City on a hill

I'm taking American History this year. I think we need more holidays to keep teachers in line - we get to the pilgrims and Indians in time for Thanksgiving, the Civil War for Lincoln's birthday, then skip right ahead to the 1960's for MLK Day and the Civil Right's Movement... I've never studied the Vietnam War, the farthest we've gotten with World War 2 is the Holocaust... But right now, we're still with the pilgrims (Thanksgiving hasn't happened yet...) and colonial America.

We're reading various documents from the time period to assess for their value and limitations (don't ask), and one of them is called A Model of Christian Charity by John Winthrop, who would settle the Massacusetts Bay Colony.

You can stop reading here if you really really don't care about history...

Winthrop was a Protestant Minister from Weymouth, England. He and about 108 other Protestants were crossing the Atlantic in 1630 on the Andorra when he penned this sermon that he would present on the ship and when they landed in the colony. I think it's one of the most famous sermons in history - it's the only one I've ever read in a school setting. This sermon stood the test of time; we're still reading it nearly 400 years later (okay, maybe the pilgrims didn't blog about it). It expressed the hopes, dreams, and aspirations of those early colonists who were risking everything - their lives, money, families - to settle in this New World and practice their faith without an oppressive government overseeing them. There was still an oppressive government - they were just blocked by a 3 month trip via ocean.

Winthrop expresses a deep faith and a desire to create a colony that would be a city on a hill (I immediately thought of TobyMac... are you singing along too?). He wanted this to be a perfect community, a beacon to the world. I can imagine that these early settlers were full of hope, full of adventure, and excitement. In this strange New World, I wonder if they thought of it as a "do over" - a chance to try life again, and maybe do it right this time. Oh sure, there would still be sin in the world and whatnot. But how often do you get the chance to create a town? An environment that is still full of bushland, that has no laws, no settlement - it's just you, your neighbor, and the omnipotent God that created it all. I wonder if they envisioned a New Jerusalem when they sailed across those stormy seas. Their greatest desire was to shine God's light. How different would the world look if that was the most intimate wish of all of us?

If / when you read the sermon, you'll see that they truly wanted to follow all of the laws that God has given us. They quote scripture, saying that they won't harm the natives, or enemies, but they would feed them and care for them. They promise to care for each other and to be a great, peaceful community that the whole world would look to, and by doing so, the love of Jesus Christ would be spread to all.

40 years later, greed takes ahold of the colonists. It happens. When your town is only one to twohundred small, and you're the only one with a specific trade, you can jack up your prices as much as you want. The government was the voting church members (basically, your elders and deacons), and they would create a law that would allow them to punish merchants and tradesmen who took advantage of their neighbors. Their reasoning - you are here to love and to serve the Lord your God, not to make a profit. That struck a chord with me. The people had agreed on this new law that would require you - by law - to live humbly, not in excess.

I wonder if I have the faith that it would take to climb aboard a caravel and sail for 3 months. To build my own house in the wilderness. To leave the city and country I had lived in and head off to this strange new land that nobody really understood (without a cell phone). I wonder if I have the discipline enough to charge my goods for only as much as I need to get by. What great faith those pilgrims had.

It makes me wonder how our nation got from a City on a Hill to what it is today. Only 40 years into it (40 years is considered a generation, btw), and we were already screwing up - but we fixed it. Other community members came along, took care of us, pointed out our errors, and set us on another path. Somewhere along the lines though, we stopped doing that. The community fell apart. Instead of living 3 feet away from your neighbor, we started getting bigger houses, bigger crops, and soon we were living 3 miles from our nearest neighbor. We stopped caring as much - we all wanted to do our own thing. It takes a lot of effort to refine a person. Sanctification is a lifelong, grueling process. Sometimes, it's just easier to look away than to clean the wound and put on a band-aid.

Today in English, we did an activity where we had different values (faith / religion, family, close friends, good healthy, beauty, wealth, etc) and we ranked them from most important to least important. There were various signs around the room with the different values on them. When the teacher called out a number, we would go to the corresponding value that we had put down, and then open up in discussion about why we picked what.

I saw some real life in people that had never come out before. I saw the class clown come out and say that one of his best friends had died in her sleep during the summmer and another girl say that her father had died during her freshman year. I can't imagine the pain that they went through, and how I went alongside these students for three years without knowing. I heard kids open up about their ideas on God, some of them breaking my heart. It was a reminder that I am still in a mission field, whether I realize it or not. I may not come to school on a boat, but I still need to be a beacon to the world.

It kind of felt like I was back in my youth group. That made me wonder why I felt that way. I guess it's because these were people trying to be real with each other and let their guard down; to just take off the mask for a few minutes. There were several awkward moments for a lot of us, especially the first few people to speak. None of us were really sure how we would all be perceived. As I was walking to lunch after that class, I realized that the reason I feel so comfortable around the kids from youth is because we're open. You go to a totally new step in your relationship when you're honest and real and people get to see the whole person. It shows trust, love, and caring about one another. The very thing Winthrop settled his colony on. It makes... a community. The very thing God created the earth based on. It's interesting how everything keeps coming back to this idea... community.