“I thank you,
Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the
wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants…” (Matthew
11:25
I love the Fourth of July. When I was a little
kid, this holiday was always special to my family because my maternal
grandmother, the child of German immigrants, lived with us. She’d been born in
the U.S. on July 4, 1884, so Independence Day at the Griffiths home always involved
a celebration. I seem to remember a picnic meal on the back patio of our Long
Beach, California home. At night our neighbor, Mr. Gallagher, would set off
fireworks for all the kids on our street[i]. Some
of the dearest memories I have were of events on or around the Fourth of July.
This particular Independence Day is pretty
special for us. It’s America’s 250th anniversary. We’ve lasted a
quarter of a millennium, and representative democracy still has a beating heart.
I think that’s kind of special, don’t you?
I’ll confess I’ve had a bit of a hard time
getting my “whoopie!” on this year. My anxiety for America has been crowding
out my enthusiasm for her birthday. There’s this god-awful debacle in the
Middle East. We’re seeing climate disasters throughout our nation which no one
seems to be doing anything to address. And, even if it’s come down a smidge, the
price of gas is still way too high, and a huge chunk of my pay is still going
into the tank of my 2017 Corolla.
Ambivalence, however, has always been with us.
Even when I was a kid watching Mr. Gallagher’s fireworks, the grown-ups were taking
sides over the direction of our nation, just as grown-ups have done since Jesus’
time and before. In our Gospel lesson for Pentecost 6, Year A (Matthew
11:16-19, 25-30), Jesus expresses his own pique with a bunch of folks who’ve
seen the goodness of God with their own eyes but still have to whine and bitch
about something. They criticized John the Baptist. I can just imagine them
saying to each other, “What’s up with this loony-toon preacher? He keeps
telling us to repent and give money to the poor. We’re not made of money! We’re
doing the best we can. Not everyone can live off eating bugs like this guy. And
why’s he always complaining about King Herod? He’s just going to start trouble!”
They weren’t that pleased with Jesus either. Can
you hear them? “Who is this Jesus dude? He’s eating with tax collectors and
sinners! Why, in my day, boy howdy, when a person was ritually impure, they stayed
ritually impure! And nobody healed anyone on the Sabbath. Back then we had rules,
by golly, and we followed them! What’s all this mercy and forgiveness crap? In
the good old days, you pulled yourself up by your sandal straps!”
You get the idea. There are some folks who don’t
like to hear John preach the law or Jesus preach the Gospel. Their happy place
is in the quicksand of their own critical indignation. You may have met people
like this (You may have met some of them in church!).
Jesus tells us in the Gospel that wisdom
sometimes is revealed to children. I think it might be a good idea sometimes to
recapture a bit of childhood wisdom. While watching Mr. Gallagher’s fountain
blast a geyser of multi-colored sparks over Stevely Avenue, I wasn’t thinking
about the war in Vietnam or whether Humphrey or Nixon would be a better
president. I just thought the display looked really cool. The Fourth of July
was America’s birthday party, and birthdays are fun.
Maybe this Independence Weekend I can try to
recapture a little of the joy I felt as a kid. It’s our country’s birthday, and—by
the grace of God—our Republic has lasted another year. Our neighbors are still
our neighbors. Even if we disagree with them, they still love their children
like we do. They still take their trash out to the curb like we do. They still
pay their taxes (we hope!) like we do. And they still might give us a lift if our
car breaks down and we ask them nicely.
We still have hope in the ideas which founded
this wacky experiment in self-governance. Mr. Jefferson—slave holder that he
was—put his quill to parchment and gave us these magnificent words:
“We hold these truth 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.—That to secure these rights, Governments are
instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the
governed.”
However imperfectly this idea has been realized
in our 250-year history, it remains our aspiration, and one worthy of
celebrating.
The Hebrew scripture lesson for Pentecost 6 is
from the prophet Zechariah (Zechariah 9:9-12), a guy who found himself in a
geo-political situation worse than anything we could imagine.[ii]
Nevertheless, ol’ Zech had a child’s ability hope for tomorrow. He could look
beyond the goat rodeo he was experiencing and see a time when peace and humility
would be the order of the day, when a new King would come riding on a baby
donkey. Like the prophet, let’s all keep that childhood dream alive, because
God never stops being good even though we haven’t noticed the goodness. Let’s
look beyond today and rejoice we are still “prisoners of hope.”
God bless America, and God bless you, my friend.
Please come again.
[i]
The firework display was, technically speaking, illegal in Long Beach. Mr. Gallagher
did it for years, and no one ever called the police to my knowledge.
[ii]
Okay. If you’re a Bible nerd, you’ll know that the author of this lesson in
chapter 9 of the book was probably writing about 100 years after the guy who
penned the first eight chapters. Chapter 9 and following are known as “2nd
Zechariah.” I doubt one guy lived long enough to write both parts, and it wasn’t
uncommon for writers to write in the name of their teacher or one who inspired
them.