What, To the Unborn, Is the Fourth of July?

Tomorrow is July 4th, a day on which, we, as earthly citizens of this nation, celebrate the blessings of liberty and freedom. With our cookouts and fireworks and patriotic songs, we remember the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and its famous words: 

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

America has always had a complicated relationship to that paragraph. One thinks of the words of Frederick Douglass in his famous oration on July 5, 1852. After commending the founding fathers as great men of genius and bravery, and after acknowledging the fourth of July as a worthy anniversary for a nation to celebrate, he asks his audience, 

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham…a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.

Over one hundred years later, this sentiment was echoed by Martin Luther King, Jr. in his American Dream speech on July 4, 1965. There he extolled the amazing universalism of that passage from the Declaration before noting that “ever since the Founding Fathers of our nation dreamed this dream, America has been something of a schizophrenic personality.” “Slavery and segregation,” he said, “have been strange paradoxes in a nation founded on the principle that all men are created equal.”

And, of course, we could say similar things about the fundamental issue of justice in our day: the denial of the right to life to the unborn. Like Douglass, we might ask, “What, to the unborn, is the fourth of July?” Like King, we might say, “legalized abortion is a strange paradox in a nation founded on the principle that the right to life is unalienable.”

So, given that complexity, how should we, as Christians, celebrate the fourth of July? 

First, be grateful to live in a nation whose founding documents say true things about reality. We are created. We have a Creator. He is the source of our rights, including the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This is a worthy inheritance, and it is good to be grateful.

Second, be grieved that this nation falls so far short, not only of its ideals, but of God’s laws. Whether we’re talking about the murder of unborn children that is still legal in many states (including Minnesota), or the ungodly celebration of all manner of sexual immorality and insanity, or the pride, envy, and hatred that infect our body politic, or the stubborn refusal to acknowledge God as God and give thanks, it is good to be grieved by the ungodliness of this nation.

Finally, be hopeful about God’s mercy and justice in this nation. Don’t grow weary in doing good. On this side of the downfall of Roe v. Wade, let us renew our efforts to advocate for the unborn, to persuade our neighbors that at conception, a new unique human being is wondrously created, that every human being has the right to life, and that this right ought to be secured in law. 

Let us continue the good work of building a culture of life, through receiving our own children as blessings in Jesus’s name, through encouraging and supporting foster care and adoption in our church and community, and through funding and volunteering at crisis pregnancy centers. And let us continue this good work in the face of opposition and hostility and slander, and let us face that opposition and hostility and slander with gospel-grounded joy because God is for us.

And so, Cities Church, on this fourth of July, be grateful, be grieved, and be hopeful. 

This reminds us of our need to confess our sins.

Confession

Our Father and God, we confess that we have unclean lips, and we dwell amidst a people of unclean lips. Our lips are unclean because our practice does not match our profession. Our boasted liberty is in reality an unholy license; our national greatness is swelling vanity; our shouts of liberty and equality are hollow mockery; our prayers and hymns with all our religious parade are mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy. We have demanded our rights, and then trampled the rights of the weakest and most vulnerable. Father, we confess that this is a great evil. 

Father, as your people, we too have despised the least of these. We have not always received our own children as the gifts that they are. We have sought our own ease and comfort at the expense of others’ good. We have sinned with our bodies and with the bodies of other people. We have been haughty and proud, and there is no health in us. Forgive us, we pray, in your great mercy.

We know that if we in the church regard sin in our own hearts, our prayers will be ineffectual, so we confess our individual sins to you now. 

Father, your mercy is our only hope. It’s the only hope for our nation. It’s the only hope for this state. It’s the only hope for these cities. It’s the only hope for this church. And it’s the only hope for every person in this room. And so how good it is that you, Father, are the God of mercies. We plead that mercy in Jesus’s name, and ask that you forgive our sins, create in us a clean heart, and renew a right spirit within us. In the name of Jesus we pray, Amen.