Independence Day
A Homily for the 4th of July
The Rev. Michael Vinson+ Rector
The Collect. O ETERNAL God, through whose mighty power our fathers won their liberties of old; Grant, we beseech thee, that we and all the people of this land may have grace to maintain these liberties in righteousness and peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
A priest hears two accusations, sometimes in the same week. The first: “This Church has become far too political!” The second: “This Church isn’t political enough!” One parishioner wants the pulpit purged of anything touching the public square; the other wants it turned into a campaign headquarters. Both, I’d suggest, have confused something — and today, of all days, is the day to untangle it.
Now, the first charge sometimes sticks. It is fair against any church where party politics and ideological demagoguery are proclaimed with more verve, verbosity, and passion than Christ and his Gospel — though more often than not, the accuser is every bit as political as the accused; he simply doesn’t like the politics he’s hearing, so off he goes to find a church whose prevailing social politic flatters him. And the second charge? It asks the pulpit to get out the vote for [fill in the blank], to curse and condemn our political enemies, to wage the counter-attack against the counter-culture. But the Government isn’t the Church, and the President isn’t the Country’s Bishop.
As Aristotle rightly observed, “Man is by nature a political animal.” Now, what we hear is something different from what the philosopher meant. We hear “political animal,” and the face of the worst partisan ideologue you can imagine comes to mind. That guy or that lady who argues and fights over fiscal, social, and moral law as it pertains to their right to pursue life, liberty, and happiness.
Or it’s your friend or cousin who only talks or complains about politics! Or, in a more productive sense, the person who serves every cycle at the polling station or volunteers to support a local or national candidate by knocking on doors, handing out yard signs, and the like. All of these are a part of the political landscape in which we exist.
Aristotle, however, is thinking about first principles. Man — meaning everyone born and living on the earth — is a political animal, meaning humans live within communities (the Greek polis). Men and women organize their lives within the polis, and humans do this naturally because our nature, as given by the Trinitarian God, is communal: life is lived in community (whether it is a good or bad community is an entirely different matter). Man is made for the polis, and therefore man lives and moves and has his being within organized city-states. That’s what Aristotle means by defining us as political animals (or creatures).
If man’s nature is political (in the Aristotelian sense), then his political life was envisioned and given to man by God; He made us to be political (again, living in the polis). Which is why the first polis is the family. Then in history we see the emergence of the clan, the tribe, a people, and nations. And as you track the story of human organization in the Old Testament and history at large, you’ll find it organic and natural. Before the advent of “the citizen,” a person would have thought of him- or herself as a member of a people — of the ethnos, the nation in which one was born and raised — or, if an alien to that people, one entered it by formal means, like marriage, as Ruth the Moabite was received into the people of Israel through marrying Boaz.
The concept of citizenship came very late to civilization, roughly 2,500 years ago, in seventh-century B.C. Greece. The first form of citizenship was based on the way people lived within the small-scale, organic communities of the polis. “Citizens” were those who had a legal right (based on codified and governing law) to participate in the affairs of the state (this is the pure understanding of politics). But by no means was everyone a citizen: slaves, peasants, women, and resident foreigners were subjects of the polis but did not bear the rights and responsibilities of civic life. Nations in time would become much more defined by geographical borders, sovereignty of rule, and laws governing all who lived within the nation-state, regardless of origin or ethnicity.
I’ve outlined this rough and brief historical sketch of nation-states and citizenship to arrive at my first point: you and I are citizens of the United States (assuming you were either born here or were legally naturalized). This means you have legal status with rights, privileges, and duties to defend, preserve, and fulfill as civic members of this polis called the United States. You are a political animal of a certain stripe; you are an American.
My second point is this: if you have professed faith in Jesus Christ and been baptized with water in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, then you are a Christian Citizen. You see, your Christianity doesn’t cancel your citizenship. In fact, as a Christian, you have dual citizenship, just like St. Paul, who was a citizen of the Kingdom of God and a citizen of Rome. Today is a good opportunity to remember our dual citizenship and, more importantly, not to neglect, conflate, or confuse the two.
I want to say unequivocally that we are called by God to fully embrace our citizenship in heaven and on earth and to fully participate in both. It’s time for Christians to embrace, and not be ashamed of, being citizens of this great Country of ours — to kick apathy to the curb and participate in the polis as Christians — because your first and primary identity is as a son or daughter of God, the brother or sister of the Lord Jesus Christ, a member incorporated into Christ’s body on earth, his Church. Your first allegiance is to the Lord Jesus Christ: “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness.”
But we also have secondary identities, which carry secondary yet important responsibilities: “husband” is a secondary identity category, as is “U.S. citizen.” And as I said, secondary doesn’t mean unimportant; would you consider raising children to be God-fearing and virtuous citizens of society unimportant? Of course not! But also remember the primary devotion and allegiance that our Lord Jesus demands: “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple” (Lk 14:26). Primary things must remain primary, and secondary things can never become primary.
The founders of this great nation and the bishops of the Protestant Episcopal Church had far less separation, tension, and existential angst when it came to Christianity and nationalism. Consider what we’re doing right now. We are observing a Prayer Book feast day celebrating the Independence of the United States of America and the birth of this incredible nation. Listen to the rubric attached to the form of Prayer and Thanksgiving for our Country as proposed for the very first American Prayer Book of 1786: Prayers and Thanksgivings: For the inestimable Blessings of Religious and Civil Liberty, to be used yearly on the Fourth Day of July, unless it happens to be on a Sunday, and then on the day following. The changes made in the 1928 Prayer Book included adding a proper Collect, Epistle, and Gospel reading to celebrate Independence with the Order of Holy Communion (as we are doing today).
