Fourth of July
Pentecost 6
Isaiah 66:10-14; Galatians 6:7-16; Psalm 66: 1-8; Luke 10:1-11,16-28
Sunday, July 4, 2010
John Wall

IN THE NAME OF GOD: Our Creator, Our Redeemer, and Our Comforter. Amen

This is a complicated day in the life of the Church. And so it is in the lessons appointed for the day. On the one hand, it's the 4th of July; on the other, it's the 6th Sunday after Pentecost.

It's our annual celebration of independence from Great Britain and the beginning of our history as a new country called the United States of America. That's important enough to us as Episcopalians to put this day on the calendar of the church, with propers and prayers for celebrations in thanksgiving for God's gift to us of our lives in this land.

But it's also a Sunday, the day of our weekly gathering of the Church as a community to remember and give thanks for the life, death, and resurrection of our Savior Jesus Christ, whom we proclaim as the One through whom God overcomes all that separates us from God, in whom we are made a new people worthy to stand before God, and by whom we claim a future with God in God's kingdom.

Now, those of you who are Prayer Book purists know that the Church in its wisdom says that Sunday always gets the highest priority, and so puts the 6th Sunday after Pentecost first, and so resolves the conflict by delaying the official Church recognition of the 4th of July until tomorrow, thus giving Pentecost 6 its full due today and the 4th of July its full due tomorrow.

But tomorrow is not the 4th of July. Only very large parishes with lots of clergy and big congregations with time on their hands will observe the 4th of July tomorrow, and even then, it's not going to be the same. The fireworks will be over, a new work day will be approaching, and our thoughts will be elsewhere.

What to do? What comes first in our lives as Americans and as Christians? Do the lessons help us? Well, in a way. They remind us that in our tradition there is an intermingling of nation, people, and religion.

The Old Testament lesson reports God's words, spoken through the Prophet Isaiah, to the effect that God promises that Jerusalem's prosperity will “extend . . . like a river,” for God is on their side, and the sign of God's favor will be Israel's success and the failure of other nations: “it shall be known that the hand of the LORD is with his servants, /and his indignation is against his enemies."

In this vision of the relationship between God and humanity, God is the God of Israel, and Israel will prosper because the God who is God has shown – and will show – special favor to this special people, to the detriment, presumably, of Israel's enemies, now God's enemies.

In this view of things, our identity as Christians and our identity as Americans come together nicely. All the biblical language about God's Chosen People applies to us, now, as citizens of the United States. A good argument for making July 4th a Holy Day, for giving it high priority.

There is also in the lessons another vision, a vision of God not just as the God of Israel but of all people. The Psalmist says,

Be joyful in God, all you lands; * sing the glory of his Name;
sing the glory of his praise.
All the earth bows down before you, * sings to you, sings out your Name."
Come now and see the works of God, * how wonderful he is in his doing toward all people.

This more universal vision undercuts nationalist claims to special status in God's eyes. We see something of this universalizing vision in Jesus' relationships with Samaritans, in his sending his followers out – in today's Gospel – “to every town and place,” and in the Great Commission to go into all the world preaching and teaching and baptizing.

We also see it in Paul's famous passage from I Corinthians:

For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ.
For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body – Jews or Greeks, slaves or free – and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.

Today we are more likely to embrace this vision, but we also recognize that it opens up a space for us – on this July 4th – between our identity as Americans and our identity as Christians.

So, what might we say first about our identity as Christians? We are, first of all, those people about whom we claim, that we are the people who “by water and the Holy Spirit have been made a new people in Jesus Christ our Lord,” people “worthy to stand before God,” people beloved of God, people invited by God to be God's friends, with whom God promises to be with us always, people invited by God to this table, week by week, this table where Jesus is our host, a Savior who comes not to be served, but to serve us, a God who promises that this celebration to which we are invited week by week is but a foretaste of that heavenly banquet in the New Jerusalem, the holy city come down out of heaven, like a bride prepared for her bridegroom, to which we are invited, when all tears are wiped from our eyes and there is no more suffering, no more death, for all that has passed away, and all things are being made new.

