five years. I have taken the opportunity to get to know the people over at Emory University who have a Law and Religion Program. We live in a world in which there is a God who understands computers. There is a God who understands Freudian psychology. There is a God who understands whatever we can understand. There is a God who, as Paul Tillich said, is the ground of our being. We can’t minimize our minds and deal with the world that idealizes and idolizes rationality and science. We can’t minister to that world with less than our entire mind. We’ve got to take them as they come.
We’ve got to attract young people to the ordained ministry. I think about it a lot of times. We have so many people going into law practice, when they ought to be going into full time Christian ministry. What they want to do is change the world, and I’m convinced that the only way to change the world is by changing people one at a time. If a young person wants to do that vocationally, then he should consider a fulltime Christian ministry.
Incidentally, I understand some exciting things are going on up at Samford University and Cumberland. They have a law and religion program that is up and coming. We’ve got to marshal all our forces. We must not lose the battle. The light of the world has flickered through the Christian Religion into western civilization for 2000 years. Are we going to let it fade and die out in our generation? Our civilization is built on it. Even secular humanism and its values draw directly on the matrix of ideas and beliefs that have come from our Judeo–Christian tradition.
The most important question that has ever been asked, I suppose, is when God was walking in the Garden, and he confronted Adam and Eve and asked them, “Who told thee thou art naked?” Who tells anybody that they are sinful? It’s the conscience. And where does that come from? It comes from being reared, as Sigmund Freud says, in a home where there’s a mama and a daddy that cause us to distinguish right and wrong.
I’m seeing a generation of people today that is a little different than the generation of people that I dealt with when I first became a judge eleven years ago. I’m dealing with people who have much less a grip on what is right and what is wrong in this world. And the reason for that is because the family is breaking down. We went to no-fault divorces in 1969, and we’ve been having to expand the prisons ever since then. I don’t think I could do a sociological study that would prove my point, but I think the point is there and is well taken.
In the very structure of our community, we are losing moral force. For all of its righteousness, the Civil Rights Movement may have substituted no structure at all for what was bad structure. No relationship….do you understand what I mean by structure? The family structure, the community structure, the relationship that people have and expectations they have of each other. We might have lost something. By gaining something in individual rights, we might have lost something in our spirit of communities in the very effort to do good.
When I get into something, I guess I don’t ever come to a good stopping place. I’m burdened with these thoughts, as you can see. I enjoy the opportunity from time to time discuss them, and I appreciate the opportunity to be here. A fellow hasn’t got but 30 or 40 or 50 more years to do this, so I’m going to talk about it every chance I get. There is nothing more important to talk about. I haven’t seen anybody go to sleep in here yet-not even a blink, but I know how difficult it is to talk about what I’m trying to get across. We must not go to sleep. We must think about these things and talk about them, and we must let that Gospel light lead us into the next thousand years.
It’s been a pure pleasure being here.
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