I preached this sermon on Sunday, July 5, 2026 at St. Anne Episcopal Church, West Chester, OH on the weekend of the sesquicentennial of the United States. The lectionary texts cited are Zechariah 9:9-12 and Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30.
We talk a lot about love here on Sundays. But this weekend, for obvious reasons, I’m thinking about love of country and how we might honestly, faithfully talk about it.
When I was young, the 4th of July was my favorite holiday. I spent the summers in upper Michigan, and for the 4th we’d always go up to Marquette, on Lake Superior, where my aunt & cousin lived. We’d scramble for candy at the parade and then go to the annual international food festival right on the lakeshore, and we’d eat Ojibwe Fry Bread and spaghetti and Chinese food and snow cones and everything else you can think of as the fireworks bathed us in their star-spangled light.
I loved the 4th back then because it was easy, and joyful, and, as a kid who hadn’t learned much of our country’s layered history, it was supremely uncomplicated. Just sparklers and warm July sunshine and the sense that this home of ours is a good and generous place.
That was many years ago now, and a lot has happened since then. These days, I know that the 4th of July lands a bit differently for some people. Not just because of contemporary politics, but because many of us have spent time wrestling with that complex history of ours.
We’ve been listening more closely, in recent years, to all of the American stories: those of women, and of our indigenous neighbors, and our Black and Latino and Asian neighbors, and our LGBTQ+ neighbors, and our disabled neighbors, and our non-Christian neighbors, and all the other perspectives that didn’t always make the first round of the history books.
That diversity was, of course, already part of the story–as hinted at by that international food festival on an American holiday–but now we are attempting to give those stories their full due. And we do this not in order to betray or dilute the American dream, as some might think, but as a fulfillment of that dream’s original intent: to be a nation, not of uniformity or self-congratulation, but one that is constantly in the process of becoming more fully itself. Constantly striving to live up to its own best hopes.
This is not easy work. And it’s not what I grasped as a naive little boy watching fireworks explode in the night sky. But, a quarter of a millennia on as a country, it is indeed still the work we have been given to do.
And, to make matters even more complex, you and I, of course, do this work not only as citizens or residents of the U.S., but as followers of Jesus. So we are constantly navigating the ways that these two identities—citizen and disciple—both overlap and are in tension with each other.
To this end, in The Episcopal Church, we have an odd relationship with the 4th of July. You may notice, if you look through the Prayer Book, that Independence Day is noted as a major feast on our liturgical calendar—a legacy of our historical roots in the Church of England where faith and government were more closely intertwined.
And yet most of us have been formed as citizens who value a clear separation between church and state. So this is a tricky path to navigate. We are asked to pray for our country, and to engage actively in the pursuit of its welfare, even as we are taught that our ultimate allegiance is to the God whose love and blessing and concern are not constrained by any national border.
There’s a lesson here. We are being invited to love our country without worshipping it. We are being called to love our country not because it is perfect, or singularly chosen by God, or unassailable in its history, but simply because it is the place where we have found ourselves knit together as one beautiful, messy, diverse assembly, forging a path toward our shared horizon. That alone makes it worthy of love.
But we are reminded in Scripture, time and again, that love and idolatry are not the same thing, and that true love—including for our country— embraces complexity, and prophetic criticism, and grief, and beauty, and lament. We are, like the prophet Zechariah says today, “prisoners of hope” for this land of ours—we struggle, and yet we dream.
I did not know this as a kid eating a snow cone. But now I know that, unless we can look up at those 4th of July fireworks with both joy in our hearts and tears in our eyes…with some peculiar and potent mixture of gratitude and longing in our hearts…until then, perhaps we have not fully learned how to engage this particular holiday as people of faith.
I would also offfer, though, that while some of us may feel deep discomfort with contemporary trends to conflate Christian identity and civic identity, it would be a mistake for us to totally separate them either. If you ask me, we should not remove the 4th of July from our Prayer Book just because it makes some folks uncomfortable. We should not pretend that our faith has no bearing on public life and how we engage as citizens. It does.
God has always had a perspective on the social and political challenges of our times. Listen to those prophets. Listen to the Psalms. Listen to Jesus.
Come to me, Jesus says in today’s Gospel. Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, 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. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.
We’ve heard these words many times before, but often we might receive them as a personal invitation to be consoled by God. I was struck this week, though, with the 4th of July approaching, by how similar Jesus’ words are to those from the verse by the poet Emma Lazarus which is affixed to the Statue of Liberty: Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
Emma Lazarus was a Jewish poet, and I don’t know that she was drawing from the Gospels in her writing, but nonetheless the resemblance suggests something: that Jesus’ own words of rest and refuge are a social vision, not just a personal consolation. And so, if we are pondering how to navigate the narrow way between faith and patriotism, perhaps we should begin by trying to build a society that reflects the true values of our Lord: hospitality, charity, mercy, humility, concern for the least and the lost.
Perhaps we should remember that Jesus invitation was especially for the burdened and beleaguered of his own time—people longing for liberation and safety and peace. And he was not just giving them a pat on the head and promising things will be ok once they die and go to heaven. He was saying, let’s start to live now like heaven is here on earth. Let’s create a new sort of home where everyone—everyone—has space to heal, to live, to thrive, to be, and to become.
That vision, that notion of a true home, which we call the Kingdom of God, is not exclusive to the United States of America, but it should take root here, too. And so those who claim to follow Jesus in this country of ours, if they do anything, should be doing all they can to make that vision a reality, through peacemaking, and trust-building, and justice-seeking for all of our neighbors. All of them.
In essence, if we could spend a little less time arguing over whether this is a “Christian nation” and just go about the work of actually being like Christ to one another in this nation—then, perhaps, we would finally see what Jesus was getting at. Maybe we would all find our rest, together.
It has been many years since I sat on that Lake Superior shore and felt like the world around me was uncomplicated. I miss those days. But now that I am grown, I still love the 4th of July. Matt and I went to see the Cincinnati Pops last night and we sang along to all the good old songs and I looked up in wonder at those fireworks. I still love this country.
It’s just that now I try to love it in the way that Jesus taught me to love things: not as an idol, but as a work in progress. With space for its complexity, and forgiveness for its failures, and hope in its promises.
We are still prisoners of hope for this homeland of ours. We struggle and yet we dream. But I refuse to give up on it, even if we still have a long way to go to reach that horizon line.
And one day, with God’s help, and with true love for this land and for one another in our hearts…maybe we will get there.
By Another Road 