Its good to remember that. There is a lot of talk in the Bible about yucky and nasty we are, about how we always fall short of the Glory of God, to make the Good News difficult to remember. Even Paul can get into this mode, as in today's Epistle reading:

“God is not mocked, for you reap whatever you sow. If you sow to your own flesh, you will reap corruption from the flesh.”

I think those of us who grew up in the South heard that kind of thing a lot. I know I did, especially while I was a teenager. Oh yes, the evangelical unholy Trinity -- God the Carrot, God the Stick, and God the cop on the Beat.

Now, the South, when I was a kid, for those of you who weren't there, was a puritan, evangelical playground. Hell fire and brimstone preachers – tent meetings, revivals – the big attractions in the summertime, small-town South. Now that I think about it, where else but in a revival meeting could you see all the grownups in your life getting all worked up, sweat soaking through their clothes, full of feelings and energy and desire, in the midst of all that talk about sin and sex and the flesh.

I used to have a colleague who remembered getting saved every summer for 6 or 8 years in a row – she said it was the most fun you could have in a small town, in that lost world before air conditioning, before shopping malls, before Interstate highways and the Internet.

But the thing that amazed me most about Church in those times was the obsession about who was in or who was out. The downside of evangelicalism is the lack of clarity about membership. If the good news is heard only by a few, then the rest of us can't ever be sure we are really members. But that's not really Church to me. Church to me is like a family, like my extended family, which meets every year on the first Sunday in August for a reunion. When we get together, we do not post someone at the door to check your DNA to see if you are a Wall or not. We get together and we do talk a lot about being a Wall, but the subject of our stories is how we became a Wall, not whether we are one or not. And some of us are named Wall and some of us married a Wall, and some of us are friends of someone's brother's cousin's sister. But we are all Walls, for that day at least, and we are all welcome at the table for chicken and BBQ and fresh tomatoes and biscuits and a piece of Cousin Jenny's caramel cake.

Beloved in this place we are invited to this table, to share stories and to celebrate and to give thanks, for by water and the Holy Spirit we have been made a new people in Christ. That's Church to me. That's worthy of celebration.

But its hard to do that if you started out as an evangelical. One can always tell an evangelical, even a recovering one – by the difficulty they have getting to good news, to the affirmation that we are, by water and the Holy Spirit, a new people. But making that transition is part of our calling as God's people. In Christ we are a new creation, by water and the Holy Spirit we have been made a new people in Christ, a people worthy to stand before God, a people called here not to grovel but to celebrate, not to lament our sins, but to give thanks to the One who has overcome all that separates us from God.

But to those of us who are Southerners, I think there are three reasons why we have trouble accepting that, living into that, giving thanks for that.

One is that in the evangelical tradition we believe that we have good news to tell, but we are afraid people can't hear the good news or appreciate how good it is until we really make them believe the bad news, so we spent most of our time on the bad news, and mostly the work of convincing folks the world was bad seems to be so hard, because they are so hard to convince about how bad it is, that we never get around to the Good News.

The second reason is that we worry that if we celebrate, if we give thanks for, our new life in Christ it will seem too easy, the abundant grace God pours forth for us will seem unimportant, trivial, “cheap.”

When I hear that I remember an interview I heard once on NPR with the country and bluegrass singer Emmy Lou Harris, who said she grew up in a comfortable middle-class family, went to college, and was on the way to a typical middle class, comfortable life, but she played the guitar and sang and began to have success as a folk singer, singing about heartbreak and the struggles of the poor and the downtrodden and the oppressed. But, she said, she felt guilty making money singing these songs when she had never had the kinds of experiences she talked about in the songs.

She said she ran into Pete Seeger once at a folk festival, and Pete of course had been singing those kinds of songs and making money from them a lot longer than she had, and Pete, too, had had a relatively comfortable middle class upbringing. So she asked Pete about this and Pete told her not to worry about it too much, that she should go ahead and develop her talent and use her gifts, that she was young and that she would find that life had a way of catching up with her.

