Sermon for Independence Day, transferred
Deuteronomy 10:17-21; Hebrews 11:8-16; Matthew 5:43-48
July 6, 2025
This is a messy time to be celebrating
Independence Day as a feast of the Episcopal Church. There are those of us who’d be comforted to
see the American flag here by the pulpit every Sunday. And there are those of us who’d say it’s
inappropriate to post the flag here, even today, because of the message that
sends. So, what exactly would that
inappropriate message be?
I want to share a memory from growing up
in Springfield, Missouri. In the weeks
before Christmas, at a busy street corner near our house, there would appear a
manger scene – painted, freestanding figures of Mary and Joseph and the
shepherds and the angels, all staring devoutly at the manger holding the Christ
child. None of that was strange,
especially in Springfield. But here’s
what was strange, something that might disrupt the mental picture I’ve given
you: The manger was painted red, white,
and blue, featuring the stars and stripes of the American flag.
That flag-wrapped manger is an example of
a corruption of the Gospel called Christian nationalism. That’s a term we hear often these days, though
it’s tough to pin down exactly who is and who isn’t a Christian nationalist. The short version is that Christian
nationalism conflates being a Christian with being an American. As the Theology Committee of the Episcopal
Church’s House of Bishops has written:
“Christian nationalism defines national
identity in terms of membership in a particular form of Christianity, … a story
often based in Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism….”1 That “divinization of one group over another”2
… “fuses the interests of the nation (or at least a portion of it) and the
interests of God. It blurs the
differences between being a good American and being a good Christian. It puts its faith in the state, not in the
gospel.”3
The bishops also are clear in naming what
Christian nationalism is not. It’s “not Christian nationalism if a person’s
political values are shaped by … Christian faith. The problem with Christian nationalism is not
with Christian participation in politics, but rather the belief that there
should be Christian primacy in politics and law.”4
I know clergy who would say what we’re
doing here today is taking a step down Christian nationalism’s slippery slope. They would say that, because of the American
government’s policies supporting things like slavery, land theft, and racial
separation, the flag certainly shouldn’t be posted near the altar or the pulpit
and perhaps not in the church at all. But,
today, as we observe this feast of Independence Day, we have the flag right
here, next to the pulpit. Is that,
indeed, a step down the slippery slope of equating America with the kingdom of
God?
Here’s how I see it. For me, to observe Independence Day in church is
to offer the nation to God. So that begs
the question, what are we doing when we make offerings? What do they mean? You know, every Sunday, we offer God our sacrifice
of praise and thanksgiving with prayers, songs, bread, wine, and financial
gifts. Most of us make offerings to God
throughout the rest of the week, too, as we set aside time for prayer, or read
Scripture, or serve people in the community, or tend God’s creation, or work
for justice, or love our families and friends. So, what’s the purpose of those offerings?
Well, first, I think we offer them to say,
“Thank you.” We offer tokens of our
lives to God to recognize that all we have was God’s first and that God is
gracious and generous in sharing it. The
old-school offertory sentence some of us grew up hearing captures this
perfectly: “All things come of thee, O
Lord, and of thine own have we given thee.”
I think we also make offerings in order to
dedicate, to consecrate, to hallow our lives as instruments of God’s purposes. That’s what Lincoln had in mind on the
battlefield at Gettysburg, but it’s also what we intend about ourselves – that
we would participate with the One who is Love in bringing Love to bear in this
world God’s redeeming. As we say in a
Rite I version of the Eucharistic prayer, we offer God “ourselves, our souls
and bodies” (BCP 336), acknowledging that, unbelievably, the sovereign of the universe wants
to use even you and me to reveal God’s reign and rule on earth.
That’s why we’re observing the feast of
Independence Day here in church this morning. We’re giving thanks to God for the blessings
we’ve known in this nation, and we’re asking God to bless and empower it, that the
United States might live into the goodness to which it aspires.
So, marking Independence Day doesn’t
mean simply baptizing the nation and its deeply complicated history. As we all know, in the Declaration of
Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote that “all men are created equal” and
deserve a government that guarantees their right to “life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness.” But for Jefferson
and the other White men in the room where it happened, that Declaration of
Independence applied only to other White men who owned property – not to poor White
men, not to any women, not to Black people considered to be property,
not to Indigenous people whose property the White men had taken. For the Church to mark Independence Day
doesn’t say any of that was OK. Nor does
it say we should ignore the broken parts of our history because the nation’s good
outweighs the bad. Instead, it says that
our founding principles are aspirations, holy but incompletely fulfilled, so we
pray that our nation will do the work to live them out.
And where could we turn to see what that might
look like? Let me suggest three sources.
