Pentecost 5A (lectionary 15)
Fourth of July weekend
sermon by Rev. Robert Klonowski
Faith Lutheran Church, Homewood, IL
July 5, 2020
American Prospect
Well, will you look at that. In the middle of a pandemic, there has broken out among us in America the most significant conversation about race and justice and the nature of freedom in our country, in many years. And so much of it is about our American history, our narrative, about how we tell our story. Public park statues of Confederate soldiers who fought against our country and who fought for slavery, statues once honored and romanticized by some Americans, are rudely torn down now by kids in shorts and t-shirts. The movie “Gone with the Wind,” with its nostalgia for the good old days of white supremacy – “We’ll always have Tara!” – is taken down from its streaming platform until a historical disclaimer can be added – for after all, Tara was a slave labor camp. Let’s *not* always have Tara, shall we? And then there’s my favorite: NASCAR has banned the Confederate flag. What?! What a time to be alive, to see that happen. What a time to be an American, on this Fourth of July weekend.
I have shared with you before in sermons that at baseball games – when we have baseball games! – I sing the national anthem. There is nothing quite like it if you like to stand out in a crowd and make people turn around and look at you, and most of you know I like to be the center of attention very much. Occasionally when I’m at a game with friends who share my left-leaning politics they are surprised by my enthusiastic singing, and maybe a little put off. Shouldn’t I be dropping to one knee or something? But I sing. It means a lot to me. Occasionally when I’m at a game with pastor friends they object to it as a ritual of civil religion, but I argue in favor of civil religion. It’s my civic community, these people and this country of mine, and it’s important that we get our civil religion right. I call it religious patriotism, and on the occasion of this Fourth of July weekend with that conversation about freedom and justice raging on around us, I want you to think about it with me.
Twelve score and four years ago, our forebears brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all are created equal. These are revolutionary words, capable words, words that can still rock the old world that we know and call us into greatness beyond what we’ve ever known. And so it is that the greatest Americans in history have pinned us to these words, as they called us to revolutionary undertaking: Frederick Douglass and the abolitionists, Abraham Lincoln and how he shaped the meaning of the American Civil War, Susan B. Anthony and the suffragists, Franklin Roosevelt and why Americans fought the Second World War, Martin Luther King and the civil rights fight to let freedom ring. All of them pointed in their rhetoric and their work to the founding principles of the Declaration. Theirs was not a knee-jerk, unquestioning patriotism that accepts the status quo: the my-country, right-or-wrong kind of thing. Theirs was a patriotism of higher principle and religious fervor and vision, a patriotism true to the Declaration and its call to what could be. Not our country, right or wrong; but our country, *fix* what’s wrong.
For right from the start there were indeed things wrong. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration, but these truths were apparently not self-evident enough to him, to offer equality to the people Jefferson held in slavery. If the American founders walked delicately around this irony, their British opponents were perfectly capable of highlighting the contradiction. “How is it,” asked the English Christian writer Samuel Johnson, “how is it we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of negroes?” During the Revolutionary War the British offered freedom – yes, it was the British who offered freedom! – to African-Americans who would declare loyalty to the King, and the records are that no fewer than 20,000 of them escaped from slavery and fought in the British army. One of them was from a plantation called Mount Vernon in Virginia, a man named Washington. He was Harry Washington, a Mount Vernon slave, and he fought for the British against George Washington, you know why? Because Harry Washington believed in liberty, and Harry Washington believed that all men are created equal.
There were indeed things wrong. Loyalty to our country does not mean loyalty to what is, just because it is. All too often “what is” means injustice. No; loyalty to our country means loyalty to what I call the American prospect, the higher principles on which our forebears, limited in the scope of their vision though they were, nevertheless so brilliantly founded our national community. I call it religious patriotism because it’s based on a fundamentally religious impulse, the idea that what is, is not all there is, and that there’s a vision so big as to be beyond the present and there is a being beyond us – oh, okay; call that being God! – who shapes our ends. I think of the very first words of Jesus – “The Kingdom of God has come near!” – in this respect, and also the record of Jesus’ ministry: calling the outcast; lifting the poor; ignoring oppressive conventions of gender; building community to include rich and poor, slave and free, male and female, Jew and Greek; healing the sick and restoring to community – that’s what it means to have a prospect, to live into a Kingdom of God vision that is bigger than what is.
Thomas Jefferson had an inkling about this. He knew that if the revolution was based on principle, then it could never be a one-time affair, but had to be an on-going, ever-re-examined prospect, and don’t we know that these days, with the on-going, roiling, revolutionary discourse going on around us right now. It’s an on-going, ever-re-examined prospect, and so late in his life Jefferson wrote that “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots.” Think here, for example, of the assassination of Martin Luther King, who died because he was calling us all to be true to the Declaration. He was pinning us to the words of Thomas Jefferson. The blood of patriots, indeed.
The Christian prospect is this: can we build a community that is like unto the community that Jesus showed us? The American prospect is like it: can we build a nation that is true to its ideals? I call it religious patriotism, and it’s what I want people to hear when they hear me singing the national anthem.
On July 3, 1776, John Adams sat down and wrote a letter. It was the evening before the publication of the Declaration, and he was at the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. He wrote home to Massachusetts, to his beloved wife and intellectual partner Abigail.
“I am apt to believe that [this Declaration] will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival.” Hey, are you having a good Fourth? “It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty.” Good thing you took the time this morning, to worship with the Faith video! “It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shows, Games, Sports, [Cannon], Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other ….” Well, this year maybe not so much on the parades, but judging from my neighborhood alone we somehow seem to be extra enthusiastic in the pandemic time about all the “illuminations” and fireworks, all night long.
“[Abigail,] you will think me transported with Enthusiasm but I am not. I am well aware of the Toil and Blood … that it will cost Us to maintain this Declaration …. Yet through all … I can see the Rays of ravishing Light and Glory. I can see that the End is more than worth all the Means. And that Posterity will triumph in that Days Transaction ….”
People of Faith, we are people of God, and we are Americans. Let’s fight for justice, then, well aware of the toil and blood it’s going to take us to maintain the vision of our religious patriotism, the values of freedom and justice we have sought to work out throughout our American history, and that are being worked out in our streets and in our thinking and in our politics, even today. Let’s fight for justice, with the vision of the Declaration and of Douglass and Lincoln and Anthony and Roosevelt and King and of all the patriot fighters who’ve gone on before us. There is no better place in the country to do this very work, than right here in the Chicago Southland. We are people of God, and we are Americans. Let us then – yes! in the name of God! – let us then be about the American prospect.