Freedom Won and Freedom Yet Unborn

This Fourth of July marks a remarkable milestone: two hundred fifty years since

the signing of the Declaration of Independence. It is right to celebrate—to gather with neighbors, to fire up the grill, to watch the sky bloom with light, to give thanks for the freedoms we enjoy and to remember those who secured them at great cost. Ours is a good and beautiful country, and gratitude is the fitting response of a faithful heart.

As Christians, though, we celebrate with a particular tone. Our Prayer Book counts Independence Day among the holy days, complete with its own collect and appointed readings. In it we pray that God, “in whose Name the founders of this country won liberty,” would grant us “grace to maintain our liberties in righteousness and peace.” Freedom, we confess, is God’s gift—not our achievement. That single word, maintain, tells the truth about liberty: it is never finished, never simply inherited, but tended in every generation like a garden that would otherwise run to weeds.

It’s a confession that keeps our patriotism honest. We can love this country without mistaking it for the Kingdom of God. The Declaration proclaimed a breathtaking truth—that all are created equal and endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights—and then left it to those who followed to make the words true. For two and a half centuries we have labored, sometimes gloriously and sometimes not, to close the distance between what we profess and how we live. The enslaved, the disenfranchised, the stranger at our gate: our history is in large part the story of an ideal straining against our human inability to honor it fully.

To name that gap is not to disparage our country but to love it well. Scripture teaches us that the truest love does not flatter; the prophets loved Israel enough to call her home. So we give thanks for genuine progress—hard-won and real—while refusing the comfortable story that the work is done. There is still justice to be secured, still neighbors unseen, still a promise of freedom that awaits its fuller keeping.

Here our faith offers a gift the fireworks cannot. Saint Paul reminds the Philippians that “our citizenship is in heaven,” and it is that deeper belonging that frees us to labor for justice here without despair. Because our final hope rests in God and not in any nation, we can face our shortcomings honestly, without cynicism, and press toward our ideals without the fear that everything depends on us. We work, and we trust that God is working still.

So light the fireworks and wave the flag. Celebrate this good land and the two hundred fifty years behind us. Remember always those who continue to honorably serve in the name of freedom for all. And let us also, a people of prayer, ask God to make this country ever more just, more merciful, and more free—until the day when the words we cherish are true for every soul who calls this nation home.

Happy Independence Day.

Scott+