Sunday, July 5, Sixth Sunday after Pentecost
“The Nation God Has Blessed”
Scripture Readings: Psalm 33:12-22; Isaiah 40:6-8; 1 Peter 1:22-25; Matthew 11:25-30
A Hymn Setting for Divine Service III, with Holy Communion
Hymns: “We Praise You, O God” #785; “God Bless Our Native Land” #965; “America, the Beautiful”; “God Bless America”; “Before You, Lord, We Bow” #966
Dear Friends in Christ,
Grace, mercy, and peace you, from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.
We read this morning from Isaiah chapter 40:
A voice says, “Cry out.” And I said, “What shall I cry?” “All people are like grass, and all their faithfulness is like the flowers of the field. The grass withers and the flowers fall,
because the breath of the Lord blows on them. Surely the people are grass. The grass withers and the flowers fall,but the word of our God endures forever.”
As we celebrate the 250th birthday of this country we love, these words from prophet Isaiah serve to remind us that nothing lasts forever, and how impermanent and temporary all things are. Scriptures tell us, “God rules over the nations,” and it is He alone that “raises up nations and puts them down again.” That means, you who are Christians and also patriots, that our survival as a nation for the last 250 years has been by the grace of God alone; and for as long as we last into the future, that will also be only by the grace of God.
To paraphrase Mr. Lincoln, why should “this nation or any nation long endure?” Why would God choose to raise up one nation, and bring another down again? The truth is, it has nothing to do with the nations themselves, or with God favoring one nation over another, much as we’d like to think so in our case. God raises up nations (including this one) solely for the purpose of making His name known in the world, so that people, to paraphrase St. Paul, will be free “to seek Him and perhaps find Him, though He isn’t far from any one of us.”
Our United States of America has been blessed, over these many years, because our system of government has been designed to honor the “inalienable rights” all human beings have to speak openly, worship freely, and follow God as their conscience directs them. For any poor soul who’s had to live in this world under a dictatorial or oppressive government, the difference isn’t hard to see. There’s a reason people want to come and live here.
God isn’t overly concerned with the nuts and bolts of human governments, or with declarations or constitutions or man-made laws, or with any of the particular ways any nation may choose to order itself. What He does care about is that His people are free to know Him and worship Him. That is why He sent Jesus into the world; not to be an earthly king or establish an earthly government, but to bring the whole world back to God. “For God so loved the world…” That is His purpose in establishing earthly governments, and also in bringing them down again.
That is why, under the system of government we’ve been blessed to live under here in America, the Church can’t be the government, and the government (God forbid!) can’t be the Church. We Christians are called to do our best to be good citizens, to obey the laws of the land, and to be patriots and support our nation however we’re able – but our God and our obedience to Him always has to come first. Whenever it should it come down to obedience to one or the other, “We must obey God rather than men” is the rule we have to follow,
God’s Church isn’t here to be the government, but to be the voice of conscience that keeps our nation and leaders and government on a righteous path. That means we Christians can happily join in the Independence Day celebrations, and honor our nation’s heritage, and be proud of our country; but it also means calling attention to our national sins – and especially to those things that might keep the people of our nation from knowing the true God.
Calvin Coolidge was, in my opinion, one of our greatest presidents. He was a man of God, a Christian, and unashamedly and openly so. He wasn’t loud or pushy or bombastic or given to making long speeches; “Silent Cal,” they called him. But that meant that when he did choose to say something, what he said was worth listening to. Mr. Coolidge may have been a man of few words, but when he did speak, he could be very eloquent, and what he said had impact and meaning. (Some of today’s politicians could take a lesson from that!)
President Coolidge was privileged to speak on the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, on July 5, 1926, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, one hundred years ago today. I’d like to share with you just a portion of what he said that day:
In its main features the Declaration of Independence is a great spiritual document. It is a declaration not of material but of spiritual conceptions. Equality, liberty, popular sovereignty, the rights of man – these are not elements which we can see and touch. They are ideals. They have their source and their roots in the religious convictions. They belong to the unseen world. Unless the faith of the American people in these religious convictions is to endure, the principles of our Declaration will perish. We cannot continue to enjoy the result if we neglect and abandon the cause.
