Sermon on July 5, 2020: 5th Sunday after Pentecost
Today, July the 5th, 2020, is the 5th Sunday after Pentecost. At mass, every Sunday and every feast day, we pray a special prayer for the day, and these prayers are known as collects. Today’s collect, which we prayed at the start of mass, reminds us that our Christian vocation is to love God and to love our neighbor, and then it moves us to ask for God’s grace to do both of those things: to love God with our whole heart, and to be “united to one another with pure affection.” It’s a collect that is worth praying every day, because the moral arc of our entire life is determined by our capacity to love God and to love our neighbor, and we cannot do it without the grace of God that is poured into our hearts, like water being poured into a cup.
Today is the 5th Sunday after Pentecost, but it’s also the day after Independence Day, which is listed as a major feast in the Prayer Book’s calendar of holy days. This year, these two days—the 4th of July and the 5th Sunday after Pentecost—are pressed right up against each other. Independence Day has its own collect, of course. It goes like this:
Lord God Almighty, in whose Name the founders of this country won liberty for themselves and for us, and lit the torch of freedom for nations then unborn: Grant that we and all the people of this land may have grace to maintain our liberties in righteousness and peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord ...
The Prayer Book is my favorite book. But it is not a perfect book. Not all of the prayers have aged well. This is one of them. It says that the founders of this nation “won liberty for themselves and for us,” and asks God for the grace to “maintain our liberties.” But we must ask: who is the ‘us’ to whom this prayer refers? They “won liberty for themselves and for us”—but who is the us? Whose are the liberties which are enjoyed? Who does this prayer include, and who does it exclude? Who can pray this prayer, and who can’t?
On July the 4th, 1776, the founders may have laid claim to a liberty and a justice, but it was not a liberty and justice for all. Liberty was not won for the indigenous peoples of this land, nor did it come to the enslaved. It’s hard to imagine an indigenous or enslaved person praying the collect for Independence Day. On July the 5th, 1852—exactly 168 years ago, today—Frederick Douglass gave a speech in Rochester, New York, titled “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” in which he said to his mostly white audience that “this Fourth of July is yours, not mine,” that the “rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me.”
Douglass’s speech is nothing short of extraordinary. In it, he exposes the hypocrisy of a nation that would claim to celebrate liberty and independence while also enslaving its members—approximately one-seventh of its population. His speech is required reading for American Christians, but not merely because it’s an historical document that reveals a past we have left behind. To read it is to see the past in the present. As James Baldwin once observed, “History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history.”
About a month ago, I wrote a letter to the parish in which I said that I was grieved by the complicity of Christianity in the history of racial injustice, and of our collective need to repent of the sin of racism. Some have wondered what I meant by that. The answer is far too large for the space of a sermon, but if we take a moment to listen to our brother in Christ, Frederick Douglass, we will see how it is at work even now. His speech on this day 168 years ago is worth quoting at length. Here is what Douglass says to the church in America:
The church of our country ... regards religion simply as a form of worship, an empty ceremony, and not a vital principle, requiring active benevolence, justice, love and good will towards man. It esteems sacrifice above mercy; psalm-singing above right doing; solemn meetings above practical righteousness. A worship that can be conducted by persons who refuse to give shelter to the houseless, to give bread to the hungry, clothing to the naked, and who enjoin obedience to a law forbidding these acts of mercy, is a curse, not a blessing to mankind.
At the very moment that [the churches] are thanking God for the enjoyment of civil and religious liberty, and for the right to worship God according to the dictates of their own consciences, they are utterly silent in respect to a law which robs religion of its chief significance…
The church of this country is not only indifferent to the wrongs of the slave, it actually takes sides with the oppressors.
Many of its most eloquent Divines, who stand as the very lights of the church, have shamelessly given the sanction of religion and the Bible to the whole slave system.
These ministers make religion a cold and flinty-hearted thing, having neither principles of right action, nor bowels of compassion.
[Theirs is] a religion which favors the rich against the poor; which exalts the proud above the humble; which divides mankind into two classes, tyrants and slaves; which says to the man in chains, “stay there;” and to the oppressor, “oppress on.”
You profess to believe “that, of one blood, God made all nations of men to dwell on the face of all the earth,” and hath commanded all men, everywhere to love one another; yet you notoriously hate ... all men whose skins are not colored like your own.
The existence of slavery in this country brands … your Christianity as a lie.
History is not the past; it is the present. The words of our fellow Christian sound as though they could have been spoken today, if instead of slavery he was speaking of police brutality or mass incarceration. The church he describes sounds like a church that even now remains eerily silent about these injustices, just as it was silent about the Fugitive Slave Law. This is what it means to say that the church is complicit in the present history of racial injustice. And even now, just as then, it’s a complicity of which we the church are invited to repent.
In the language of today’s collect: we are invited to be united to one another with pure affection. We are invited to love our neighbor as our self. And we see the cost of what happens when we do not. We will see that the failure to love our neighbor is itself the failure to love God—even more, we can only love God when we have learned to love our neighbor.
This is a call not only of individuals; it is the call of the whole Body of Christ—not just St. Paul’s Church, not just The Episcopal Church—the whole church. The whole body of faithful people must be the place where our love of neighbor happens. Success or failure is not measured by our own individual efforts, or by whether or not we bear prejudice as individuals, but by whether we bear forth justice as a body. If the whole church has not learned to love our neighbor, then none of us have. And when we don’t, then the church bears a deep wound and a heavy burden, a burden which says that our Christianity is a lie.
It is not a lie. But does the church have the courage to live as though it were true? As if the way of Christ is to grant freedom to the oppressed, to set the prisoners free, to lift up those who are bowed down. As if Christ were the One who gives us rest, if we would only lay our burden down and take up his yoke—which is the yoke of true liberty.
For he is gentle and humble in heart, and we will find rest for our souls. For his yoke is easy, and his burden is light.
Amen.