Last week on December 15, I travelled to Maryville to share the company of a wonderful group of folks.  Ben Cunningham and I were both invited to speak at an event celebrating the adoption of the Bill of Rights.  Ben did a fantastic job, in fact, I called him Reverend Cunningham!  He was preaching and lots of folks like me were giving him plenty of amens!

I can’t think of a nicer event that I’ve been to in quite some time.  Everything from the music to the decorations to the spirit of the event was wonderful.  It was beautiful and I’m so thankful for the honor of the invitation.  I had a request for my shared comments, so here they are.  There maybe some typos in what I’m posting as I wrote it just for me to speak.  If so, my apologies!

A very special thanks to Carol Ross and the Blount County Committee for the Bill of Rights who sponsored the event.

218 years ago, the first 10 amendments to the US Constitution took effect, following their ratification by three-fourths of the states.  In 1941 Franklin D. Roosevelt signed into law Bill of Rights Day. “And I call upon the officials of the Government, and upon the people of the United States, to observe the day by displaying the flag … and by meeting together for such prayers and such ceremonies as may seem to them appropriate,” said FDR’s statement, according to a copy produced by the FDR library.

IT is an honor to be with such a God-fearing, patriotic and activist group as is here tonight as we celebrate this day together.

Bill of Rights?  Some would say, Bill of Rights?  Aww, that old thing?  Or, shhhhh, bill of rights…  Or they may like the Bill of Rights, i.e. cafeteria style.   You know, picking and choosing what they think actually should be recognized and enforced.

“Hmmm, I’ll have a heaping plate of that ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,’ but I don’t want any of that ‘prohibiting the free exercise thereof’ even touching my plate!!”

Our Bill of Rights, and really the entire constitution itself, is currently under assault.  Carpet-bombing by enemy fire, if you will.  Tonight as we celebrate its timeless principles, we must encourage one another to continue fighting for not only its application, but also its very relevance in the day and age of the state!

As our technology, looks, medicine, health, environment, changes, gadgets, toys, and body of knowledge continues to change, one thing never will: and that is the heart of man.  And the understanding of his heart is the origin of our Bill of Rights.

While certainly our founding fathers were scholars and studied in law, government and political systems, their unique opportunity to architect a government from the ground up, was built on their understanding of man’s nature and how he reacts to power. Most all of our framers felt man was in need of a spiritual redeemer, but just in case men chose otherwise, the founders attempted to put earthly precautions in place!

Author Joseph Conrad described the shadows of man’s propensity as the “heart of darkness.”  We have seen such darkness in works of fiction like Conrad’s, or in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.  C.S. Lewis alludes to it when he says we live in enemy occupied territory.

Our Bible tells us we wrestle not against “flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers,” and our colonists in America saw this very darkness in the accumulation of power and subsequent application of force by a British King.

All of us here tonight know our history—that in 1776, Representatives of our 13 colonies noted that our rights do not flow from a King.  “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights.”  There were to be no kings, no queens in America.

No serfs nor lords.  No political masters—nor servants.

So strongly rooted was this belief that blood was spilled in its defense—lives were lost in opposition to tyranny, oppression, to the very concept that a ruling political class should restrain those God-given rights of mankind.  Liberty in America—came to mean more than overthrowing the bands of tyranny—it blossomed to the understanding that man was born with freedoms.

This idea was truly unique- among peoples of the world in that most viewed freedom as throwing off the shackles of one captor in search of a more beneficent ruler.  America however, sought not to trade captors, but to prevent capture.

Our framers created the best document they could with human nature in mind, but not until there were more explicit guarantees against men’s lust for power was that document ratified—those guarantee in the form  of our extraordinary Bill of Rights that we honor here tonight.

That bill was not a granting of all rights, but an attempt at guarantee against the bloodlust that echoes through history today.

Pages of history are littered with the records of the rotting corpses of millions who felt the blow of power unrestrained—

Mao was responsible for over 70 million deaths of his own people—in peacetime!  Stalin’s purges account for as many as 20 million deaths of his own people.  Today, even it places like Zimbabwe, political opponents of President Mugabe were beaten, burned and dismembered for daring to offer the people a choice on a ballot.

Our founders and those anti-federalists like Samuel Adams who insisted on further guarantees in the form of the Bill of Rights, clearly understood government’s threat to their individual liberty—to OUR individual liberty.

WE currently understand that the ignoring of those rights is rampant today not just by the political class and power seekers, but often by a rogue judiciary that feels itself impelled not only to ignore law, but moves to create it.

Our freedoms are never permanent—not some kind of lucky 7 scratch off or pinball machine with a flashing “Game Over” sign—no freedom is an ever raging battle, and our rights are constantly challenged and continuously tested even when directly spelled out in that wonderful Bill of Rights.

Do-gooders, jurists, and legislators believing themselves more God than man, often find ways to challenge such individual freedoms in the name of collective good.  And a cultural rot infecting our nation serves only to aid and abet their efforts, for a people unable to control themselves look for political masters to do the controlling for them.

As a mother who has given birth to three children, I can best compare the times we’re living in as the moments when I knew I was about to deliver my child.

You are filled with excitement, expectation of joy, but fear too.  During each delivery my teeth chattered—and my nurse would ask, “Are you cold, sweetie?”

No, not at all—it was the intensity of the clash of my greatest hopes and greatest fears.  Giving life or losing it.

We sit with our teeth chattering today, fearful that what we’ve loved will be lost, yet hopeful and looking for signs of optimism in meetings like this one that we can pass the torch of liberty.

Surely our founders lived such intensity—birthing a Constitution and her bill of rights— a document that reflects both hope AND Fear…hope that the words set in ink can prevent that which our framers and her people feared—the accumulation of too much power in the hands of too few.

If you believe as Patrick Henry did as he noted in March of 1775 that “I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided; and that is the lamp of experience. I know of no way of judging of the future but by the past,” then you believe in what drove the spirit of the revolution, that is, man’s desire for freedom but also history books filled with tales of man’s propensity for evil.

Many today argue for a new man, of changed heart in better times.   More civilized. Utopian.  It is that argument that serves as the basis on assault on our Bill of Rights, for if they can destroy to reason for such guarantees, how much easier to tear down the guarantees themselves.

In 1943, before the Allied landings in Sicily, Gen. Sir Harold Alexander said to Patton, “You know, George, you would have made a great marshal for Napoleon had you lived in the 19^th century.”  Patton immediately countered, “But I did.”  General George S. Patton looked out on many battlefields believing he had actually fought battles there before…

I don’t believe in reincarnation, that my soul and it’s body were actually in another space and time, but I do agree with Patton in one regard:  we have fought what is at the heart of these battles before.

And we will fight them again.  Do not shy from it.  Prepare for it.

Do not look to political leaders to defend you.  Many will give you reassurances.  Few will abide.  Most will use your spirit, your passion, and your voice as a pawn in their game of moderation and compromise.

You must go at it alone.  Convinced in your heart of the importance.  Steadfast in your resolve.  It is that resolve –the resolve of the people, truly the people–that gave us our Bill of Rights in the first place.

I will close with a line from the screenplay by fellow Tennessee native, Randall Wallace that he wrote for Mel Gibson’s movie Braveheart. If you are unfamiliar, Braveheart is the Hollywood about the story of Scottish patriot William Wallace:

There’s a difference between us, William Wallace said. You think the people of this country exist to provide you with position. I think your position exists to provide those people with freedom. And I go to make sure that they have it.

Tonight I salute you all—for you are fellow warriors fighting to make sure people have it.  Fight on!  Fight on.