God’s Fourth of July (Sixth Sunday after Pentecost)

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This week, we celebrate the 4^th of July. It’s a time most of us look forward to, as we get a chance to bar-b-que, watch fireworks and enjoy a long weekend (which this year feels like it’ll probably be from this weekend to next weekend before anybody is seriously back in the office!)

But the 4^th of July is also an interesting kind of day for most Americans. On the 4^th of July, many of us pause to:

• recognize how many blessings we have as Americans, which we often take for granted – I have been in countries where the freedom to simply gather together to worship is not something you can take for granted…

• reflect on how far we’ve come, and how many obstacles we’ve overcome as a people – paradoxically, this often involves remembering painful experiences, as we remembered on Juneteenth when we read the Frederick Douglas quote about what the 4^th of July meant to people who were still enslaved but lived in a country where “liberty” and “equality” were the goals; and yet, the ideas of liberty and equality continued and helped us to change, and continue still, to push us forward to a new and better day…

• celebrate how much we really have as Americans – although we have many needy people among us, as a group, we have enormous resources and abilities to meet those needs, and that’s often not the case in other parts of the world…

All of those things are good to remember and celebrate on the 4^th of July. And this is especially because for the most part, on the other 364 days of the year, we spend most of our time and energy telling each other how bad we have it!  Inflation is too high; our political choices are often terrible; and we have all kinds of social issues that seem impossible to fix. All of these things are true as well.  

And so we have a kind of “polarization” of our days. On one day, we feel really blessed. On the others, we feel totally deprived. But it’s often the case that in order to meet legitimate challenges and face problems with courage and hope, you have to focus on the blessings and the opportunities you have.  Otherwise, we end up living in what’s often referred to as “relative depravity”, where tell ourselves that no matter how much we have or think we have, it’s doesn’t feel like it’s enough to meet the challenges ahead…

Americans often suffer from such a feeling of relative depravity, but it’s not just us and it’s not just today. Although the term “relative depravity” didn’t exist in the first century, this is really the problem that Paul is addressing in his letter to the early Christians in Corinth.

Today, the city of Corinth as an archaeological ruin. I’ve been there. But even as a ruin, you can see some of the glory it had in the first century. In fact, it was a major trading hub and was one of the wealthiest cities in the Roman Empire. They had goods and services that were unimagined in many other places.  And of course, they were a free part of the Empire, and not living under occupation as people in Galilee and Judea were. Things were good for them. Indeed, we can tell from Paul’s letters that for many of them, life was great!

But things were not going so well for folks in other parts of the world. There was a famine going on in the middle east, and early Christians in Jerusalem were in particular need.  So Paul took it upon himself to raise funds from all of his congregations to support those folks in need in Jerusalem, and apparently many congregations got involved in helping. So did the Corinthians! Well, at least, at first.

But now, in today’s portion of the letter, the Corinthians were getting cold feet.  They weren’t sure they were going to do this after all. I mean, maybe they didn’t really have enough. What would happen if things got tough for them later on. Yes, they had plenty, but maybe it wasn’t as much as some others. It seems that they suffering from this notion of relative depravity.

And so Paul spends a lot of time (we’ve read only a piece of one of the chapters he devotes to this subject), trying to help the Corinthians see themselves in light of the fourth of July that God had given them in Jesus Christ. And Paul tells the Corinthians that, in order to see themselves in the right way, they need to:

• understand themselves as people who have an abundance from God – Paul says that in Christ, they have been made rich – they’ve been blessed with the promises of eternal life and hope and God’s help each day; this is an actual thing right now, not just in the life to come, and they should remember that…

• desire to use the gifts that God has given them, even their money and other material gifts – being generous, says Paul, is not a product of what you have or don’t have, but of your desire to use what you have…

• act – they can’t just feel grateful, they have to show it by what they do; and this can’t be out of a sense of what they don’t have, but out of a sense of what they DO have (because if you think you don’t have enough, you never do…)

And it’s good that we have this particular reading always near our national 4^th of July holiday, because it’s a good reminder that as Christians, the presence of Jesus in our lives makes everyday a kind of fourth of July for us. That is, we’re called to be people who recognize how blessed we are so that we’re able to have the confidence that Jesus will also be working in us and through us, in spite of the problems and limitations we often face.

And that means that we, also, are called to live into God’s fourth of July in Jesus each day by being living as people who recognize the abundance we have received from God, instead of simply dwelling on the challenges and problems. Living into God’s fourth of July in Jesus means growing in the desire to use those gifts for the work God wants us to do, even if that work is different from what we might have done in previous times. And living into God’s fourth of July in Jesus means being people who act right now with what God has given us, instead of waiting until a better moment.

Amen.