These are the times that call us to live our lives on purpose as individuals; and if we believe in the right to make our own choices as individuals, the times also demand that we live on purpose as citizens of our local and national communities. In this year’s election process it is imperative that we as citizens seriously explore our nation’s purpose and our personal role in it.
Photo by Angela Kellogg
This is our nation’s 244th birthday. How young we are! And the jury is still out, as Abraham Lincoln said, as to whether “this nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure”. The Republic that has sustained our country is still testing and probably will always be testing whether such a democracy can endure, because, as many of our forefathers wrote, this kind of experiment depends on the moral character of its people. There can never be enough laws enacted or enforcers trained to make a country good.
As we celebrate what we tend to take for granted—our more firmly established nation and its government of the people, by the people, and for the people--we must be aware that freedom is always a fragile thing, balanced on the generous and voluntary agreement of all the free to abandon personal inclinations to selfishness and care for the well-being of others. In so doing we must trust the audacious expectation that others will be caretakers of our basic rights in return. Making the putting of others and the common good ahead of self-interests is a biblical principle. The question is, have we come to value freedom enough that we dare on regular days to risk that freedom to live in this reciprocity, alert to any internal (inside our own hearts) or exterior efforts to threaten it.
The future of freedom as we know and love it depends on our personal and persistent living out in practical ways our commitment to this ideal. It calls us to tell our children the story of how freedom was won as well as discussing our best and worst efforts at living it out in the past, and challenging them to love better and take seriously their responsibility to chisel out their generation’s call to this precious and unique vision.
Photo by Angela Kellogg
My favorite verse of “America the Beautiful” is this:
Oh, beautiful for patriot dreams
That see beyond the years
Thine alabaster cities gleam,
Undimmed by human tears.
There must always be visionaries who, when in even moments of our most disappointing behavior, can see and hold us to a better purpose. When our cities are smoking with disillusioning failure, someone has to still see the potential of precious stone sparkling in the sun. When the wails of despair are rising to the ears of heaven, and tears of the disheartened are flowing, someone has to still believe that there is model to which we can aspire of a city “undimmed by human tears.”
That dream city will not come about by human perfection. It will only be an outgrowth of grace, the awareness that in our worst moments, “God shed his grace on me.” That amazing mercy gives us the right to hope, and demands that we be gracious and merciful to each other in spite of glaring imperfections.
In the next few days many of us will celebrate our free country by roasting hot dogs and wearing our patriotic tee shirts; the community band will play “The Star Spangled Banner”. We will listen to our children’s children sing along, but they will not know unless we tell them that this national anthem is about a wounded and embattled remnant of soldiers, straining to see through the fog and gun smoke whether the tattered remains of the American flag could still be seen flying from the mast of a riddled ship in the harbor. It did! And still flies nearly two and a half centuries later over battlefields and harbors and battered cities where men and women have given their lives and blood so that the rest of us could go on taking care of each other’s right to be.
But there is a deeper, more important foundation for this freedom we protect and enjoy. It is the deep belief that God created every living person with an eternal soul and therefore with infinite and eternal value. It is that eternal value that gives each person essential rights. Our founders believed that these rights were not ours to give, but were “endowed by the Creator” as a gift from God. The right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” is only ours to protect and honor.
In spite of our shortcomings and failures, we can celebrate progress made. Our nation has learned and grown in the trust in its people to do the right thing; when that trust is strained almost to the breaking point, those who follow the Master of love must not abandon that trust but renew our commitment to it.
The belief in basic human value has driven us to fight for justice, not only here, but in places where human rights have been grossly violated. This belief has caused us to use our power to defend the weak and the downtrodden and to preserve the rights of those with whom we disagree. We yet have a long way to go, but we have made progress, and must always work to do so.
In the end, if we lose our belief in God and the eternity of the soul, if we degrade and disregard the sanctity of life itself, not just commercially viable life, but all life, and cease to protect the powerless, we ourselves and our nation will be swallowed up in greed and overtaken from within, disintegrating into an anarchy where only the ones with the biggest weapons survive. We will go the way of ruthless dictatorships of the world, each eventually betrayed and mutinied by an uprising of the disenfranchised.
So in kindness, decency, patience and gentle grace, let freedom ring. May we believe in the value of all and use our powers only and always to protect the weak, the powerless, and those who have yet to enjoy the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. May we never abandon our own personal responsibility to live out our commitment to these ideals by scraping onto the plate of institutions and government the total load of pursuing “liberty and justice for all”. And may God bless not only America, but all peoples who choose right over evil.
