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Let us continue in worship by giving attention to God's Word as it is recorded in the book of Leviticus the 25th chapter. I begin the reading at the verse which is numbered eight. "And you shall count seven weeks of years, seven times seven years, so that the time of the seven weeks of years shall be to you

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49 years. Then you shall send abroad the loud trumpet on the tenth day of the seventh month. On the day of atonement you shall send abroad the trumpet throughout all your land. And you shall hallow the fiftieth year and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for

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you when each of you shall return to his property and each of you shall return to his family. A jubilee shall that fiftieth year be to you. In it you shall neither sow nor reap what grows of itself nor gather the grapes from the undressed vines, for it is a jubilee. It shall be holy to you. You shall eat what it yields

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out of the field. In this year of jubilee each of you shall return to his property. And if you sell to your neighbor or buy from your neighbor you shall not wrong one another. According to the number of years after the jubilee you shall buy from your neighbor and according to the number of years for crops he shall sell

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to you. If the years are many you shall increase the price and if the years are few you shall diminish the price, for it is the number of crops that he is selling to you. You shall not wrong one another, but you shall fear your God, for I am the Lord your God. And may the same spirit that inspired these words incline

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our hearts as we think of them in these minutes. Pray with me. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, amen. She stands 305 feet tall, weighs 205 tons, her nose is four and a half feet long, her mouth is a yard wide, her skin is green, and I love her very much. I

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refer of course to the Statue of Liberty. Her official title is "Liberty Enlightens the World" and two million people stop by to see her every year. I call her the Great Grey Lady because she's 99 now. It was on October the 26th, 1886, that she came to her pedestal in New York Harbor. I met her first when I

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was seven years old. The year was 1941. I think today, not of the first time I met her, however, but of the second, for it was on that second occasion that we met at midnight and danced on the dark waters. Westminster College is one of our premier Presbyterian educational institutions and they have for many years

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sent study groups to various parts of the country and abroad. In my sophomore year there, I was part of a group studying the United Nations in New York City. The United Nations was very young at the time, only seven years old. One night during that study time, I separated myself from the group and took a boat

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trip out about the Statue of Liberty. It was in the spring. The night was very dark and cold. There was a heavy mist upon the waters which parted before the blunt prow of the vessel. Most people stayed inside, hiding from the coldness, but I went outside and the lights of the statue reflecting on the mist and the

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clouds somehow isolated me so that I felt there were only two of us there, I looking at the statue and the statue looking at the world. You know, the Statue of Liberty is not made to be seen from every angle. If you look at her from the back, you find that she is rather stiff and awkward. If you look at her from

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Bedloe's Island where she stands, she is so overwhelming that you cannot really see her. If you go to Manhattan Island or to New Jersey, she is too far away to be accurately observed. The way to see her is on board a ship and as that ship passes before her gaze, there is a certain place just after you have passed

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the narrows when the line and the contour of her body and of her gowns sweep up to her torch so that she looks like she is about to step from the pedestal. As if she is responding to your invitation, "Shall we dance?" Well, 33 years ago, I asked her to dance and the two of us moved on the dark waters and what I

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thought about then is what I want to share with you this morning. She whispered to me then of her witness to the world. It is not known by most people that the French in giving us the statue had an ulterior motive. In the 1880s, Napoleon III was ruling France and there were those in France who were anxious to

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throw off his autocratic dominion. It was these people that conceived of the idea of the statue. They wanted to build a statue personifying liberty and send it to that land which was most known for its love of liberty, the United States. Their idea was that Frenchmen beholding this statue of liberty in another land

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would rally about the cause of liberty in their own land and thus bring about reform in France. That's the reason when the statue was given, it was given with the specifications that it was not to face toward America but outward from America. The message you see is to be to all the world, let all be free. When you

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contemplate that, you're led to ask why it is that America has been known as the land that loves liberty and it is of course because of the faith of our fathers. The scriptures say that where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom and the Spirit of the Lord has been honored in our land. When you look

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at the Statue of Liberty, you see her holding a great stone tablet. That is not there by accident. Auguste Bartholdi, who designed the statue, wanted us, when we looked at that tablet, to remember Moses coming down from Mount Sinai with the stone tablets of the law of God. Now on the tablet which the statue carries is

