Promoting Social Righteousness

Promoting Social Righteousness (October 16, 2005)

The Great Ends of the Church - Part 5

On July 4, 1963 at the Gwynn Oaks Amusement Park in Baltimore, Maryland, the Stated Clerk of the Presbyterian Church, the Rev. Dr. Eugene Carson Blake, who was white, marched arm in arm with a black Presbyterian elder named Furman Templeton up to a cordon of police, and asked to be admitted. The police told Dr. Blake he could go in, but not Templeton. Blake wouldn’t go in without his friend. As the confrontation developed a crowd of some 1000 white men shouted “Dump ‘em in the bay,” and other epithets unprintable in a sermon.

On the way Blake and Templeton had discussed which rides they would like to go to first. Blake didn’t like Ferris wheels and Templeton didn’t like roller coasters. Blake told the chief they wanted to ride on the miniature railroad. The police chief suggested what they really wanted was a ride in the paddy wagon. The next morning millions of Presbyterians awoke to see the front pages of the newspapers plastered with a photo of the chief executive officer of the church, dressed in a clerical collar and a straw hat, entering a police van.

Blake never spent a moment in jail. After being fingerprinted he and other ministers who had participated in the demonstration pleaded “not guilty” to trespassing charges, which were subsequently dropped. But the die was cast and mainline churches moved from words to action. The next month Blake was just behind Dr. King in Washington D.C. as the civil rights leader gave his “I have a dream” speech. And the churches worked hard for passage of the Civil Rights legislation of 1964 and 1965 opening voting to all and outlawing discrimination in hotels and restaurants.

We come now to the fifth of the Great Ends of the Church – the Promotion of Social Righteousness. These six great ends are a rudder, we have said, a guide to what the church is supposed to be and do. They go together. They are not to be “cherry picked”. They are also a marvelous evaluation tool for local churches to measure how they are doing in fulfilling these ends and what more they could do. They are great for keeping churches from complacency.

The fifth End is clearly the concern for social justice. Some people say the church should just do evangelism, others that it should just do social justice. The Great Ends show that these go together.

The Presbyterian Church is part of a Protestant tradition called Reformed which goes back to John Calvin in the 16th century in Geneva, Switzerland. Other churches in this tradition are the Congregational, the United Church of Christ, and the Reformed Church in America. Calvin, who knew his Bible better than any other Reformer in the 16th century, taught that the church’s job was not to pull people out of an evil society into a safe haven where they would be “saved” and uncontaminated by the world, rather it was to be a light to the world, to reform society, and to be intimately involved in its affairs.

Calvin was not interested in abstract theology that was distant from real life. Christian faith, he taught, requires social responsibility. One of the first things he did was to establish a college, which still exists in Geneva. Under Calvin the church provided refugee resettlement centers, encouraged public education, worked to provide health care for all, spent a lot of time talking about how to keep the streets clean – virtually running a sanitation department. Calvin also spoke out against unfair business practices and public polices which ignored the poor. Calvin himself even worked to provide a more economic cooking stove for the poor.

It must be admitted this sometimes led to abuses. Geneva was a theocracy. As hard as it was for Calvin to believe it, some people were more than happy to trade, say, a little more dirt on the streets for the freedom to do what they wanted. The Puritans in New England made many mistakes in this area, as we all know. But their great contribution is they never forgot that “the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the world, and they that dwell therein”.

Today it is hard to know how to promote social righteousness when the churches themselves are divided on a host of social issues: stem cell research, abortion, euthanasia, homosexuality, same sex marriage, on and on. But one answer we know John Calvin would not accept because the Bible itself cannot accept it and that is to return to a private sphere of individual concerns for salvation or spirituality with no interest at all in the common good.