The first is Scripture. I think it’s interesting what readings the Book
of Common Prayer gives us this morning. On this feast honoring our nation, our
readings urge us to turn away from the fireworks long enough to heed voices in contrast
to our culture. As the Israelites are
about to enter the land God’s given them to possess, Moses calls them not to
lord it over the people they’ll defeat but to “love the stranger, for you were
strangers in the land of Egypt” (Deut 10:19). To Jewish converts trying to understand Jesus’
way of love, the writer of Hebrews tells them not to imitate David or Solomon,
their nation’s founding fathers, but to consider themselves “strangers and
foreigners on earth … seeking a [new] homeland, … a better country, that is, a
heavenly one” (11:13,14,16). And in the
Sermon on the Mount, what you might call the Constitution of the kingdom of
heaven, Jesus tells his followers what they should do to those who work against
their interest: “Love your enemies, and
pray for those who persecute you,” Jesus says – I’m sure bringing groans from
the nationalistic partisans in the crowd (Matt 5:44). Throughout Scripture, we hear the God who is
Love calling us to do what’s hardest and least personally satisfying. If you’re blessed with abundant resources,
give them away. If you have the power to
oppress people, build them up. If you
have the power to take things away from people, give them the cloak you’re
wearing. Feed the hungry. Heal the sick. Clothe the naked. Care for prisoners. Welcome the stranger. In the kingdom of God,
these are the supreme laws of the land. They’re
the things that we as individuals, and as a nation, must do – in
personal action and in policy.
So, Scripture can guide us in sharing
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness with all. Our second source is our own Episcopal guide
to holy living, the Baptismal Covenant. Over
the next six weeks, on Thursday nights at HJ’s, we’ll explore what it means to
follow Christ in our culture. Rather
than wrapping the baby Jesus in the American flag of Christian nationalism,
we’ll explore how to be a Christian American – how the promises of the
Baptismal Covenant can guide us to practice Christian ethics as American citizens.
The first session, this Thursday, will
set the stage with some reflection on Richard Niebuhr’s classic book Christ
& Culture, and then we’ll explore the five baptismal promises week by
week.
Finally, as the third source to guide us
in living out our nation’s founding aspirations, I’d suggest we look back at our
nation’s founding sermon. There is such
a thing. And there’s an image from that
sermon I know you know: the thought that God was calling the English Pilgrims
to the new world in order to be a shining “city upon a hill” with “the eyes of
all people upon” them.5 Presidents
of all stripes – including Kennedy, Reagan, and Obama – have used this image to
paint a picture of American exceptionalism that springs from God’s favor.6
But that’s not really what the
sermon’s about.7
It comes from John Winthrop, the first
governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. As he and his fellow Pilgrims neared the
shores of North America in 1630, Winthrop took the opportunity of a captive
audience to cast a vision for the colony as an outpost of God’s kingdom. As he borrowed that image of the “city upon a
hill” from Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount (Matt 5:14), Winthrop explicitly applied
the Constitution of God’s kingdom to the English people’s colonizing efforts. Now, the notion of holy colonization is pretty
troubling for us, to say nothing of the Pilgrims’ belief in theocracy as a
system of government. But setting all that
aside for a moment, I think some of Winthrop’s other words in his shipboard
sermon could be a blessing to our national life and discourse today. Here’s why: For John Winthrop, this new English colony was
to be God’s “city upon a hill” not because it was full of religiously
minded Englishmen. Instead, they would
be a “city upon a hill” only if they remembered their fundamental
calling. I’ll leave you with Winthrop’s
own words:
[I]f we shall neglect … the ends we have
propounded and … embrace this present world…, seeking great things for
ourselves and our posterity, the Lord will surely break out in wrath against
us…. Now, the only way to avoid this
shipwreck, and to provide for our posterity, is to follow the counsel of [the
prophet] Micah, to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with our God.8
That offering of ourselves is what may yet
make us a shining city upon a hill.
1.
Shin,
Allen K., and Larry Benfield. The Crisis of Christian Nationalism: Report from
the House of Bishops Theology Committee. New York: Church Publishing, 2024.
16.
2.
Shin
and Benfield, 18.
3.
Shin
and Benfield, 17.
4.
Shin
and Benfield, 20.
5.
Winthrop,
John. A Modell of Christian Charity (1630). Collections of the
Massachusetts Historical Society (Boston, 1838), 3rd series 7:31-48. Available
at: https://history.hanover.edu/texts/winthmod.html.
Accessed July 4, 2025.
6.
Shin
and Benfield, 16.
7.
This
discussion of the sermon’s point relies on Shin and Benfield.
8. Winthrop, John. A Modell of Christian Charity.
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