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the date, July 4th, 1776, and what Bartholdi was trying to say is that independence and freedom and liberty rest on a mosaic or a biblical base. God's will is that men be free. Now there's no more perfect expression of that than the concept of the Jubilee Year. It's part of the law of God as it's

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recorded in the book of Leviticus. I read it to you just a moment ago. The Jubilee Year was a law which stated that every 49 or possibly 50 years, we're not sure exactly which, at the sound of a trumpet blown throughout the land, every slave was to be set free. Every person who was indebted was to be freed of his

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debts. Indeed, everything returned to the way it had been. All property reverted to the original owner. All of the haves had to give up what they had accumulated across the previous 50 years so that all were even again. A perfect liberty and equality. Now there is no record in the Old Testament that this law was ever

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observed. We cannot find any instance in all of its 39 chapters in which it testifies that the law of Jubilee was observed. By the New Testament time, the concept of Jubilee had taken on a new idea, and that idea was that when Jesus returns in great glory, he will establish an equality among men, and there will be

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a freedom and a liberty then more wonderful than men had ever known before. Now at the center of both these concepts, the Old Testament concept and the New Testament concept, at the center of both of them is the word which is in the midst of the Jubilee law, and that word is this, "Proclaim liberty throughout the

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land to all of the inhabitants thereof." Those are the words which we as a people chose to inscribe upon the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, and those are the words which are epitomized by Lady Liberty in New York Harbor. Liberty, you see, is born in this book, and freedom arises out of an act of faith. A story has recently

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come to us from Romania which is quite shopping. Sosescu is the communist dictator of Romania. He wants to have most favored nations trading status with the United States and entered into negotiations with us on that question. Our government pointed out that he did not allow freedom of religion. Bibles

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could not be printed in Romania, and this is a violation of the Helsinki agreements, and so Sosescu said, "All right, I'll do it. I'll let Bibles be published and Bibles be imported," and we said, "All right, then you may have most favored nation status," and to seal the bargain we sent to Romania 20,000 Romanian and

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Hungarian Bibles, but once they arrived in that country they seemed to disappear. They were covered in a shroud of mystery, and it wasn't until just a few months ago that we learned the truth. They had a great shortage of toilet paper in Romania, and suddenly there was a glut of toilet paper upon the market. In

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examining it, it was found that on the tissues, verses of the Bible and passages of Scripture appeared. Shortly thereafter, the whole story was revealed. The 20,000 Bibles had been shipped to a paper recycling plant in Bralje. There they had been broken down and made into toilet paper. Because the recycling

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process was so inadequate, the words could not be totally obliterated, and thus verses and chapters and portions of the Scriptures appeared on the toilet tissue. When this was revealed, Sosescu confiscated every other Bible in Romania that he could find. Now, my friends, why is it that this man fears

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this book? Why is it that he wants to eliminate it? Why is it that he goes to such lengths to desecrate it? Why his contempt for it? Why his hatred for it? Because this is the textbook of liberty, and it has been so for 4,000 years. It stood against Pharaoh and Nebuchadnezzar and the Romans and George III and

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Louis XVI, and it stands against Sosescu. For liberty rests upon the value of man, and this is the book which teaches that God made man, God loves man, God died for man. Nothing so holds high the value of man as the Word of God. Liberty finds its beginning here. It is recorded in this book that when Moses came down

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from Mount Sinai with the law of God on those tablets, it says that his face did shine, and he knew not that his face did shine. And when Auguste Bartholdi built the Statue of Liberty, he had emanating from her crown seven rays of light, and he was saying by that, that when that statue comes down with her tablet, she is

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a light with the same fire that burned in the countenance of Moses. And as I stood there 33 years ago and watched that light reflected off the fog and the midnight mist, as I danced with that great lady on the dark waters, she whispered to me of her witness to freedom for all the world.

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She also whispered to me of her welcome to the world. You know, when most of us think of the Statue of Liberty, we do not think of her as speaking to the world, we think of her as welcoming the world to our shores, but that was not part of the original concept at all. That part came later, and it came about in this wise.

