By The Rev. Benjamin J. Newland
Independence Day - July 4, 2003
- Deuteronomy 10:17-21
- Psalm 145
- Hebrews 11:8-16
- Matthew 5:43-48
On the whole, I find our lectionary texts to be well-chosen and enlightening. Surely choosing three readings and a psalm for each Sunday in a three year cycle was a difficult task. Yet often it is not only the readings themselves where I find inspiration, but also in the interactions between readings, in comparing and contrasting the different voices of Gospel, Hebrew Scripture, and Epistle.
The lectionary covers not only Sundays, but special days of commemoration as well. One such day in our American Prayer Book is Independence Day. Unfortunately, in suggesting lessons for such a specific occasion (one certainly not imagined by biblical authors I might add) the lectionary is not its usual competent self.
The reading from Deuteronomy, clipped out of context for applicability, informs us that the God of our nation is fair, just, and welcoming. God is not partial and will take no bribes, God executes justice for orphans and widows, and God loves strangers providing for them food and clothing. The inference is that we too, as a nation, ought to strive for these qualities.
The reading from Hebrews is similarly clipped out of context. It is a passage extolling the virtues of Abraham and other heroes of the faith. Since Abraham did a lot of traveling, leaving his home and living in tents while dreaming of a land of his own, we are being reminded of our own nation’s status as newcomers to the land.
For a gospel reading is suggested a famous piece of Matthew. Love your enemy, for God makes the sun to rise on the just and the unjust alike. This is an interesting bit of Gospel news, bringing up questions of theodacy and fairness, and challenging us to love when it is difficult as well as when it is fulfilling. Yet I can’t make sense of it in terms of our national holiday.
In the face of such an lectionary fizzle, we are fortunate—and I mean this with all sincerity—we are fortunate to live in the United States of America, where we have our own collection of sacred texts. And so on this day when we commemorate American Independence, I would like to share with you some of my favorite American Scriptures:
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, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness—That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it…
In the month of September, in the year 1776, General George Washington’s armies were in retreat and the war that would come to be called the American Revolution was not going according to plan. Little more than two months earlier, fifty-six men, representing the thirteen American Colonies, had signed a document penned by Thomas Jefferson that began with the words above and ended with these:
We therefore, the representatives of the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the World for the Rectitude of our Intentions, do, in the Name, and by the Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly Publish and Declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be, FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES…
The power and poetry of these words are utterly overwhelming to me. It is a painful truth that we seldom live up to the righteous demand for justice called for in our Declaration of Independence, but I cannot imagine how anyone, upon reading these words, could not be moved. How was is that King George III, upon receiving this document, did not immediately depose himself before the onslaught of liberty’s fury? And yet, the words were not enough. Blood would have to be spilt, and British and American soldiers would have to be killed, before the American Colonies would be free.
In that month of September in 1776 it could not have looked to General Washington like the Revolution he was fighting would ever be successful. He was out-manned, out-gunned, out-trained, out-historied, and indeed out-classed in every category important to a military general. And in that dark September, Thomas Paine, an English writer turned American soldier, wrote these words:
These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.
And so when the original American Dream seemed ready to die before it could be born, Paine defined the true American Patriot as the person who would persevere not only during the easy times of summer and sunshine, but during the dark of winter and the partly-cloudy conditions of real struggle. Free and Independent States were not to be just a beautiful idea on paper, but an ideal worth the toil and blood of their citizens.
Eighty-seven years later Abraham Lincoln would take Thomas Paine’s words to heart and force the United States to face the ideals written in the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson wrote, “that all Men are created equal.” The gender specific language sounds harsh in our ears today, and who knows if the founding fathers meant to include women or slaves in their declaration. Whether they meant or not, that is how Lincoln read it, and he set out to make the country look more like the declaration that had started it. In January of 1863 he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, part of which sounds like this:
…on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any state…shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons, and will do no act or acts to repress such persons, or any of them, in any efforts they may make for their actual freedom.
It didn’t go that smoothly of course. Lincoln’s words freed the slaves, but it took a civil war to actually do it. It would take another hundred years for those slaves’ children to be allowed to vote or to go to school with white children. It was a test, for Lincoln, a test of a nation conceived in liberty. Could any such nation really exist? Reality always lags behind ideals, but was it fated to lag so far behind that the nation would fail?
