Happy 4th of July! How do you celebrate this holiday? wI had a friend in college, Lucas, who would come to our annual summer fourth gathering with pocket sized copies of the constitution and the declaration of independence and read sections of them to anyone who would listen. Now although I was guilty of making myself scarce when he got on a roll, I really loved that he wanted his friends, a bunch of goofy students ready for a fun night with sparklers and cheap beer, to remember the bigger vision and hope articulated in those founding documents. He wanted us to think a little more deeply about what we were doing, about our citizenship and the purpose of this day, and that practice has been an annual gift to me ever since, as each year when the 4th of July draws near, try to read and think and return to reflection on our country and what it means to be a citizen and hold this legacy.
Now this year on the Fourth of July, in the Episcopal Church, something strange is happening today, something even more provocative and even more deeply considered than a pocket sized constitution. Because on this national holiday, we are being prompted by our traditions and worship to consider beyond the cookouts and fireworks, even beyond the Declaration of Independence, to the meaning of our citizenship as people who are called first to be citizens of the Kingdom of God.
Let me tell you why I think that is. The forms of our liturgy and the Book of Common Prayer, while recognizing today as an occasion of commemoration, instruct us that should the fourth fall on a Sunday, we read the scriptures and pray the prayers appointed not for Independence Day, but for the sixth Sunday after Pentecost, and that we have to scoot any church observance until tomorrow. This once a year celebration of the founding of a whole country has to scoot over for a regular Sunday? Hmmm.
We have liturgical instructions that a usual Sunday morning is priority number one. And then the readings for this Sunday give us some other food for thought on this Independence Day. Today’s gospel story is about Jesus’s conflicted relationship with his homeland, his love and loyalty of home and the limits and tensions of that love and loyalty.
Where does our lesson begin? “Jesus came to his hometown, and his disciples followed him. On the sabbath he began to teach in the synagogue.” Jesus has been traveling about, not all that far from home, but arrives back in the town he grew up in, and back to what we might think of as his childhood parish, the local synagogue. Jesus is back in his home territory, home synagogue, and he began to teach, likely saying some of the same things we’ve read in Mark up until now, beautiful and confusing and provocative things like:
“Is it easier to say ‘your sins are forgiven,’ or ‘stand up and walk?’”
and
“I’ve come not to the righteous but the sinners”
Or perhaps he was telling stories of demons sent away, children come back to life and women healed, storms calmed, strange disciples called, the rules of the sabbath reformed. The people in his homeland were astounded and they took offense at Jesus. The word for offense can also be translated as scandalized. They are scandalized by his gospel.
Jesus can’t do any ministry there, and he is amazed at their unbelief. Amazed, Mark says! And we might imagine that in that amazement at their unbelief, their rejection, is also some heartbreak, disappointment, maybe even anger? And so Jesus and his friends take on a fresh strategy of ministry. They go around the villages and countryside, looking for like-minded folks and ministering and proclaiming the gospel with their travel gear on, ready to keep on moving, to shake the dust off their feet when they face rejection.
Jesus loves his homeland, he wants to bring his love and gifts to his community, but compromising the gospel in order to fit in there is not an option. So he does what he can do — heals a few, talks with those who want to listen — and lets go of the rest, remembering that his call is bigger than Nazareth. Jesus loved his homeland, but compromising the gospel was not an option. Hmmm.
What do we do, how do we live, when our homeland cannot accept all of who we are?
That’s a question in this gospel lesson, it’s a question from the instructions of the Book of Common Prayer to honor the Sixth Sunday after Pentecost, and it’s a question for Christians on the Fourth of July, when we might take the opportunity on this occasion to ponder our patriotism and how to love this place and project of the United States well and faithfully.
Because we love this place—this landscape and dream and project and homeland. Right? I love Fourth of July nonsense and Americana nostalgia and US history, and I love soul food and hamburgers and cheesecake and Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys and Aaron Copland and Beyonce and the Appalachian foothills and Keith Haring and Walt Whitman and Toni Morrison and the way the Rocky Mountains look from 40,000 feet, and I have big feelings about our Olympic teams, and most of all I love the aspirations of democracy and the vision of freedom and equality that we continue to work toward.
And you have things that you love about this place, this people, this project of a nation, things that move you to tears or make you jump to your feet or slap your hand over your heart. But no matter how we love our country, for Christians, that love must come second to the call and love that we have to Jesus and the gospel.
In his book, City of God, St. Augustine talked about this in terms of ordering our loves rightly, and says that while we it is good to love what God has made, it becomes evil when our love of that thing displaces our love of God. This notion sounds well and good, but can sometimes feel more prickly on the ground. The right ordering of loves might be a little less clear in our catchphrase culture that holds “God and country” very tightly together, or if we sing and pray “God Bless America” without considering the depths of what that such blessing might mean in line with the gospel. It’s stickier to rightly order our loves when America First permeates our soundwaves, or when it seems like everyone is trying to judge the most legitimate way to be an American, when our deepest values are supposed to be reduced to a bumper sticker, or when loving our home seems to entail suspicion or even derision to others beyond our borders.
In other words, we can only order our loves and faithfully live our citizenship in God’s kingdom and our country with thoughtfulness, dialogue, and intentionality.
We love our homeland, but compromising the gospel in order to fit in here is not an option. So we might need to find ourselves feeling uneasy with politics and culture that don’t square with the core of the Christian faith.
And what’s the core? What’s the good news? It’s that God loved God’s creation so much that putting on skin and walking and living and loving and healing and liberating people he came in contact with, loving so much and in such a practical way and just so strangely that they killed him for it. But, but! The love was so big and strong and unstoppable that he came back to life and kept on at it.
And not only that, but this kind of love, this live-changing, body healing, soul nourishing, society changing, freedom love of God is not just for me and you, it’s not just for holy people or Episcopalians or even just for law-abiding constructive citizens of the United States. It’s for all of us. Doesn’t that make us glad? Doesn’t it make us nervous?
When we live into this good news and refuse to give up on that vision of God’s love for all people, those like us and not, people might say we’re compromising our patriotism, might not want to hear it.
When we live into this good news and remember that God is the source of all things and holds a love and life more powerful than death, we can’t put our trust in a government or a passport or a culture or a nation, but have to lift our eyes, turn for help, to God alone.
When we live into this good news of God’s strange strength and abundance, God’s weird kind of love and power, and find ourselves in the unpopular camp and feeling weak and out of step, that’s when we remember that God’s grace is sufficient for us, for power is made perfect in weakness.
This gospel passage is framed by calls to place our trust, or pledge our allegiance, we might say, in God’s goodness, mercy, and grace, and we are in very fine company with the prophet Ezekiel, and the psalmist, and the Apostle Paul, when we follow Jesus’s example of his relationship to homeland.
Friends, my fellow Americans, let us love this place well, love this landscape and dream and project and homeland. And let us love it thoughtfully and carefully, remembering that our love of country, our patriotism, and our service to it, follows second to our love and call to walk in love as Christ loved us, and gave himself for us an offering and sacrifice to God.