But here’s a fascinating bit of history: when the first American Prayer Book was actually ratified in 1789, those Independence Day propers were dropped. Why? Because many of the clergy of the young Protestant Episcopal Church had been Loyalists during the Revolution — men who had prayed for King George from their pulpits — and Bishop White judged it uncharitable to compel them to celebrate a victory over their own consciences. For nearly a century and a half, the American Church observed no feast of Independence, until the 1928 Prayer Book restored it. Think about that: the very Prayer Book tradition we celebrate today spent 140 years wrestling with the same tension I’m describing — how to hold heavenly citizenship and earthly citizenship together without confusing the two. Our fathers didn’t resolve that tension by pretending it away; they resolved it slowly, charitably, and liturgically.
In the Daily Office, we pray for our government leaders, our Country, our shared civic life, and all the peoples of this land. Once again, we pray for those who govern us in the Prayer for the Whole State of Christ’s Church: that all Christian rulers may truly and impartially administer justice, to the punishment of wickedness and vice, and to the maintenance of thy true religion and virtue. As Anglicans, our dual citizenship is exercised simultaneously, yet never confused, mixed, or conflated. We pray (to God) for our nation (the polis). In doing so, you are a political animal — but more than that, you are a Christian political animal.
Meaning your citizenship is much more difficult to carry out, because you are born again, a citizen of heaven, and your political life on earth by necessity must be exercised in the name by which you are called, the name by which you were marked, the name above all names: Jesus Christ, King of Kings and Lord of Lords.
In all its various aspects and forms, Christian citizenship should look like Jesus. For example, submission to authority: St. Paul exhorts Christians to submit to governmental authority because civil authority is God’s institution and will punish wrongdoers and praise those who do good (Rom 13:1–5). We submit to the authority over us as Jesus submitted to the Father. Taxes are another good example.
Paul, sounding a lot like Jesus, exhorted the Roman Christians to pay taxes as well, writing, “Therefore one must be in subjection [to governing authorities], not only to avoid God’s wrath but also for the sake of conscience. Because of this, you also pay taxes, for the authorities are ministers of God, attending to this very thing. Pay to all what is owed to them: taxes to whom taxes are owed, revenue to whom revenue is owed, respect to whom respect is owed, honor to whom honor is owed” (Rom 13:5–7). Obedience to the governing law of this nation and respectful submission to those in authority are commanded by God and are a means of sanctification; nation-states (good or bad) are gracious gifts given by God to sanctify the Church.
I’m interested in Christian Nationalism, not National Christianism — meaning one word is supposed to modify the other, not the other way around. Our love of the nation and our civic participation at the local, state, and national levels must be Christian. Again, for us as Christians the bar of political life is set much higher, because we are called to carry out the civic law according to the greater law of loving God and loving our neighbor.
In our day, the American idea is suffering greatly. It’s not as clearly discerned as it once may have been; it’s obfuscated far too much by unhealthy partisanship, secular orthodoxy, apathy, and anger — societal and civic diseases corroding and chipping away at the Divine idea for our national life as it is expressed through our political activities and social institutions. We have forgotten the most important ingredient, the one thing which binds any union, let alone a nation: the virtue of charity. Within our national life, brother is sadly set against brother. And how will we live up to the Divine ideal if brother is against brother and sister against sister? Will our differences and oppositions finally break the bond we share as citizens? Do our faith and the word of God allow for such finality of separation? Surely not.
In Christian nationalism rightly understood, our civic and political life honors God by doing all things in love — especially when we love our enemies, whose political, ideological, ethical, and moral crusades align neither with our societal interests nor, more importantly, with the faith we hold as revealed in Holy Scripture. Our Lord says to us this evening, “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; that ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven.” But let me be clear: “love your enemies” isn’t synonymous with abdicating your civic responsibility to uphold, defend, and preserve every good, true, and beautiful thing we enjoy in this Country. Far too many Christians have confused love with resigning themselves to being nice, to being civil, to disengaging from political life. But political life is societal life, and societal life is the natural, God-given polis in which we, our children, and our grandchildren will live out the days of our lives. As members of the polis, we are given the duty and responsibility of stewarding our national life for the better! Like marriages and friendships, good things can vanish if not protected and fought for.
Friends, let us take this occasion to heed the Psalmist’s words and lift our eyes to the God who is our helper. And looking to him, let us humbly repent of our sins and the sins of our fathers — of our collective national sins, both past and present. Because without the help of the Lord, we don’t stand a chance. Beloved, as Christian citizens of these United States of America, let us declare this a day of independence and, even more, a day of dependence. Without God’s grace, we will not maintain these liberties in righteousness and peace but will squander them through wickedness and discord. And we would do well to remember that this beautiful and bountiful Country, where we enjoy such sweet liberty and unparalleled freedoms, is a providential gift from the God of Heaven. The rocks and rills, the woods and templed hills; the spacious skies and amber waves of grain; the purple mountain majesties that tower above the fruited plain — all a gift from God’s gracious hand. Amen+
