Sermon: The Sixth Sunday after Pentecost- July 5, 2026

The Rev'd Cecil Patrick Perkins, The Rector 

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May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord our rock and our redeemer. And please do not let these people pitch up pick up pitchforks after what I'm about to say. Amen. Please be seated. I have to talk about the 250th anniversary of the United States, which means there's no way to win, but I can't avoid it. So I'm going to launch right in. We all know that this weekend our country reached a remarkable milestone in its history. For 250 years, the United States of America has lived under the independence first declared by the Continental Congress on the fourth of July in 1776. And over that span of time we have known seasons of extraordinary flourishing and seasons of deep fracture. Moments when we have stood with courage for liberty and moments when we have denied that same liberty to others. Like every nation under heaven, ours is a story marked by both genuine achievement and real moral failure. And yet through it all, three foundational convictions have endured. First, that human beings are created with a dignity that does not originate in government and thus cannot be removed by one. Second, that rights are not granted by kings or legislatures, but recognized as already given by God, and three, that political authority is legitimate only insofar as it is accountable to those it governs. Those convictions have shaped our common life for generations, and my friends, they are worth giving thanks for. But today it is also worth noticing how fragile they now feel. For we are a divided people in a way that goes beyond ordinary disagreement. Now, free societies will always argue sometimes sharply about the direction of public life. But what is troubling in our moment is not disagreement itself, but the growing assumption that disagreement must be rooted in bad faith. We no longer merely think others who think differently than we are mistaken. We immediately begin to believe that they are dangerous. So political identity has hardened into moral identity and moral identity into tribalism. My dear friends, in such a climate, it is understandable that many should long for a clearer foundation, a more unified story, a firmer identity capable of holding us all together. And among Christians in our country, that longing in the last several years has taken often a particular form. That is, the claim that for America to be great again, it must return to being a Christian nation. Now, I have to admit to you, that's an appealing phrase, especially when it is spoken in anxious times. It's appealing because it promises coherence where there is fragmentation and moral clarity where there is confusions. But my friends, we Christians are called morally to test not only what sounds compelling, but what is actually true. And here a careful question must be asked by all thinking Christians. And that is the question, what does it even mean to call America a Christian nation? If by that we mean that America was founded as a constitutionally Christian state, the historical record simply does not support it. I'm sure you all know this. The Declaration of Independence speaks of nature's God, of a creator, and of divine providence to be sure, but these expressions reflect a broadly theistic moral imagination shared by many of the founders and many of the country people who were Jewish or whatever else. They're not particularly Christian. However, if you read the Constitution itself, along with the Articles of Confederation and even the Federalist Papers, they speak in a noticeably different register. For you see, they contain no reference to God or to Jesus Christ whatsoever. They bear no establishment of the Christian faith in law and no confession of religious doctrine. Instead, the Constitution explicitly declares in Article VI that no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under these United States. So, my friends, from its inception, the American Constitutional Order distinguished and separated civil membership from religious confession. That is to say, whatever else the United States was intended to be, it was not constituted by its founders to be a confessionally Christian state. I hope that's not controversial, but I will move on. We as Christians, however, must ask a different and deeper question than the constitutional one, and that is this. Even if a nation were shaped by Christian moral influence, does Scripture itself provide any category for what we are calling a Christian nation? And here the answer is not complicated. There is no such category in Holy Scripture. The Bible knows of only one nation linked to God by a covenant relationship, and that nation is Israel. Plain and simple. But we also have to remember that the coming of Christ brings a decisive transformation even in that. The covenant people of God are no longer identified with a single ethnic group or a political state. Instead, we discover that God forms a new people in Christ, drawn from every nation under heaven. This is why particularly the New Testament applies to the church, language that once belonged uniquely to Israel. Saint Peter writes to scattered believers throughout the ancient world, and he says, You are a chosen race. You are a royal priesthood, and you are a holy nation. My friends, the startling claim of the New Testament is not that any earthly nation has become God's covenant people, but that the church itself, the body of Christ, composed of Jews and of Gentiles together in Christ, is that holy nation. Not Rome, not present-day Israel, not any modern state, the church. And this is not merely a theological detail. It shapes how we understand the way God relates to nations as nations. For I'm here to tell you, and I've read the Bible a few times, Genesis straight back to the maps, nowhere in the New Testament is there a promise that if a political society adopts Christian beliefs or moral norms, that God will thereby enter into covenant with that country and preserve it as a most favored nation. It ain't there. God certainly governs the nations, he raises them up and brings them down according to his providence, and he may bless them or even judge them. But covenant in the strict biblical sense is reserved for a mystical rather than political body, the body of Christ. It is not extended to nation states. And that is to say, baptism, not borders, defines membership in the covenant people of God. Now, I've said all of this, and maybe I poured cold water in a place or two, but understand, I'm not saying this to deny that Christianity has profoundly shaped the United States. I'm saying it rather to clarify what kind of influence we're talking about. Many people these days will admit, insofar as what I've said, so they claim that America was founded upon Christian principles. You hear that one all the time. And I agree. It was founded upon Christian principles, but probably not the ones that you think. In 2026, all of you know this, Christian principles is often used as a code word for traditional views of sexual morality. When you hear Christian principles, you can fill in the blanks and realize that people are talking about sex. Now, as a biblical scholar, this sort of reductionism really worries me. Because Scripture's descriptions and prescriptions concerning sexuality aren't nearly as cut and dry as some would like to believe. Many of you will know that I this week was at my aunt's funeral, and while at that funeral, I