The prophets of the Old Testament – Jeremiah, Isaiah, Amos, Micah – spoke out clearly for justice for the widowed and the orphans, the poor and the sojourner within the gates, the disinherited, the ones Franz Fanon called the “wretched of the earth” and the Bible simply calls, the am ha-aretz, the people of the land. They had no one else to speak for them, so the prophets spoke for them. And when Jesus began his ministry he did so by openly identifying himself with Isaiah: the spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the acceptable year of the Lord.

The churches also cannot accept anything that would endorse discrimination. On the issues of sexuality, the Presbyterian Church has made clear its opposition to discrimination against people because of sexual orientation. That must be said clearly again and again. “God is no respecter of persons,” as the scripture says. He looks on the heart, not on the face.

Almost 100 years ago the Presbyterian Church and other mainline churches and wrote a document called “The Social Creed of 1908”. It focused on problems in industry. It boldly called for protection for workers from dangerous machinery and occupational disease, for the abolition of child labor, for the regulation of working conditions for women, for the end of the “sweating system”, what we call today sweat shops, for the right to have one day off in seven (which is still a problem, judging by the many people in our church forced to work on Sunday), for a living wage as a minimum in every industry, and for “the most equitable division of the products of industry that can be ultimately devised”, in other words, share the wealth, for the abatement of poverty, and provision for old age and those incapacitated by injury. The statement said Christ wills a kingdom, and not a cross, for all “toilers in America”.

This was powerful and far ahead of society at the time. We need a new one for the modern day.

At our best Presbyterian churches have always been interested in the common good. We are not sectarian, interested only in the four cozy walls. We like to name our churches not after saints but places, local places: Forest Hills, say, or Jamaica, or Whitestone, or Oshkosh. These names are neither imaginative nor inspiring: First Presbyterian of such-and-such place, Second Presbyterian, Third Presbyterian, etc. But they show that we care about that place and we belong there, we’re not running away.

We’re not talking, as some churches are these days, about people being part of a “remnant” for some great “rapture”, appealing to self-preservation and selifishness, rather we are talking about service and commitment to the common good. The ministers in Presbyterian churches will likely be found attending local events, sitting with other local leaders, attending civic services and celebrations, meeting with Catholic priests, Jewish rabbis, other ministers, who care about where they live and its greater good, not just about the bottom line for their institutions. Our local group of clergy has sponsored such things as discussions about capital punishment and homelessness.

At our church we collect food on the second Sunday of every month for the hungry in Queens. The children bring it forward and it is blessed as part of the offertory. We give to such programs as Habitat, and SEED, which is working to find new solutions to poverty – moving beyond charity to justice -- and the Alberta Alston House in Corona and the Queens Federation of Churches. In the past our church helped out at the homeless shelter at Grace Lutheran church, which operated for over a decade. Many remember the late Randy Provost, who spent countless hours helping out there.

The Presbyterian Church has also strongly questioned government approaches which gives huge tax breaks to the wealthy while cutting back programs for the poor. As Rev. William Sloane Coffin, who preached at Riverside Church in Manhattan, has said, the way the government is helping the rich while cutting back on help for the poor you’d think the greedy were needy and the needy were greedy.

This weekend the Presbytery of New York City opened the first ever apartment complex for grandparents raising grandchildren. It was dedicated on Saturday in the Bronx. This is a marvelous thing, setting the path in a new area, and it is spearheaded by our own Presbyterian Senior Services. This is certainly promoting social righteousness, and meeting a new need. Incidentally, there are some 85,000 grandparents in our city raising grandchildren.

Dr. Blake never thought of himself as a prophet. He was the quintessential organization man. If he had not gone into church work he would have been a great president for General Motors. He was in no way a professional troublemaker. But he was absolutely clear on his ethics and his priorities.

Though he himself had come from a privileged background, he knew exactly what Martin Luther King meant when he quoted Amos. “Let justice roll down like water, and righteousness as an ever flowing stream.”

Rev. Charles Brewster

Acknowledgement: R. Douglas Brackenridge: Eugene Carson Blake, Prophet with Portfolio. P. 95