As our nation marks its semiquincentennial, we exercise our religious freedom by gathering for worship on Sunday morning. In worship, we give thanks for the many blessings God has given us, and this weekend, we consider how this occasion challenges us to live up to our nation’s ideals of liberty and justice for all. As Christians living in 21st century America, we are blessed with tremendous opportunities and resources. How will we use our freedom?
This week’s readings are Zechariah 9:9-12, Psalm 145:8-15, Galatians 5:13-26, and Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30. In preparing for this week, I found helpful the ELCA’s Worship Resources for the US Semiquincentennial and Illustrated Ministry’s Pastoral Care Package for the same occasion.
Grace to you and peace in the name of Jesus. Amen.
I recently read a Catholic priest’s memoir of growing up in the 70’s. One of the things he talked about was the excitement of America’s Bicentennial year, with assemblies in school, seeing the bicentennial wagon train.
I’m obviously too young for that, but the memories seem to be that it was a big national celebration. This year feels more complicated.
But one of the more helpful things I’ve read is from Pastor Angela Denker, who pointed out where our country was 50 years ago.
The assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were still fresh memories. There were oil and energy crises. Two years earlier, President Nixon had resigned. The Vietnam war had ended just a year earlier with the fall of Saigon. We live today in challenging and interesting times, but isn’t that always true?
Here are a few headlines from this week:
America has the big birthday blahs.
At 250, is the U.S. too divided to celebrate as one?
Ahead of America’s 250th, Most Say Nation Has Lost Its Way
And from a fascinating poll by the libertarian Cato Institute: New Poll: Nearly Half of Americans Don’t Know What America’s 250th Is Celebrating. The answer to that one, by the way, is that 250 years ago yesterday, the Declaration of Independence was adopted.
That’s the one that says, “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.” Hopefully that sounds familiar—those self-evident truths are some of the most important words in history.
I do hope today we’d word that as “all people are created equal.” Sometimes “men” was used to represent all humanity, and we can read that back into the Declaration, but of course, it’s taken our nation a long time to even get close to acting as if all people are created equal. American citizens’ right to vote was not constitutionally extended to men of all races and colors until 1870, and to women in 1920.
That same Cato survey says “overwhelming majorities are grateful (86%) and proud (79%) to be Americans…most Americans (76%) feel positive about the nation’s founding, and 70% believe its founding principles remain relevant today.” I’d count myself in the majority of all those. I’m certainly grateful to live in this country, and I think the Declaration of Independence was a great gift for the world.
South Dakota Synod Bishop Constanze Hagmaier put it like this: “for a 250-year-old, America is a beautiful, beloved, unfinished experiment worth celebrating.”
Our nation has not always lived up to its ideals. We’ve started wars, destructively exploited natural resources, exported a whole lot of garbage (literal and metaphorical) to poorer countries, and oppressed our own citizens. We’ve enslaved millions, killed more civilians at once than anyone else, and we have the fifth highest incarceration rate in the world.
I have at least one ancestor I know of who fought in the Civil War on the Confederacy side. There’s a lot of ugly history in our country.
We’ve also been a beacon of religious freedom, political freedom, and peaceful transitions of power for the world. The US has led the way in conservation and national parks, creativity and inventions, and providing refuge and the opportunity for a fresh start as a nation of immigrants.
We’ve sacrificed and gone to war for the cause of freedom and liberation. There’s a lot that’s worth celebrating this weekend.
There’s always an interesting tension in how we mark national moments and holidays in worship. Many of our traditions and holy days are far older than our nation’s civic holidays, and the Bible never mentions the United States.
I’ve said before, it matters that our denomination is the “Evangelical Lutheran Church in America” not the “Evangelical Lutheran Church of America.” Our primary identity is as the body of Christ, members of the church universal. We are citizens of God’s kingdom, part of Christ’s one holy and apostolic Church that transcends all human boundaries and borders.
Jesus does not love Americans any more than people of any other tribe, tongue, or nation. Our Psalm says, “Lord, you are good to all.”
And, we live within this particular country, and this nation is made up of our neighbors, whom Jesus calls us to love. We are a church in America, in a particular nation, in this time and place. And so we can’t ignore what happens around us.
We don’t make laws as the church; we are not and should not be in charge of the government. But we’re also not called to withdraw from society. As Christian citizens in a democracy, in a republic, we also need to make our voices heard.
We need to live out our principles in private and in public life, which of course we do by voting, by engaging with our neighbors, by advocating on behalf of the people on the margins, the people overlooked and ignored by so many in our culture.
Bishop Hagmaier continues:
“As Lutherans, we call ‘a thing a thing’. Therefore, we can love this country and still tell the truth about it. We can honor sacrifice and still lament injustice. We can celebrate freedom and still ask where freedom has not yet been fully shared. We can wave a flag and still bow only before Christ…
Scripture reminds us that ‘our citizenship is in heaven’ (Philippians 3:20), and that is not an escape hatch from earthly responsibility. It is the very reason we can be brave here and now.”
One of the beautiful things about living in a nation with freedom of religion and freedom of assembly is we have the freedom to be a public moral voice, to point beyond the shallow pursuit of wealth and more stuff, beyond the horse race of partisan politics and the short-term attention span of the 24-hour news cycle.
We get to point people beyond algorithms to eternal truth. In a self-centered world, our job is to insist on love of neighbor, always pointing to Jesus, always pointing to the one whose yoke is easy and whose burden is light, who invites us to come to him for rest.
As we mark this national anniversary, I believe the key question for us today is found in verse 13 of our reading from Paul’s letter to the Galatians.
He writes, “For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters, only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become enslaved to one another. For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’”
Paul isn’t talking about political freedoms or anything else in the Bill of Rights. He lived in an oppressive empire and couldn’t imagine the freedom you and I have. When he says freedom, he means the freedom given to us in Jesus, the confidence of knowing our eternal future is secure.
In Christ, you are forgiven and set free from the power of sin, free from condemnation, redeemed forever by Jesus, who has set us free from the fear of death. That freedom does not depend on what earthly nation you live in, or what any earthly authority can do to you. Our freedom as Christians comes from our Creator. You are children of God, claimed forever in the waters of baptism and sealed by the Holy Spirit.
The question is, how will you use your freedom?
The spiritual freedom we find in faith is lived out in the world, in service to others. How will you use your freedom?
How will we use the inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness endowed to us by our Creator?
Will we use our freedoms, our rights to assembly, to free expression to lift up and help those in need, to give voice to those on the margins, or only to protect our own wealth and privileged status?
Will you use your freedom of self-defense to protect your neighbor, or to threaten others? Will you use your freedom of religion to participate in worship, or to judge those who worship differently?
As followers of Jesus, will we value and work toward the common good of all of God’s children? Will we be concerned enough to do something about the people around the world who long for the same liberties and opportunities we so often take for granted? Or will we slip into the self-indulgence Paul warned against?
Will we defend the ideals of liberty and justice for all by confronting unjust systems, looking for wrongs to right, challenging our leaders when they fall short?
In just a minute, we’re going to sing O Beautiful for Spacious Skies, and we’ll sing it in the same way we sing God Bless America, as a prayer for God to work in our nation, so that our neighbors may be blessed.
We give thanks to God for the beauty of this land, for the sacrifices of those who came before us, and we pray for the future: “America, America, God shed his grace on thee;…God mend thine every flaw.”
We pray, may God bless America. And may our church and our lives bear witness to God’s blessing, sharing the love we have received from Jesus, and leading others to the freedom found in Christ.
Amen