had occasion to speak to a double handful of fundamentalist evangelical ministers, which is always a party for an episcopal priest. And in the middle of this, several of them were talking about the principles of biblical marriage. And I always get a little chuckle when I say that you guys who read the Bible literally need to understand that if you read 1 Kings literally, it doesn't place 300 concubines and 700 wives beyond the pale of a definition of biblical marriage. There it is. Now I have to say honestly, poor Solomon, because one Middle Eastern woman is more than enough for any man to deal with. Don't tell her I said that. This morning, however, all fun aside, I'd like to suggest that the primary Christian principles that shaped our nation's founding are far less about sex than about self-awareness. For you see, the framers of our republic shared moral instincts that shaped the way they shaped our nation. And these instincts were profoundly and characteristically Christian. One of those instincts concerns power. American constitutional thought is marked by a suspicion of concentrated authority. You'll know that power in our government is divided, checked, balanced, and restrained. No branch of government is permitted to become absolute. At least incidentally. This is not for them a merely political ingenuity. It relaxs reflects, I should say, a moral intuition about the dangers of our fallen nature. But it also reflects a deeply Christian understanding of human virtue. And that's the biblical virtue that says the strong must limit their own strength for the sake of those without strength. Think about that. Think about our Bill of Rights. What is the bargain basement foundation of the Bill of Rights? It is the majority self-limiting its own power to protect the minority from it. That is what is the basis of our freedom in this country. And that principle is profoundly biblical. The New Testament reveals the same sort of view of power. It reveals that the true shape of authority is not domination, but self-giving. Jesus exemplified that. Paul writes in Philippians 2 that Christ Jesus, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited. But he emptied himself, taking on the form of a servant and humbling himself even to the death on the cross. Friends, that's to say that in Christ power is not grasped, but poured out for the sake of others. This doesn't mean that authority is abolished, but it is redefined as service. Our framers, flawed as they were, understood the Christian principle that true political virtue exists where power refuses to exploit itself, and friends, they wrote that into our foundational documents. Another instinct concerns the treatment of the stranger. In the law of Moses, Israel is repeatedly commanded over and over again throughout the Pentateuch to love the sojourner, and the reason given is always the same. God says, Love the sojourner, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. What a remarkable argument. God is telling Israel to remember its own history as the foundation for its compassion towards others. Memory becomes moral instruction. Because God knows and we ought to know, a people who forget their own times of dependence become harsh towards those who depend upon them. In the American story, for all its complexity and contradiction, there is a similar or should be a similar moral memory at work. We should all remember our long national history of migration, displacement, refuge, and arrival. Now, I want to say something to you if this is making you nervous and making the hairs of your neck stand up and you think here is Patrick being a classic Episcopal priest and preaching the Democratic Party platform. That's not what I'm doing. Christians may and do disagree about the policies that govern immigration and national borders. That's fine. But they cannot escape the biblical insistence that the stranger is never merely a policy category. He is a neighbor bearing the image of God. And just as importantly, this neighbor is in the very same place that either you or your forebears once were. He's a stranger, he's an alien, he's looking for a new home and a new life. A third instinct concerns the idea of belonging itself. One of the most distinctive features of the American experiment is that being an American is not fixed by ancestry alone, but may be received through a process called naturalization. That's a big word, but it's a wonderful word. I've paid for it, so I know exactly what it's about. You this word means that you take something that is foreign and you make it natural. Now, this is different than just giving someone citizenship. What this is, is a legal erasure of any distinction between native born and alien. And in this way, people do not merely arrive and dwell as legal residents in America. What they do is become Americans. This idea, my friends, was unknown in the world prior to the Christian era, and it comes directly from the New Testament. Saint Paul tells the Ephesians that those Gentiles who were once strangers and aliens to Israel are now through Christ fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God. They were naturalized. So again, I say, regardless of your policy preferences on what it should take to become naturalized, you've got to admit that the Christian resonances here are undeniable and powerful. So before I step on any other toes, let me conclude. America never was a Christian nation in the sense that many today want to suggest. Scripture provides us no category for that claim, and history does not support it. But this reality should in no way diminish the American Christians' love for this nation or gratitude to God for it. On the contrary, it very well may deepen it. Because in a very real sense, one of the most Christian instincts shaping the founding of this republic was precisely the refusal to constitute it as a Christian nation. I want you to think about this for a minute. Think about it. How better to preserve the spiritual integrity of the church than to prevent it by law from grasping civil power? How better to honor the command to love one's neighbor than to ensure that no one in this country is forced to seek religious or any other sort of liberty by leaving and going to other shores? And how better to gather the wretched refuse of the world into a single people than by defining in law a shared identity that transcends all other difference, the identity of American. Yes, I will concede to you that our founders had blind spots and failed to carry these ideals to their logical and moral conclusions, but friends, the seeds were there, and the seeds were profoundly Christian. So I close by saying this. If American Christians, be they Democratic or Republican, are truly interested in making America great, I would suggest that the best way forward isn't revisionist history or religionist hegemony. It is our insistence on the Christian virtues of self-sacrifice, love for neighbor, and radical hospitality to those who are different than we are. As Christians, these are not optional political preferences for us. If you're a Christian, it's a moral imperative because it's the shape of discipleship. Now, until Jesus comes back, Christians will continue to disagree often sharply about how these principles are to be embodied in public policy. And that's fine. That's inevitable and necessary. But we can never forget, my friends, that beneath these disagreements lie convictions that are not negotiable for anyone who follows Christ, even if he or she happens to be an American. Amen.