Liberty in Righteousness and Peace

But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you… that ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. St. Matthew v. 44–45

Beloved in Christ, we keep this day a feast that is not in the Kalendar of the universal Church, and could not be, for it belongs to one nation among the nations; yet the Church of our fathers judged it fitting, in the year 1928 and after, to set apart a collect, a lesson, and a gospel for its keeping, and so to fold even our civil liberties into the household of faith. We do not gather this morning to worship a nation. We gather to bring a nation, and our own share in it, before the altar of the God who alone disposes the destinies of peoples — and to ask, in the very words appointed, that what our fathers won we may have grace to keep, and to keep rightly.

I.  Of the Mighty Power That Won Our Fathers' Liberty

Mark well how the collect opens: not "our fathers, by their own strength and counsel, won their liberties," but through whose mighty power our fathers won their liberties of old. The verb of the sentence belongs to God before it belongs to men. This is not a polite pause of piety before the true business of civic memory; it is the entire theological claim of the day. Whatever human courage, whatever hardship, whatever cost of blood and treasure attended the winning of American liberty — and none of it is to be despised or forgotten — the collect will not let us say that liberty was self-made. It was won through a mighty power not our own, as Israel's liberty from the house of bondage was the Lord's doing and not the fruit of Israel's own strength, though Israel's feet walked out of Egypt on their own legs.

This is the first lesson of the day, and it governs all that follows: a liberty that forgets its Giver very quickly begins to suppose it is its own possession, to be spent as its possessors please. But a liberty that is received as gift carries with it, of its very nature, an accounting to the One who gave it. That is why the collect does not end in thanksgiving. It moves at once from gift to grace: grant, we beseech thee, that we and all the people of this land may have grace to maintain these liberties in righteousness and peace. The verb "maintain" tells us that liberty, once won, is not thereafter secure by inertia. It must be kept, daily, as a thing still dependent on the same mighty power that first gave it; and it must be kept toward two particular ends, which the collect names for us and which the Lesson and Gospel go on to unfold: righteousness, and peace.

II.  Of the Fatherless, the Widow, and the Stranger

The Church might have appointed for this day any number of Old Testament texts celebrating deliverance — the crossing of the Red Sea, the song of Miriam, the entry into the land of promise. She appointed instead a passage that begins gloriously and ends, quite deliberately, on the ground: the Lord your God is God of gods, and Lord of lords, a great God, a mighty, and a terrible, which regardeth not persons, nor taketh reward: he doth execute the judgment of the fatherless and widow, and loveth the stranger, in giving him food and raiment. The greatness of God is not left in the heavens; it comes to rest, in the very next clause, upon the fatherless, the widow, and the stranger — the three classes of person in the ancient world who had no power to compel justice for themselves, and who therefore stood as the truest test of whether a people's righteousness was more than a word.

A liberty is proved righteous not by how it treats those who can reward it, but by how it treats those who cannot.

Moses does not stop at description; he draws the plain inference for Israel: love ye therefore the stranger: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt. The argument is not sentimental but historical — you know what it is to be without standing in another man's country, therefore let that memory instruct your justice now that you have a country of your own. This, beloved, is the "righteousness" of our collect, and it will not let American liberty rest content with being merely powerful, or merely prosperous, or merely old. A liberty is proved righteous not by how it treats those who can reward it, but by how it treats those who cannot — the fatherless, the widow, the stranger among us still. To maintain our liberties in righteousness is, at the least, to keep asking Moses's question of ourselves: do our laws and our common life still love the stranger, remembering that we too were strangers once, in one bondage or another, before grace made us free?

III.  Of the Peace That Liberty Must Keep

If the Lesson sets the standard of righteousness, the Gospel sets the standard of peace, and it is the harder of the two. Our Lord does not say, in this passage, "love your countrymen," nor even "love your neighbor" — that commandment he has already granted his hearers know. He goes further: love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you. A nation's liberty, won as ours was won, by a quarrel and a war and a long train of grievances against an adversary, stands under a particular temptation: to let the memory of old enemies harden into a permanent posture of the soul, so that peace is mistaken for mere victory, and righteousness for mere vindication.

But our Lord grounds the commandment not in strategy but in likeness to God: that ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. The peace our collect asks us to maintain is not the mere absence of war between nations, valuable as that is; it is this deeper peace, modeled on the impartial kindness of the Father, which refuses to let any liberty — even a liberty rightly won — curdle into contempt for those who once opposed it, or who oppose it still. Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect, says our Lord at the last, and the word he uses means not sinless perfection but completeness, wholeness, a love that has reached its full extent and left no one outside it. That is the peace this day asks us to maintain: a completeness of charity that our merely civic patriotism, left to itself, would never think to attempt.

A peace modeled on the sun and the rain does not ask first who has earned it.

IV.  Conclusion — The Two Hundred and Fiftieth Year

We stand, this Fourth of July, at the farther edge of two hundred and fifty years from the fathers whom our collect names, and it is fitting on such an anniversary to ask not merely what they won but what has become of it in our keeping. The answer the Church puts into our mouths is neither boastful nor despairing; it is a petition. We do not know, of ourselves, whether we have kept these liberties in righteousness toward the fatherless, the widow, and the stranger among us, nor whether we have kept them in the peace that loves even the enemy; we know only that grace to do either is not manufactured by anniversaries, but asked, and given, by the same mighty power that won the liberty in the first place.

Let us then keep this feast neither as an act of national self-worship nor as an occasion for its opposite, but as what the Prayer Book always intended it to be: a votive Mass, offered under vow, in which a Christian people brings its civil inheritance to the altar and asks that it be sanctified — kept, this next quarter-millennium and however much longer the Lord shall grant, in righteousness toward the powerless, and in peace toward the enemy, until that liberty finds its true end in the perfect freedom of the sons of God.