Sermons

“What then, to any of us, is the Fourth of July?”

This past Friday, you and I were meant to engage in the habitual grilling and flag-waving… and maybe doom-scrolling and fear-mongering. But really, what is this 4th of July? As one DC resident and famous abolitionist might have put it; What then, to any of us, is the 4th of July?

Frederick Douglass gave a prophetic speech on July 4th, 1852. It is powerful; it is of the past, but it is now. What do we make of his critiques? He brings up the hypocrisy of the nation, the ways in which we create laws, and our sense of legality out of inherited, unjust tradition. He notes that what isn’t actually up for debate is the fundamental humanity of Black people. But he draws us to simmer in the hypocrisy and irony of that very fact. That we will deny citizenship and liberty to so many others. And in denying citizenship to others, the nation is forced to engage in a game of dishonest rhetoric.

Frederick Douglass, the great nineteenth-century Black abolitionist, channeled Isaiah to
expose this hypocrisy. His most famous speech, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of
July?” is shot through with biblical passages, including Isaiah 1:11: “What to me is the
multitude of your sacrifices? says the LORD…” Douglass shows us something crucial for this moment: that accurately naming injustice isn’t unpatriotic—it’s prophetic. The most faithful response to a beloved but broken nation is to tell the truth about how we got here, to expose the systems that persist, and to chart a different path forward. Just as Isaiah did for Israel, just as Jesus did in the Sermon on the Mount.

Frederick Douglass writes: “Is it not astonishing that while we are plowing, planting, and reaping, using all kinds of mechanical tools, erecting houses, constructing bridges, building ships… reading, writing, and ciphering, acting as clerks, merchants, and secretaries, having among us lawyers, doctors, ministers, poets, authors, editors, orators, and teachers… living in
families as husbands, wives, and children, and above all, confessing and worshiping the
Christian God… We are called upon to prove that we are men. Would you have me argue that man is entitled to Liberty? You have already declared it. Must I argue the wrongfulness of
slavery?

What then remains to be argued? Is it that slavery is not divine, that God did not establish it? There is blasphemy in the thought. That, which is inhuman, cannot be divine.” This speech wasn’t given to enemies—it was spoken to the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society, to an audience primed to agree with him. It’s about the Northerners who congratulate themselves for not being slaveowners while nevertheless enabling slavery in the South through complicity in the Fugitive Slave Act.

When Frederick Douglass channeled Isaiah to condemn slavery, he showed us that religion compartmentalized from politics—religion that tries to serve God without serving the oppressed—is not Christianity at all. Isaiah’s message is that what happens in the house of worship is inseparable from what happens in the streets. The temple is no sanctuary from political
responsibility.

What Douglass understood—and what we must understand—is that this isn’t just about
political hypocrisy. This is about theological anthropology: what does it mean to be
made in the image of God? When we use Christianity to justify exclusion, we’re not just
being hypocritical—we’re committing heresy. We’re preaching a different gospel. Now, some of you may be thinking: That’s history, that’s slavery, that’s the 1800s. But what Douglass was exposing—the use of Christianity to justify cruelty—has much older roots than we think. And those roots are flowering again right now in our Congress, in our courts, in our communities.

This would seem obscure, except that we were forced to spend weeks hearing public debate about the deserving versus undeserving poor. Medicaid. Which we all protested for. Or watched go down the drain. Scratch the surface just a little bit, and you get back to the repeated old American tropes: who is deserving and undeserving?

So much of America and our polarizing rhetoric is around deserving and undeserving. Making a habit and idol of binaries, good or evil, in or out, man or woman, gay or straight, black or white, deserving or undeserving. This isn’t new, beloved. This cruelty has ancient roots, and knowing the legal precedent matters.

When Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries in the 1530s, he created England’s first refugee crisis. The monasteries had been the primary social safety net, feeding roughly 5% of England’s population daily. In one stroke, the destitute were left without refuge. Elizabeth I’s government responded with the Poor Relief Act of 1601—revolutionary at the time, the first government to accept legal responsibility for aiding its poor citizens.

But here’s where the legal architecture of exclusion began. The same law created rigid categories: the able-bodied, the “impotent poor,” and children. Parish leaders were
given discretionary power to determine who fit where. The fatal innovation was
embedding the distinction between “worthy” and “unworthy” poor directly into statutory
law.

Then came the Settlement Laws of 1662. You could only receive aid in your parish of
legal “settlement.” But authorities could “examine” anyone who might become dependent and forcibly “remove” them before they established legal residence. The law created “settlement certificates”—essentially internal passports that poor people had to carry to prove their right to be somewhere. Sound familiar?

But here’s the detail that should chill every Christian to the bone: Under the “contract system,” parishes could auction poor people to the lowest bidder. Families were separated. Children as young as seven were bound out as apprentices until age 24. It essentially legalized indentured servitude—all while maintaining the fiction of Christian charity.

If you’ve been horrified by lawmakers who invoke Jesus while crafting policies that separate families, who quote Scripture while denying healthcare, this is where it comes from. The same theological malpractice: using Christianity to justify the systematic abandonment of the vulnerable while maintaining the fiction of charity.

The Pilgrims brought these laws to America. Massachusetts adopted them in 1639.
Virginia followed in 1646. This is the direct legal ancestor of today’s Medicaid residency requirements, the congressional debates over who “deserves” healthcare, and the legal frameworks that allow ICE to separate families.

Here’s the Anglican connection that should compel our action: The Church of England became complicit in a system that used theology to justify abandoning the poor.

And here we are again. Five hundred years later, we are watching elected officials invoke Christianity to defend policies that separate families, deny healthcare, and make legal strangers of our neighbors. The English Poor Laws reveal how a society can simultaneously accept responsibility for its most vulnerable while creating an elaborate legal system to deny that responsibility.

So the question for us is not just moral but legal and historical: Are we building a nation that expands the circle of care, or one that perfects the legal architecture of exclusion?

Because Jesus never asked about settlement certificates when he healed. He never required proof of parish membership when he fed the multitudes. Yet we have inherited systems that make legal strangers of our neighbors and turn mercy into a bureaucratic privilege rather than a Gospel right. The legal precedent for exclusion is ancient. But so is our Anglican tradition of resistance to it.

So what do we do? We go back to Jesus himself. We go back to the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus gives us the most radical vision of community ever articulated—a vision that dismantles every system of deserving and undeserving, every legal architecture of exclusion.

The Gospel: Matthew 5:43

The Law, even God’s Law handed to Moses, must be engaged and re-interpreted in light of contemporary realities. Jesus’ own teaching is an example of this struggle. In this passage, Jesus extends love towards the “enemy.”  Jesus has an alternative strategy for dealing with evil. His objective is to make a new habit of overcoming evil with good, to overcome humiliation and shaming by those in power.

His teaching stems from a theological conviction that since God provides good things for the just and the unjust, so must God’s followers treat others with consistent love. Listen to what Jesus is really saying: The rain falls on everyone. The sun shines on everyone. God’s love isn’t rationed based on worthiness, residency, documentation, or any human category we create. And if that’s true of God, it must be true of us.

This isn’t just nice theology—this is revolutionary politics. Jesus is dismantling the entire
apparatus of deserving and undeserving that we’ve been perfecting for centuries. The
fundamental organizing principle of the Kingdom of God is radical inclusion, not righteous exclusion.

This is why Christology matters: if Jesus is truly the revelation of God’s character, then God’s fundamental nature is radical inclusion. Every system that creates “worthy” and “unworthy” categories is quite literally anti-Christ, against the very nature of God revealed in Jesus.

The Trinity gives us the theological framework for this work: The Father who creates all people in the divine image—no exceptions, no documentation required. The Son who became incarnate specifically among the excluded and marginalized. The Holy Spirit who empowers communities to live as foretastes of the Kingdom. When we practice radical inclusion, we’re participating in the perichoretic love of the Trinity.

Living a New Habit of Hope

Here’s the hope that Douglass knew, that the Birmingham teenagers knew, that every generation of faithful resisters has known. When enough people start living by Jesus’s radical vision instead of the world’s cramped categories, everything changes. Small acts of faithful love, multiplied across enough people, create unstoppable transformation. Research shows it takes 66 days for a new behavior to become automatic and feel natural.

“Love Thy Neighbor: 62 Days of Small Faithfulness”

Many of you are exhausted by the news, discouraged by politics, and wondering if your faith
matters in this moment. Today, I want to suggest that feeling “maladjusted” to injustice
isn’t a problem to solve—it’s a calling to answer.

The Challenge: So I’m asking you to try something this summer. Not to save the world. Not to solve politics. Just to love your neighbor for 62 days and see what happens. Because transformation begins not with grand gestures but with daily faithfulness.

Notice Your Neighbors – Make eye contact and greet three people you don’t know.

Listen to Your Neighbors – Have one real conversation with someone whose story you don’t know.
Serve Your Neighbors – Choose one concrete way to meet a need in your community.

Advocate with Your Neighbors – Join or support one local effort for justice.

“When you listen to the folks in the chains, there is freedom.” The neighbors we’re
called to love include those our society has marginalized—and in loving them, we find
our own liberation. What, then, to any of us is this Fourth of July?

It’s a choice.

Do we choose Douglass’s path of prophetic truth-telling? Do we choose Jesus’s radical vision of community over the world’s legal architectures of exclusion? Or do we choose comfort, complicity, the ease of not seeing?

The future of this American project—whether it becomes the beloved community or perfects the art of exclusion—depends on what we choose to do in the next 62 days, and every day until the Kingdom comes.

Because truths are louder than lies. Light defeats darkness. And love—Jesus’s love, Douglass’s love, the love that refuses to abandon anyone—that love will outlast every threat, every injustice, every attempt to make legal strangers of our neighbors.

This is our moment. This is our calling. This is our Fourth of July.

Amen