And it does. Every one of us here who have some of life behind us knows that no matter how comfortable we are today we are never more than one phone call, one email, one appointment, one turn of the wheel or lurch in the stock market away from having the role of Job thrust upon us in all its heartbreaking anguish, all of its wrenching pain, and loss, and suffering.

As Christian people we know as well as anyone that life is by definition difficult and short, and that at the end of the day this blessed gift of life will cost us absolutely everything.

But, as Garrison Keillor once put it, sometimes you simply have to look reality in the face and deny it. Or, to put that in Christian terms, we are the people to whom God says, Be not afraid, be strong and of good courage, for I am with you, You are my people who by water and the Holy Spirit I have made a new people, As Jesus says to his followers in today's Gospel, The Kingdom of God has come near you, for I have made you citizens of that Kingdom, that Holy City, and the Gates of Hell will not prevail against it.

So we are the people who are called to give thanks, to shout Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia, even at the Grave, we make our song, Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia.

The third reason we have trouble celebrating the Good News is our fear that if we celebrate all the time, we won't get around to doing The Right Things. Now we know what the Right Things are – feeding the hungry, helping the poor, healing the sick, working for justice, and so forth. And the fear is that we can become complacent, inward-turning, self-satisfied, immune to the cries of those who need our help. So we put off talking about the Good News, put off celebrating the good things God is doing for us, until we have gotten everyone motivated to do The Right Things.

But it is my sincere belief that a joyful community is a more generous community. A community that celebrates God's generosity to us is more likely to be generous with others. A community that is confident of God's assurance is more likely to welcome the stranger. It is fear that makes us circle up the wagons; it is thanksgiving that enables us to reach out, lift up, give comfort, lend support, take care, be with, fight for.

So that's who we are as Christians.

On July 4th, who are we as Americans? If our God is a God of all people, not just us? The connection is that even if America is not a unique nation, God's Chosen Nation, a nation set apart by our special relationship with God, it is still one of the nations of this world, the world God has made and in which God delights, the world God has joined up with definitively and finally. So we are one of the peoples whom God is working in Christ to reconcile to him and to each other. And we, as God's people, have the opportunity to be part of that reconciling work.

Our calling is therefore twofold. On the one hand it is to celebrate in, to rejoice in, to give thanks for the saving work God has done and continues to do for us. That's who we are as the Church apart from where we are in time and history, in this country with its own special and complicated history, with its high ideals and noble aspirations to be a land of the brave and home of the free, a land of opportunity which welcomes the outcasts of the world, the tired, the poor, the hungry, those who yearn to be free. And at the same time it is the land in which millions died to preserve slavery, in which women and people of color and gay and lesbian people have had to struggle and fight to achieve for themselves the rights and freedoms and opportunities the rest of us take for granted. Where in the richest nation on earth so many people struggle in poverty to find decent housing and health care and education and opportunities for work.

We affirm that the God who redeems us is about the work of redeeming this world, of calling us whom God has made a new people to tell God's story, to proclaim what with God's help we can be, to be God's hands and feet and hearts and minds in this world in furthering God's redemptive work, not because this is the way we earn brownie points with God but because when we minister to people in need of us, we keep company with God, who is always there before us.

That brings Pentecost 6 and the 4th of July together. That's why we seek to be an open and welcoming church, a church that seeks to live out our promise in the Baptismal Covenant to seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbors as ourselves, to strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being. That's why we've chosen to end today's service by singing “Oh beautiful for spacious skies.”

And that's why – even though we started this service with the Collect for Pentecost 6 I'm ending this sermon with the collect for the 4th of July.

Lord God Almighty, you have made all the peoples of the earth for your glory, to serve you in freedom and in peace: Give to the people of our country a zeal for justice and the strength of forbearance, that we may use our liberty in accordance with your gracious will; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

©2010 John Wall