The question must have been in Lincoln’s heart, but there was no doubt in his words. Eleven months later he stood on a battlefield in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania where earlier that year 51,000 men had died arguing about the freedom of people whose skin happened to be darker than theirs. His words are nothing less than iconic:
Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live…
Lincoln goes on to say that he cannot consecrate the ground they’re all standing on any further than the dead have already done. He says it is instead the task of those gathered to dedicate themselves,
…that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
I heard that Lincoln was an atheist in his youth—that he had no use for God. By the time the Civil War had gotten a hold of him this clearly wasn’t the case any more. After being elected to his second term, Lincoln tackled one of the persistent problems in theology during his second inaugural address. While seeking to describe the two sides of the Civil War still raging, he said, “Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other.”
This brings to my irreverent mind a post-game interview with the victorious quarterback of a super-bowl champion team. Says the quarterback, “Well, it looked bad there for awhile, but I just trusted in Jesus and everything came out all right.” The implication seems to be that Jesus was rooting for his team and not the other. If I were the quarterback for the losing team, I would have said, “Well, we were doin’ good there for awhile, but then Jesus abandoned us!”
Lincoln can’t let his even-handed statement of the situation stand, and follows up with a sentence that cuts directly to the heart of theology in far fewer words than any theologian I’ve ever read. “It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces; but let us judge not, that we be not judged.” It’s OK Abe, you can judge them for me.
The thing that stands out to me about all of Lincoln’s words is his utter dedication to the United States of America, not as a place, or as an economy, or even as a group of people. For Abraham Lincoln America is an achingly beautiful idea that we as Americans have a duty to live up to. Eighty-seven years ago a bunch of regular guys had a really good idea, he says. Now, we’ve flubbed it up pretty badly so far, so lets get to changing things.
If you want proof of his faith, I offer the signature of the Emancipation Proclamation:
Done at the city of Washington, this first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, and of the independence of the United States of America the eighty-seventh.
As if to say that the founding of the United States of America on the principles of liberty, and justice, and equality, and freedom was just as significant an event in world history as the virgin birth of Christ, and the date of the document that set the slaves free ought to reflect that.
Before I wrap up this already too long sermon with one last bit of American Scripture, I’d want to tell you why I titled it ‘Cognitive Dissonance’. Cognitive Dissonance is the psychological term for what happens when your brain disagrees with itself. Like when you know what is right but are forced to choose the wrong. Or when you believe in the ideal but are witness to the reality. I named this Independence Day sermon Cognitive Dissonance because that is exactly what I experience whenever I really think about the country I live in.
I believe that the Declaration of Independence was meant to claim life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for ALL people. I understand that it did so initially only for white men who owned land. I believe that Abraham Lincoln intended to set the slaves free. I understand that more than one hundred years later there are ways in which they are still not free. I believe in the original Dream of America: that all who are willing to embrace our ideals and contribute to our nation will be welcome here. I understand that we have border guards and that the INS registers citizens from Arabic countries but not from Northern European ones.
The Patriot dream of America is a complicated thing, full of contradiction between ideal and reality. It is, however, a dream very much worth dreaming. The power and rightness of the values that set this country on its course deserve our constant nurture, and to be ever present thorns in the sides of our leaders.
And finally, in testament to that far-reaching dream, the first two lines of the third verse of America the Beautiful:
O beautiful for patriot dream that sees beyond the years
thine alabaster cities gleam, undimmed by human tears.
I’ll never forget when Dan Rather came on the first Dave Letterman show to air after September 11th, 2001. He quoted that verse and said that he didn’t think he could ever sing it again, because our alabaster city was indeed nearly drowned in human tears. I think he missed the point. It’s not that our cities, our nation, or our people are not anointed with tears. It’s just that, somehow, this patriot dream, fueled by a people driven to live free and at peace, can see beyond the years of pain and strife, and stand undimmed by the tragedies done in its name from time to time.
I was born too cynical to end a sermon by invoking God’s blessing on America as the American Presidents are always doing at the end of their speeches. Instead, let me give you that last verse again:
O beautiful for patriot dream that sees beyond the years
thine alabaster cities gleam, undimmed by human tears.
America! America! God shed his grace on thee,
and crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea.