This is
America! When praying, speak any language you wish!
Last month,
when the legendary, neon-extravagant Geno’s Steaks (which is my preferred choice for bistec
con queso) posted signs that Philly
cheesesteaks must be ordered in English, a nerve was touched. While the
President and Congress debated immigration policy, a militarized fence along
the U.S.-Mexican border, and amnesty for undocumented immigrants, the owner of Geno’s, Joey Vento, himself the son of immigrants who
arrived not speaking English, became the chief spokesperson of the view that
coming to America means acculturation, and that means learning and living in
the predominant language. Though threatened with discrimination lawsuits, Vento
brags in classic South Philly style that “business is up, so the signs are
staying up.” Suddenly, I notice that at our local Starbucks tourists insist on ordering their extra-hot, soy
milk with extra foam lattés medium
or large instead of grande or venti.
It’s rather
clever that arch-competitor Pat’s Steaks,
just across the street, is playing the other angle. Tom Francona, the manager
there, said, “We’re serve everybody here. It doesn’t matter if you speak
English or any language. If you need help getting through a cheese steak
order, we’ll help you. All you need is $7.”
Maybe I should
go there. I have lived in Philly for seven years, and I still can’t order a
cheesesteak, in English.
In our common
consciousness, America is always asking, who are we? What is our identity?
Our Book of Common Prayer puts it well, in a prayer written near the founding
of this nation: God has “fashioned us into one united people brought hither
out of many kindreds and tongues.” But we always are struggling with how much
we can remain kindred, or how much we must become common. And who defines the
common American experience? Is it language, or can we keep the various tongues
from which we have been brought hither. And, what brings us hither?
These are
important questions, but I am always a bit leery when the answer suggests that
some kindred or tongue already here is preferred over those who have yet to
come. I know I am being a bit idealistic, but for the vast majority of us, we
don’t need to go too far back in the family tree until we find immigrant
forbears, who sought out this land to be fashioned, as the prayer suggests,
into a united people. Even within the our complex history—that slavery
was a forced and cruel immigration and that those Americans already native were
soon reserved away—we are a land of immigrants, and many of us can trace
our family’s arrival to this land.
And, if the
original native peoples of these lands had the same immigration policies that
are being proposed today, I wouldn’t be here. I doubt if the first Puritans
could’ve made it past an electric fence, and no one on the Mayflower was ever
called “those people from down there,” or “illegal immigrants,” so I vote for
dropping that description right now.
We are called
to know our history, and American history is complex, often exhilarating,
sometimes tragic, hopeful, pessimistic, promising and troubling. I always say
for America to find its future we must know the entirety of our past, and that
is no small task.
On Independence
Day weekend, we try to understand who we are in terms of our founding. As we
gather in this historic church and remember that people like you and me had
front row seats, and played important roles on July 4, 1776. “No other church
has played a more important role in our Nation’s birth,” David McCullough has
said. As we gather to thank and praise God, I suspect many of us use this
weekend to ponder who we are as a nation, and where we come from. Not
narcistic atavism, we seek an identity for ourselves as citizens in the very
historical DNA of our ancestors.
In his new
book, Revolutionary Characters, Gordon
Wood asks, “No other major nation honors its past historical characters,
especially characters who existed two centuries ago, in quite the manner we
Americans do…. Why should this be so?” And Wood answers, “…the interest in
the revolutionary generation has to do with an American sense of identity. The
identities of other nations, say, being French or German, are lost in the mists
of time and usually taken for granted…. But Americans became a nation in 1776,
and thus, in order to know who we are, we need to know who our founders are.
The United States was founded on a set of beliefs and not, as were other
nations, on a common ethnicity, language, or religion…. As long as the
Republic endures…Americans are destined to look back to its founding.”
Yes, to look
back on our founding is to look back on our founders, but you and I gather
today to give thanks that God Almighty is one of our founders. Religious folks
in the United States, for better—but sometimes for worse—have
always understood God as a part of our history, evident in our history, and a
part of our future history, too.
I recently read
Nathaniel Philbrick’s Mayflower, a
rather good book telling the history, good and bad, of the 104 English Puritan
pilgrims who established the Plymouth Colony. Why did they choose to risk
their future by crossing the Atlantic? I am impressed that the drive to cross
the Atlantic was so strong that even pregnant women boarded the creaky
Mayflower. The sailed to escape religious persecution, so goes our school
lessons, but life wasn’t so difficult in Leiden, Holland, where the community
lived after first escaping England. In an important parallel to the
immigration debates raging today, the Puritans, if Philbrick has this right,
became concerned that their children were assimilating into Dutch culture. “The
congregation had rejected the Church of England , but the vast majority of its
members were still proudly, even defiantly, English,” Philbrick writes. They
believed they needed virgin territory, their own land in which they could
create their own peculiar culture, and live by their own specific laws. And
they believed that God was at the center of this discernment to sail.
Philbrick writes: “…All arguments for and against emigrating to America ended
with the conviction that God wanted them to go.”
Beginning with
those Pilgrims in 1620, through the signing of the of the Declaration of
Independence in 1776, so much of European American history was understood as a
re-enactment of the Israelites fleeing Egypt from the oppression of Pharaoh and
escaping through the parting of the Red Sea. In the very spiritual DNA of my
Puritan ancestors, passed down from the first Pilgrims, is the notion that
America is the new wilderness that perfects God’s people, the new Promised
Land, always seeking perfection.
On July 4,
1776, the other order of business in the Continental Congress was to appoint
the committee that would design and strike the new seal of the United States.
Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin were both selected, and they proposed a
seal, later rejected, that showed Moses leading the Israelites through the Red
Sea waters into the wilderness, on the way to the Promised Land. On the seal,
Pharaoh was devoured by the Red Sea.
From the
Pilgrims to the Founders, they understood the nascent American nation as the
new Israel crossing the Red Sea, escaping the tyranny of the new Pharaoh—the
English Kings. The new nation was a fulfillment of God’s long mission to
destroy tyranny and give liberty. It is no accident that George Washington was
often called the “American Moses,” leading the new people into a new promised
land.
But to be a new
Israel in a new promised land is not to make the birth of the nation a
destination, but a stop on the journey to perfection. To take seriously the
notion of Divine Providence in the founding of our nation is to commit
ourselves, as Christian keepers of that hope, to the very call to perfection
that Jesus gives from the Sermon on the Mount. Here is our reading today from
the Sermon on the Mount:
Jesus said,
"You have heard that it was said, `You shall love your neighbor and hate
your enemy.' But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who
persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he
makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous
and on the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you
have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your
brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the
Gentiles do the same? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is
perfect."
This church has
observed the Fourth of July since 1785, and it is always of interest to me that
the wisdom of the Episcopal Church over these centuries is that Jesus’ words to
love one’s enemy, and be perfect in righteousness are to be read on this
Sunday.
The task of the
Christian and Citizen is to take quite seriously Jesus’ admonition from the
Sermon on the Mount: “Be perfect, therefore, as your God in heaven is perfect.”
My daughters sing a song no doubt taught to boost self-esteem, “I’m not
perfect, and I know I never will be.” That’s fine, I suppose, and I grew up
with the mantra, “Nobody’s perfect!” but the glory that is the United States of
America, at least as understood by those who strive to be Christian first and
Citizen still, is that our Covenant with Almighty God is that we seek
perfection for ourselves within our civil society, seeking a level of virtue
that serves selflessly the public good as that same virtue honors God not only
with our lips but with our lives. Our prayerbook refers to such virtue as
honorable industry, sound learning, and pure manners. If we, as Citizen and
Christian, cease the pursuit of such virtue, our nation, to which we have
plighted our troth of earthly security and sustenance, then ceases its own
witness as promised land, land of the hopeful and free, and shores where the
tyrant has no sway.
Simply put, we
who are Christian and Citizen take to the utmost that we are a people who are
made by, and live by, a creed. We are all God’s children, created in God’s
image, and to love God, and to be redeemed by God’s love, we are set free, even
in our fallen nature, to live into the glory of God’s creation and possibility.
That is our religious creed, and on this day we celebrate the translation of
those religious sentiments from the specific religious or Christian creed into
a secular one built on religious sense and sensibility: We hold these truths
to be self-evident, that all human beings are created equal to pursue life,
liberty and happiness.
The Christian
and Citizen knows that July 4, 1776 was a beginning and not an end. Dr. King
thundered in Washington in the summer of 1963, “I have a dream that one day our
nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed.” That one day
is still to come if we strive to perfect ourselves, as God in heaven is
perfect, through service to the common good. We cannot be a people content
with cheesesteaks and lattes, as if these were birthrights, definitions of what
it means to be an American, a creed unto itself. No, we must strive to be
perfect, on global warming, on domestic violence, on famine, on AIDS, on access
to medical care, on literacy, on Darfur, on Iraq, on Iran, on North Korea, on
development in Old City, on schools, crimes, drugs, living wage, affordable
housing in Philadelphia, on the protection of our borders, and on the care of
those who seek to cross them, and on those who live there wondering what their
lives will be. We must strive for perfection on the health of our children,
and the world we are leaving them. The list goes on an on. As Christian and
Citizen, you are also male and female, straight and gay, Democrat and
Republican, black, white, red, yellow, brown, and every hue in between in the
rainbow of God’s image; you are richer or poorer, in conditions better and
worse, in sickness or in health, so no doubt your solutions to the myriad of
challenges before you are as varied as the pluralism you represent. But the
call to service, to virture, to charity, to love, to self-offering, to
peacemaking, to healing—simply to the perfection that Christ call us—is
irrevocable in the call God has given us is allowing us, by Providence, to
inhabit this small parcel of the earth in this particular time.