Texts: Deuteronomy 10: 17-21; Matthew 5: 43-48

At the age of sixty-one, after having published close to 500 books, treatises, essays, and other works, after having been awarded the Nobel prize for chemistry of that day, and after counting such notable men as Isaac Watt, Josiah Wedgwood among his friends, Joseph Priestly was a hated man in England and was embarking on a dangerous sea journey to seek asylum in the newly formed United States. Rather than seeking refuge here like Einstein, one hundred and forty years later because of his ethnicity, Priestly was coming to our shores because of his political and religious beliefs which he espoused not just from the pulpit – he was also an Anglican cleric – but also in pubic debate and pamphlets.

Unlike many refugees who came after him, Priestly did have family in the new Nation; his son had come to America with the expressed intent of joining the Revolution that we celebrate this weekend. As the character Benjamin Franklin says in the musical “1776,” “it's never been done before.” It had never been done before – that a colony would tell its mother country that the people who inhabited it had rights, certain inalienable rights, that the people would define themselves not as subjects but as citizens. “We are a new people with a new name,” Franklin goes on to say, “rougher, cruder, perhaps, but with a distinct character that demands a new name.” Americans.

In his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn looked at the massive changes that had occurred in the seventeenth century and came up with a new term to describe them: a shift so fundamental, so earth-shattering that it challenged and changed the way people looked at the world and their place in it: a paradigm shift. The American Revolution was indeed a paradigm shift, one with roots that run deep into the very framework of Scripture and the paradigm shift that caused the world of the old paradigm to put men like Hus and Wycliffe to the stake.

The old paradigm held that people should not have access to Holy Scripture in their native tongues, the better to read and develop differing opinions about its import, known to the church as heresies. The wiser and more politically astute of persons also were concerned that as Lord Cokesbury once said, once a person asks questions about religion, can questions about government be far behind? The answer is obvious. In fact, as the Translators, that august body of fifty men who wrought the wonder known as the King James Bible soon discovered, the very act of translating could be not just religiously dangerous but politically dangerous as well. It had proven so for Hus and Wycliffe.

If we look at the two readings this morning, we see major paradigm shifts. The Deuternomic injunction is not just to fear the power of a deity as other ancients feared the powers of their gods, but to love God with all of one's heart and soul and to follow the statutes and laws of the Lord who executes justice for the widow and the orphan and who loves the sojourner, the alien as the Hebrews themselves were once sojourners in the land of Egypt. The Matthean reading provides another major paradigm shift in that we are now commanded to not just love our neighbor but to love our enemies, those who would do us harm. Oh, how very difficult that is, to be sure.

The American Revolution, like all revolutions, began with high ideals. More than simply the slogans of no taxation without representation, it held to the belief that there was a more fundamental question, that of justice, or the belief that government should not be arbitrary but just. This developed in conjunction with the important philosophical concept of progress, that history was not just an endless cycle of rise and fall but a steady climb upwards. This was the real contribution of the Enlightenment.

We usually don't see the shift while the shift is occurring. As the historian Steven Johnson put it, the beautiful thing about ideas is that they generate clues that can help one understand the mystery of their origin. “The mountain lifts you high enough that you can finally see the land masses that made the mountains in the first place.” The individuals who put together the Deuteronomic code and the One we profess to follow, much like our nation's founders, struggled to shape thought and action on certain principles and those principles served to become the new paradigms of new ways of living.

If we look at our own time, we are really in the same boat. Bright as we think we are, we are no more perceptive of the subtle changes that occur around us, that will shape our future and the future of our posterity. Posterity, now there's a concept that almost seems lost in today's world of the here and now. It's a concept that our Founders strongly advanced. It means more than simply protecting our own interests, our own property, even our own liberty. It means developing policies that would ensure and protect the future, the future beyond ourselves, such as investing in education. Quite frankly, if we do not invest in the development of future generations, how can we expect them to invest in us? It's a part of the ideal of the common weal, the good for all, not just now but for our posterity, for those not yet born. That's the real difference between the nay-sayers and those who would develop a real future.

Back to the paradigm shift of Jesus. In hindsight, we can see how very radical it was. Although his followers did not necessarily see that, those on the other side certainly did. That's why they made sure he was crucified. Jesus extended the table to all without reservation, to friend and foe alike. As his followers, we must do the same, as difficult as it is – and it is really difficult. Loving one's enemies does not mean we agree with them; it does not mean that we capitulate to them. It means that while we are opposed to the beliefs and values that would destroy us, that we love the persons who advance those beliefs and values. And in the midst of this struggle, it also means that we work to develop a society that holds to the ideals of justice and mercy.

The table that we have before us this morning does not call for uniformity of belief; rather, it is a table that is open to all who share the commitment of Jesus to living a life of love and care for others. I think that's what it means to call Jesus the Christ, the one who came to give us a new vision of God. That paradigm shift is the ultimate one, the one that serves as our framework for living in this world.

Let us pray: Source and Ground of our being, grant us the imagination to shape our lives in the way of the One who gave us the paradigm for a new way of living, even Christ Jesus our Lord, Amen.