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There was a poet in those days whose name was Emma Lazarus. She was a native born American of Jewish descent, and they were trying to raise money in order to pay for the pedestal on which the statue was built. You see, the French gave the statue, but we were to provide the pedestal. And in order to raise money, they

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persuaded some authors to give manuscripts to be auctioned off, the profit to go toward the pedestal. And Longfellow and Mark Twain and Whittier and Bret Hart all contributed manuscripts. And Emma Lazarus, who was a noted poet, was asked to write a poem for the occasion, and she did. She wrote it in

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November of 1883. She called it "The New Colossus." Now, she had never seen the Statue of Liberty. At that time, it was lying in pieces in a wooden shed in Paris. But her words captured the spirit of the statue. You remember the way her poem concludes. "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to

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breathe free. The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door." Those words so captured the spirit of the statue that 17 years later, after the statue was in place, they were carved into the pedestal. And you will see them there until this

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day. And it was with that carving and that poem that we began to think of the statue as welcoming the immigrants of the world. You know, a few weeks ago, I did something I'd never done before. I attended a naturalization ceremony here in Pittsburgh. I went up to the courthouse. Anybody can go. It's open to

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anyone who would like to be there. And a rainbow of people were gathered. They were of all colors, and they were of all races, and they were of all ethnic origins. Some were dressed very formally. Some were dressed very casually. Some had their children in their arms as they took the oath with the tears rolling

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down their faces. A group of Cub Scouts carried the flag into the room. The judge was a lady, and she said that no official function she fulfilled upon the bench gave her greater joy than this. And when the oath had been taken, a troop of Girl Scouts led the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag. And then, as we all stood and

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applauded these new citizens, each and every one of them was given a little American flag. And as I watched that, it spoke to me most eloquently of the truth that the strength of this land is to be found in its people. That's the reason in this Jubilee Law in the book of Leviticus it says that we are to proclaim

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liberty throughout the land to all of the inhabitants thereof. You see, all have a part in liberty. All have something to say. None are to be excluded. There is to be equality of opportunity. Thomas Jefferson said we ought to have a new revolution in America every 19 years so that everyone will have his or her

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opportunity to contribute to the treasure which is our national heritage. We all know, of course, that the Statue of Liberty is now being repaired. And I was interested to read the other day that the copper skin of the statue is only as thick as a 50-cent piece. And that skin hangs on a great iron frame

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which was built, incidentally, by Gustav Eiffel, the man who built the Eiffel Tower. Now the reason that the statue is a kind of a sheath on that iron frame is it has to have a certain amount of give and elasticity. High winds blow in New York Harbor and the statue is much larger than a great sail. And so she must

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be able to give. They say that to stand in the torch on a gusty day is to feel the whole arm of the statue spring under you. Wouldn't that be a thrilling experience? Well, it speaks to me of this, that America is an elastic nation. We are a polyglot people. We are a melting pot. We are an incredible mix of women and

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men. If we were rigid, we would break. But because we can stretch and expand and have room for all people, we can grow and strain toward the skies. You know, just a few weeks ago in New York City, just a few miles from where the statue stands, something happened which touched me very deeply. A teacher in the fourth grade was

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passing around to her students a facsimile of the Declaration of Independence. And each of the students was looking at this exact copy. And finally it came to the desk of Luigi. Luigi, a first-generation American. He looked at it most reverently. And then, before passing it on to the next student,

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he gravely took his pen and signed his own name. "Welcome, Luigi. Welcome home." That's what the great gray lady whispered to me as we danced on the dark waters. "Give me your tired, your poor, the wretched wretches longing to breathe free. I welcome the world."

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And she whispered to me also of her worth to the world. You know, the statue almost didn't get here. The French Senate, it came in 200 cases. But we as a nation didn't seem to be very interested. We couldn't raise the money to put up the pedestal. Congress would not designate the money. They asked the rich to make

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contributions and they didn't make any. I suppose there were a variety of reasons. America was not much in a monument-building mood. The Catholic press opposed the statue very vigorously. They called it a pagan goddess. Some people said if the French are giving us a gift, they ought to pay for the pedestal also.