We are too prone to overlook another conclusion. Governments do not make ideals, but ideals make governments. This is both historically and logically true. Of course the government can help to sustain ideals and can create institutions through which they can be the better observed, but their source by their very nature is in the people. The people have to bear their own responsibilities. There is no method by which that burden can be shifted to the government. It is not the enactment, but the observance of laws, that creates the character of a nation.
About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning cannot be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction cannot lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.
No other theory is adequate to explain or comprehend the Declaration of Independence. It is the product of the spiritual insight of the people. We live in an age of science and of abounding accumulation of material things. These did not create our Declaration. Our Declaration created them. The things of the spirit come first. Unless we cling to that, all our material prosperity, overwhelming though it may appear, will turn to a barren scepter in our grasp. If we are to maintain the great heritage which has been bequeathed to us, we must be like-minded as the fathers who created it. We must not sink into a pagan materialism. We must cultivate the reverence which they had for the things that are holy. We must follow the spiritual and moral leadership which they showed.
Amen, Mr. Coolidge! Amen! Those words are as true now as the day they were spoken. I don’t know how many more years we’ll be able to exist as a free republic, or be privileged to enjoy the blessings that go along with living in this good place. I do know that the devil and tyrants and dictators of every sort have been trying to destroy God’s Church for over 2000 years; yet while “the nations totter and kingdoms fall” – the Church Jesus Christ has given us goes on, here in this place and around the world.
Prophet Zechariah said to the people of Israel that they were “prisoners of hope.” And the same is true of us, here today in our United States of America. Optimism and hope for our future has always been our ethos, part of our national consciousness. We Americans are by nature optimistic people. We can’t help but hang on to our hope that tomorrow will be brighter and our future will be better, and blessed, and good, for us and for our children -- because we know that God has promise as much, so long as we hold on to our faith in Him. To be “prisoners of hope” means we have no choice but to keep begging God for His help in preserving the freedom we have in this place, for the sake of our families, our loved ones, and those who will follow after us.
If those precious values of God, family, and country are going to survive in this place, our generation is going to have to pray for them, and fight for them when we have to, like all the generations before us had to do. There are those among us who see the Declaration and our Constitution as outdated, and as old, outmoded ideas that should be tossed aside for “something else” (though I shudder to think what they have in mind for what that ‘something else’ might be.) There are those who claim that our Holy Bible, and our Christian Churches, and our faith in Christ, are standing in the way of what they call “progress”, and that we should either abandon the Word of God for the wisdom of men, or be pushed aside.
They’re terribly mistaken, of course; and I don’t know about you, but I find myself getting awfully tired of hearing all that nonsense. We’re all going to have to pray very hard not to give in to anger, or to be baited into playing that game of throwing angry words into the muddle of the political arguments. “Silent Cal” had it right; what’s needed isn’t trading angry words for angry words, but words that are thought out, and Spirit-given, and gently spoken. “Speaking the truth in love” is what St. Paul called that.
Jesus says in today’s Gospel, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.” Our rest is in our faith in Christ, and in the hope His cross and resurrection have given us. Our peace is in our Sunday worship; and the grace we need is found in blessed baptismal water, and in the body and blood of Jesus, given to us for the forgiveness of our sin. Lord, where else can we go? You alone have the words of eternal life.
“The grass withers and the flowers fall,” prophet Isaiah says. Kingdoms fall and nations tremble. God raises up, and God puts down again, as He sees good, fit, and necessary; blessed be His Name forever either way. May God continue to grant us peace and hope and rest in all the good years yet to come.
Father in Heaven, in Your mercy keep our nation strong, and our people faithful to You. Where we have been in the wrong in Your eyes, O Lord, rebuke, correct, and forgive. Where we are godly, faithful, and in the right, may You continue to bless us with good. May God bless America, and the thousands of Christian Churches that still dot our landscape from sea to sea. Good Father, keep us always in Your grace, until You bring us all to heaven at last. In Jesus’ name; Amen.
Rev. Larry Sheppard, M.Div.
Trinity Lutheran Church, LCMS, Packwaukee, WI
St. John’s Lutheran Church, LCMS, Oxford, WI
pastorshepp@gmail.com