“Thou shalt fear the LORD thy God; him shalt thou serve, and to him shalt thou cleave, and swear by his name. He is thy praise, and he is thy God, that hath done for thee these great and terrible things, which thine eyes have seen” (Deuteronomy 10:20-21).
These words were originally spoken by Moses to the Israel of the Old Testament. They were his “Farewell Address” to the people that he had served so long. The Israelites had come out of slavery in Egypt, and they were about to enter the Promised Land. God had done, indeed, many “great and terrible things” for them: great miracles of both mercy and warfare to set them free. God had fought for them against Pharaoh and against other enemies when they were too weak to fight. God had given them victories when they should have been defeated. God had made them a people, not by their efforts, but by his efforts.
The fear that the Israelites owed God, then, was both the respect that is rightly owed to an eternal and perfectly righteous Power and the love that is reasonably due to such a Power when he condescends to be both a Champion and a Father. The very least speck of gratitude, intelligence, or common sense ought to be enough to compel any person or group of persons so aided by the Almighty God to serve him, cling to him, obey him, and to “swear by his Name”—that is, to use his Name as the highest warrant of truth and justice.
We read these words of Moses today, then, appointed in the American prayer book for Independence Day, because it is our intention to apply them to ourselves and to our own nation. We read them because we wish to express our understanding that we exist as a free nation, as the United States of America, because of God’s loving intervention into history. Early or late, we or our ancestors came to this place as nomads, adventurers, or castaways and now we are a people, and now we share a home. We are a force in this world, like it or not, and because of all that God has given us, we share the duties and responsibilities that accompany that divine favor and calling.
Thus, in this morning’s Collect, we pray that God will “Grant…that we and all the people of this land may have grace to maintain [our] liberties in righteousness and peace”. We must remember our tradition. We are not just “a church.” We are, in fact, an American Church, a household of the One Body of Jesus Christ that has been given a home and an identity here in America, by the will of God. Likewise, then, behind this petition lie two other absolute facts. The first fact is that no nation can stand apart from the grace of God and be a good nation, a nation worthy of human love, let alone responsive to the love of God. The second fact is that the Founders of our nation understood the perpetual need for the grace of God’s righteousness if they were going to build a nation in particular that was neither a madhouse, nor a penitentiary, nor a colony of hell.
But why speculate about the intentions of the American Founders, or wonder whether they were men that understood this nation’s obligation to God, when we can hear George Washington himself admonish the future generations of his countrymen in his own “Farewell Address” at the end of his presidency:
“Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens. The mere politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them. A volume could not trace all their connections with private and public felicity. Let it simply be asked: Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice? And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle” (Washington’s “Farewell Address”).
Washington treats the notion that we hear expressed so often today that it is possible to be moral without God as the merest sort of “supposition” or “theory,” of the sort that only the un-realistic and careless can find the time to “indulge.” He considers the oaths that we swear in the conduct of justice and our courts as binding before God, who is their ultimate enforcer, and as the “security” for property, reputation, and life itself. Imagine his scorn if he were told that man might as well lie under oath since “everybody does it”—everybody, that is, but free men and free women in a nation that lives “under God.”
Washington declares that only a fool, immune to “reason and experience,” would expect that a nation without God can remain free of the enslaving madness of self-indulgence, free of the fear that transforms nations into prisons and tyrannies for the sake of mere physical survival, and free of the evil that can make an earthly nation a foretaste of hell. And he is quite right. Only fools believed in a godless nation when he spoke, and only fools believe today that America can survive without God.
We Christians possess a distinct office in our nation. God is already King of all, and he cannot be made more so. Rather, it is our calling to be faithful—to remind our neighbors, both by our personal lives and by our civic lives, that God remains King no matter what system of government human beings choose for themselves, no matter what they vote for or tolerate at the polls. God cannot be voted out of office; the courts cannot strip him of his majesty or revoke his commandments; and a unanimous vote of the people cannot make evil good or good evil.
In all the turmoil of this world, as our young citizens are called upon again and again to bring peace and justice to captive nations, even as others make sport or politics out of the blood that they shed sharing the blessings that we often take too lightly, one thing is sure: God loves this nation. Our history is not a series of “lucky breaks”—our history is the presence of God with us. God was there with the Congress in Philadelphia when it adopted the Declaration of Independence. God was with the Continental Army in the bleak winters and on the battlefields. God has been with us countless times, not just here at home, but all over the world on pieces of land that have no value other than the blood that was shed there or the men that are buried there. God has made us rich and strong, not to be the masters of the world, but to be benefactors in his Name—that mankind may see our good works and glorify our Father in heaven.
No nation, however, has a blank check from God to do as it wills. The Israel to which Moses spoke ignored the inspired wisdom that he offered, it departed from the praise and fear of God, it sinned, and it ceased to be, except as scattered remnants haunting history. The nation to which George Washington spoke, echoing the words of Moses, is just as capable of self-destruction, and it appears at times that we may have strayed so far from God that there is no hope for us. But despair is a lie and a tool of the devil. Any nation, just as much as any person, can always turn to the Lord God for mercy and healing. Any nation can turn to God to be restored to its right mind and to its best and most honorable estate under the divine governance.
The United States, for which we thank God this morning, can easily be, with the grace of God’s righteousness, greater and more admirable than it has ever been, even in the best days of the past. The United States can have true peace, as long as we remember that peace is not “an absence of conflict,” but a right relation with the God of all peace. We can have peace with God and peace with each other only by seeking God’s kingdom and God’s righteousness first, and then all things needed for greatness will be added unto us. Let us serve God, cleave to God, and praise God; and God will bless our nation; and we will love her all the more because she lives, now and always, in God’s power.