God Has Blessed America

A sermon for Sunday, July 5, 2020

Would you pray with me?

God whose love dwells within all creation, thank you for gathering us together. Make your presence known among us. And may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable to you, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

I will ask your forgiveness at the beginning of this sermon, because I will speak first as a citizen of the United States and not first as a Christian. I have to admit, I’ve cried more than once this week singing along with “America the Beautiful.” They have been deep, cleansing tears, tears that come from a place of love and longing. This hymn has grown dearer to me throughout each of my nearly 32 years as a citizen of these United States of America. In recent years, the choruses of each verse have become the prayer of my heart for my country. “America! America! God mend thine every flaw… May God thy gold refine… God shed His grace on thee and crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea!”

God, I love the land I live on. It is gorgeous here. What astounding beauty our country is built upon! My soul is stirred by our mountains and soothed by our oceans. This land is full of soaring trees and rolling plains, rushing rivers and creek beds full of life. I am astonished by our cities and I feel at home in our towns. I am amazed and grateful that this is my home.

Yesterday, we celebrated Independence Day, and I had been longing for the promise of that day, the promise of freedom, for a long time. I long for a time when we truly “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.” Knowing “that to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

“Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government.”

And yet, these former colonies have continued to struggle, even today, to live up to the ideals presented in the Declaration of Independence, whose signing we celebrated yesterday. We have struggled to be the America that we dream of being, the America that our hymns sing about. We have struggled to form a government that secures life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all. We have the vision of liberty and justice for all, but that vision remains out of reach.

In a way, our struggle to be America is much like our individual struggle to be Christians, to be as Christ-like as we long to be. We are like Paul in our epistle reading from Romans this morning. We know what is good and yet it is not the good we want to do but the evil we do not want to do that we do.

Still, Jesus calls our struggle blessed. He says, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.” Our hearts are in the right place. I truly believe that. I believe that each of you, listening this morning, is one of the ones that Jesus calls blessed here. I believe that there are many in the United States who are blessed in this way. We hunger, we thirst for the goodness of God to be spread all around us, throughout this land that we love and within all of the people who live here with us. I do believe our founders hear the prophetic cry of freedom and took to revolution because of it.

And I do believe that those who hunger and thirst for righteousness will be filled.

But I also know that we’re not there yet.

And that’s what makes this moment in the United States such a frustrating and frightening time. We are on the precipice of something more like the kingdom of God. We’ve gone through an apocalypse, and I don’t mean to throw that word around lightly. Apocalypse comes the Greek word meaning uncover. I think a great uncovering has happened for many of us in the United States in the past few months. We have seen how vulnerable so many in our country are in times of sickness and unemployment. We have seen how the deep hurts of our history have followed us to today, from slaughter of people who the Declaration of Independence called “merciless Indian savages” to the compromise of counting Black enslaved people as three-fifths of a human. We are seeing, maybe more clearly than we have ever have before, how deep our hunger and thirst for righteousness is, and how much work is ahead of us before we’ll be filled.

But I trust that we will be filled. I trust Jesus when he tells us that the poor in spirit, the lost and downtrodden, are blessed with the kingdom of heaven. I trust Jesus when he tells us that those who mourn will be comforted, that the meek are blessed, that the merciful are blessed, that the pure in heart will see God, that peacemakers, the ones who seek the true, full peace of God, which is not an absence of tension but the presence of justice, that peacemakers will be called children of God.

My friends, my fellow children of God, I believe that we are blessed with these blessings Jesus gives out in the Sermon on the Mount, but I think we all know that these are uncomfortable blessings. They are the uncomfortable blessings for those who know what goodness is but find themselves unable to do all that goodness asks of us. They are the blessings of those who grow through struggling toward something better, toward a world that looks more like the kingdom of heaven. May we all keep in our hearts the vision of what America can be as we go through these coming months. May we all count these uncomfortable blessings as our own, knowing that God is working good in us and through us with these blessings.

I invite you to let the words of Langston Hughes in Let America Be America Again work on you this day. He casts for us a vision of what America can be, but is not yet. So let me send you to his words with this benediction, “A non-traditional Blessing,” popularly adapted from a prayer written by Sister Anna Rose Ruhland:

My friends, may God bless each of us and all of us with discomfort at easy answers, half-truths, and superficial relationships, so that we may live deep within our hearts.

May God bless us with anger at injustice, oppression, and exploitation of people, so that we may work for justice, freedom, and peace.

May God bless us with tears to shed for those who suffer from pain, rejection, hunger, and war, so that we may reach out our hands to comfort them and turn their pain into joy.

And may God bless us with enough foolishness to believe that we can make a difference in this world, so that we can do what others claim cannot be done, to bring justice and kindness to all our children and the poor.

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.