On Tuesday, are you heading downtown for the fireworks? Nashville will use 200 miles of wire, 16 tractor trailer beds, and 4 barges in order to shoot 40,000 pounds of fireworks into the sky as the Nashville Symphony plays patriotic flare. Maybe you plan to get to the main stage early and do a little two-stepping as Brad Paisley sings “American Saturday Night”?

 Yeah, she’s goin’ round the world tonight, but she ain’t leavin’ here.

She’s just going to meet her boyfriend down at the street fair.

It’s a French kiss, Italian ice, Margaritas in the moonlight.

It’s just another American, just another American,

and it’s just another American Saturday night.

My son and daughter-in-law enjoying the Nashville Fourth a few years ago

 Now perhaps Paisley’s hit does not soar to the rhetorical heights of Dr. King’s “Letter from A Birmingham Jail”, but it borrows some of King’s sentiments, and you can dance to it! King preaches, “Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with narrow provincial ‘outside agitator’ ideas. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider.” (adapted) 

Unlike the lofty liturgical sympathy found in Genesis 1, the second account of Creation is more like a country song: God as a farmer in muck boots. With muddy hands, God bends low and shapes humanity from the clay. God comes so close as to breathe the Holy Spirit right into us. God then plants a garden for us, an Eden with no work, only gathering the fruits of creation and foraging wild plants. In the Genesis 3 Fall story, humanity inevitably misuses creation and Eden disappears. Only after our “environmental” sin does God command us to toil the earth earning our bread by the sweat of our brow. Work was not part of God’s original plan! The image of God planting the earth reminds us to take care of the land and each other.

When I was a child, the 4th of July was simple, fun, and carefree. Fresh-picked blackberries in a cobbler, Uncle Bud’s cheeseburgers, sparklers in the backyard with cousins, watermelon, and fireworks. As I have grown older, pride and appreciation of where we come from, remembering our roots, or celebrating one’s ancestry has become a complicated matter.  

I love Wendell Berry’s poem To a Siberian Woodsman (after looking at some pictures in a magazine).  

I sit in the shade of the trees of the land I was born in.

         As they are native I am native, and I hold to this place as carefully as they hold to it. 

I do not see the national flag flying from the staff of the Sycamore, 

or any decree of the government written on the leaves of the Walnut, 

nor has the Elm bowed before monuments or sworn the oath of Allegiance. 

They have not declared to whom they stand in welcome.* 

*Used with permission from “The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry”. Counterpoint Press:  counterpointpress.com

Who owns the land, whose ancestors hold claims to it, who had land taken from whom, who is due what from labor stolen by slavery or red-lining? These questions deeply matter but hold an almost disabling complexity.  Such complex social issues require a sense of the common good, honest dialogue, and hard thinking that our current politics seem to lack.   

I know some folks think the church should stay out of politics. Jesus’ “law” to love our neighbors as we love ourselves leads me away from Christian Nationalism and towards the separation of church and state. However, the Bible is a political book.  We see politics in these long boring law passages! In Leviticus 25, the Hebrew people laid out a 50-year legislative cycle to return land to poor people. Imagine trying to get that through Congress! I am not a legalist, I reject the implicit slavery in our text, so I do not feel bound to this ancient Jubilee law. However, our passage reminds us that God’s people must care for the land, the poor, the disposed, and all immigrants. The passage reminds those stepping into the Promised Land that they were once disposed immigrants, something we seem to forget once we taste power.  

The Lord said to Moses on Mount Sinai, “Tell the people, ‘When you enter the land that I am giving you, let the land celebrate a Sabbath rest to the Lord. Plant your fields, prune your vineyards, and gather crops for six years, but the seventh year let the land take a Sabbath rest, a Sabbath to the Lord. You must not plant, prune or harvest! Whatever the land produces during its Sabbath will be your food—for you, foreign guests, and your livestock.’” That is a radical “big government” Farm Bill! 

Farm bills and all policy is very complex. Oversimplifications from pulpits do not usually build the blessed community or even always foster justice. So let’s listen, not as legalists or absolutists, but for the heart of the law with open hearts and minds as the Lord speaks through Moses, “The land must not be permanently sold because the land is mine. You are just immigrants and foreign guests of mine. (We are all foreign workers on God’s land.) When someone faces financial difficulty and must sell part of their family property…  (it) will remain in the possession of the buyer until the Jubilee year. After 50 years, the land will be released in the Jubilee year, at which point it will return to the family.” Did you hear the principle? Did you hear God calling us to protect the land’s original occupants? The moral law always seeks to protect the poor from the powerful. (“You cannot serve God and wealth.” Luke 16; James 2)   

On Tuesday, if you start humming, “O beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain, for purple mountain majesties, above the fruited plain! America! America! God shed God’s grace on thee…”  Celebrate, but not without reflection and a restless prayer. “America! America! God mend thine every flaw…” We are all immigrants on God’s land, called to take care of the land and each other.

As we celebrate, remember Moses speaking for God, “You all are just immigrants and foreign guests of mine.” We all belong to each other. We can’t escape each other, we go around the world every night in the cars we drive, the technology we use, even the meals we enjoy. The Sycamore flies no flag. We are caught in an inescapable web of mutuality tied to a single garment of destiny.  So on Tuesday, celebrate the good things: blackberry cobbler, cousins, Sycamore trees, jury trials, a free press, and the right to petition and protest. Remember your roots, our story, all people, and remember the deeper call of God, “You all are just immigrants and foreign guests of mine.” Amen.