Independence Day - 7.4.2026

A Sermon for Independence Day  The Very Rev'd Joy Rogers

Deuteronomy 10:17–21; Matthew 5:43–48

Church of the Atonement · July 4, 2026

You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.

But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven.

“When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another . . .”

There are stories that go with all the above. To grapple with the healing of a broken nation is to grapple with the stories people tell – about our nation, and about our God.

From the last chapter of a volume called Religion in America, by religious historian Michael Pasquier:

Sociologists Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry point to Christian nationalism as a primary factor in the political and religious divisions that make the nation what it is today. They define “Christian nationalism” as “an ideology that idealizes and advocates a fusion of American civic life with a particular type of Christian identity and culture” fashioned out of “beliefs about historical identity, cultural preeminence, and political influence” that privilege a particular Christianity, whiteness, native-born citizenship, maleness, and social conservatism.

In a country as racially, ethnically, and religiously diverse as the United States, it shouldn’t be surprising that those who think and feel through a Christian nationalist worldview find America to be in a state of danger and decay. Correspondingly, those who make America multicultural and value multiculturalism view Christian nationalism as threatening to the civil rights, religious freedoms, and human dignity afforded by the Constitution. Under these circumstances, the sociologists ask, “One nation under what?”

The deep divisions in our nation have everything to do with the nature of the stories being told, and those being suppressed. We remember today a story of how the founders embedded amazing possibilities in an imperfect, already morally compromised document.

A surprising mix of people gathered in Quaker Philadelphia in the summer of 1776, and it is evident that no one seemed to regard birthplace, ethnicity, religion, or educational attainments as prerequisites. A fair number were immigrants, or children of immigrants. Jefferson and Franklin were deists, and John Adams a Unitarian. They did not believe in the divinity of Jesus or the Resurrection. Five Quakers, one Catholic, one Baptist, lots of Anglicans, Presbyterians, Puritans, Congregationalists, Unitarians. Many came from communities that had fled the British Isles seeking religious freedom. They were not about to trust any government – or each other – with their God.

The infant nation would be an oddity on the face of the earth, with a government based on untested premises about power and how it is shared, and the unknown capacities of people to make their own destiny without the time-tested institutions of a monarchy, a hereditary aristocracy, and a state religion. The leaders of an uninvented government issued a mission statement for a cause that renounced traditional authority and relinquished a long-held identity in service of a radical vision – citizens not bound by blood or religion, but by an idea.

The authors of that lovely vision were white men who sought to preserve their own privilege when they were threatened by a hostile government and a distant king. Yet they risked much. “We must hang together,” said one signer; Benjamin Franklin responded, “Or we will surely hang separately.”

Thomas Jefferson wrote the first draft of the Declaration. Benjamin Franklin and John Adams were his relentless editors. Today is the 200th anniversary of the deaths of Adams and Jefferson. They may be turning in their graves.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Historian Walter Isaacson calls it the “greatest sentence ever written,” in how it inspired people the signers never thought to include to claim those self-evident truths for themselves.

The founders knew they left a moral chasm at the heart of the document – a massive contradiction between all men created equal and a half million enslaved human beings who made up one-fifth of the population. They were silent to secure the support of southern colonies. Two hundred fifty years ago, reality did not reflect that self-evident truth. It still doesn’t.

The oddity of governing work was surrounded by oddities in God-work. The Quakers had fled to the American wilderness with their principles of pacifism and toleration – persecuted on both sides of an ocean for being religious oddities. So they established a commonwealth that would gladly embrace people of differing beliefs – a fortuitous locale for the Continental Congress.

Old Christ Church was once the local franchise for the established religion of the British Empire, yet it became a hotbed of dissent from English political order. Its clergy and membership were active participants in an undertaking that would finally cut itself off from the monarch and the bishops that were supposed to be essential elements of its life.