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Others said it's for New York, it's not for America, so New Yorkers ought to pay for it. And others still said, "Well, the rich people have made more here than anybody else, so they ought to pick up the tab." None of this happened. And when the statue arrived, there was no pedestal to place it upon. And then a man, Joseph

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Pulitzer, that newspaper publisher for whom the Pulitzer Prize is named, he took up the cause. And in his newspapers he sought to do three things. First of all, he unleashed some severe broadsides against the affluent and shamed them into giving. Second of all, he talked about it's being a gift to all America

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and not just to New York. And he did get contributions from every one of the 40 states that were part of the Union at that time. But finally, and perhaps most importantly, he listed in his newspaper the name of every single person who contributed. Over 121,000 of them, no matter how small their

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contribution. And the goal was reached. That, of course, was 99 years ago, and now the statue is being refurbished, and it's going to cost 230 million dollars to refurbish it, and so far we've raised 165 million. And I read last week of a grandmother who sent in her check and within a note which read, "Liberty must

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always be paid for, and here is mine." That reminded me of our founding fathers. You remember how they concluded the Declaration of Independence with the words, "To this we pledge our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor." They honored that, you know. They became

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fugitives. Some lost their wives, some lost their children. There were four of that number who had great wealth. All of them lost every bit of it. Each and every one of the four died in abject poverty, and yet from not one of them is there recorded a single word which suggests that they regretted the decision which

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is theirs. You see, they understood that liberty must always be paid for, and here's mine. That's why in this Jubilee Law it is recorded that it is to be renewed every 50 years. "Proclaim liberty throughout the land to all the inhabitants of thereof," and it is to be done again and again and again. You see,

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there is no expiration date on the law of God. There is no expiration date on the pursuit of liberty. Paul picks up this same theme when he says, "For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand fast, therefore, and do not submit again to the yoke of slavery." He's speaking in the spiritual realm, but what he has to say

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applies to our theme this morning. You see, liberty can be lost. We talk a great deal about the Bill of Rights, but that night when I, as a college sophomore, lost myself in the arms of that great lady, she didn't speak to me of the Bill of Rights. She spoke of duties. She didn't speak of privileges. She spoke of

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responsibilities. We complain a great deal about taxes, and they are heavy, but we are taxed two times as much by our idleness, three times as much by our pride, and four times as much by our folly. And our greatest folly is to believe that liberty comes without cost. I am not so naive as to believe that

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either Americans or America are the specially chosen of God. Yet I would have to be ignorant of history not to understand that there is no other nation on the face of the earth like this one. But a price must be paid for that, and that's the reason the great lady in New York Harbor speaks of the worth of

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liberty to the world. And now her torch has been taken down, and the rays from her crown cut off, and a hundred tons of bicarbonate of soda are being used to make her clean, and sixteen hundred steel ribs will hold her great fame. And soon she will stand tall again, holding up her torch for all the world. And her message

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then will be what it has been. Proclaim liberty to all the world and to all the inhabitants thereof. That's what she said to me thirty years ago as we danced on the dark waters. There are only three ways to be happy, friends. You can be ignorant, there's a certain bliss in that. You can be narrow and believe that you

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and you alone are right, there is a certain bliss in that. Or you can give yourself to a great cause. As Christians, our cause is to be obedient to the will of God. And on this the eve of our national birthday, I call us all in the spirit of that obedience and in the name of that God, to the protection and the

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advancement of that liberty, which is his sovereign gift to all men. And to you, great lady that I love, rise strong above the bosom of the waves. Send your luminous torchlight out upon the immense sea, and know that some of us will always labor to keep your fires bright till your message shall pierce

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the darkness of ignorance and of man's oppression until liberty enlightens the world. Let us pray. Our Father, you have given us so much. We sit before you with our polyglot of last

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names, our incredible mix of abilities and talents, and o'er us all the spirit of freedom and of truth. Oh God, bless America, land that we love. Stand beside her and guide her with a light from above. From the mountains to the prairies to the oceans, white with foam,

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God, bless America, our home, our sweet, sweet home.

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Amen. [BLANK_AUDIO]