The genius of the founders’ vision is that it was larger than their best intentions, more profound in its possibilities than the confining conventions of race, custom, class, and culture – of their day or our own. The ground of the vision is a biblical premise: that human society, rightly ordered, defers to a God who is acknowledged as Creator, Protector, and Judge – a premise that united the signers.

At our best, Americans have pressed our foundational document to embrace a larger vision, to include other sufferers of oppression and seekers of freedom – not perfectly or adequately or consistently. We are not done yet.

Many of us are angry and frightened at how the vision of liberty and freedom is being corrupted, distorted, diminished. A nation’s independence, and this American Episcopal Church’s continuing life, began with a declaration of separation, a willing acceptance of a new homelessness in the world and an identity as exiles and immigrants from an English realm. No kings – for either church or state.

The revolution continues for us all: as citizens and as followers of Jesus. For Christians like us – the biblical witness, the witness of prophets and apostles, and the ministry and message of a Crucified and Risen Lord – ground our hopes for our nation in a larger story, one revealed again and again throughout our history.

●      Abraham Lincoln at a cemetery in Gettysburg.

●      Harriet Tubman at a stop on the Underground Railroad with fleeing slaves.

●      Martin Luther King on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

●      All those who show up for Women’s marches and Pride parades.

●      Citizens who protect and pray for their immigrant neighbors, sometimes at huge risk.

●      You don’t even have to be a Christian to make a Christ-like witness.

They had a dream, for all God’s children – a dream that they preached and lived and even died for, a dream that wasn’t dependent on or constricted by who was left out of the Declaration of Independence, but a dream informed and inspired by a God who led a people out of bondage into freedom. A God who still does.

The rising tide of movements on behalf of women, minorities, the marginalized, and immigrants push past the Declaration’s ringing phrase – all men are created equal – to a deeper truth and an older text: humankind, created in the image of God.

Americans are telling very different stories about who we are. The darkest truths of our nation’s story are being revised or effaced. Stories of enslaved people, immigrants, indigenous people, and so many others are simply being removed from the public record – banned from libraries and classrooms and museums and national parks.

People of faith know the power of stories to shape our souls, open our imaginations, fuel our visions. We do not need to deny another the right to an opinion, or even to debate their debatable stories. We simply need to tell our stories – to trust the truth of our stories, the stories of a nation that tell us who we are and who we want to become, the stories about the amazing diversity of the people who call this nation home, the triumphs and the tragedies – as patriots who will challenge the nation to a fuller vision of the common good.

Who else will challenge the distortions of the American experiment that alienate us from each other, when so many of our citizens do not know that God – not any government, or president – is the real source of the life, liberty, and happiness we so often desperately and destructively and greedily pursue?

Trust the power of the stories we tell to invite healing and repentance, and forgiveness, and reconciliation, because they hold truth and hope and promise a better world. We don’t need an established religion to be both patriots and Christians.

Christians like us are called to bear witness that care of creation, concern for the poor, compassion for the vulnerable, hospitality to the stranger, and justice for the oppressed are not merely matters of civil law, but the ethos of the Kingdom of God and the imitation of Christ. Who else will proclaim that Gospel truth?

It is up to us to tell the truth about a God who breaks out of heaven and joins beloved creatures in the messy mystery of creation itself.

●      A God who wears flesh and blood to show us what being fully human looks like.

●      A God who comes among us to heal and to help; to feed and forgive; to make us holy and whole and home with God and with each other.

●      A God who will be present in suffering and dying to show us what love really means.

●      A God who breaks free of death to show us what life really means.

●      We are here to hold our broken nation before God’s altar, praying for healing and forgiveness and reconciliation for all of us.

●      We rehearse the God-stories that free us and forgive us and feed us and ask us to do the same for others.

●      We will sign our declaration of Dependence with a piece of bread and a cup of wine –

●      a pledge of allegiance to the Sovereignty of God, and the Lordship of the Christ.

We hold these truths to be self-evident.