For Wilshire Baptist Church
Sunday in church we sang the hymn, “My Country ’Tis of Thee,” in advance of Independence Day, which lands on Thursday this week. We sing it just once each year at Wilshire, but there is a message in the text that should have some year-round implications.
I believe I’m correct in calling it a hymn because it is in our hymnal, and because it has a strong church lineage: the words were written by the Rev. Samuel Francis Smith in 1831 while a student at Andover Theological Seminary and at the prompting of Lowell Mason, a well-known organist and church-music composer.
Still, we mostly sing it in secular settings — community and school functions, for example — and we typically sing just the first familiar verse. The effect is flag-waving national pride as we come to the hopeful last line: “Let freedom ring.”
But when we sing a hymn at Wilshire, we sing every verse, and on Sunday we sang every verse of this hymn. And that’s important because while the first three verses evoke national pride, wave the banner of liberty and paint images of spectacular natural beauty, the fourth verse identifies who is the source of all this glorious greatness and liberty we enjoy: “Our fathers’ God to Thee, Author of liberty, to Thee we sing.”
And there is the truth of the hymn: God is the “author of liberty.” It’s not Thomas Jefferson; it’s not George Washington, Abraham Lincoln or any of our favorite presidents. It’s not a religious leader; not a pope, evangelist or megachurch preacher. It’s not activists or advocates; not the NRA or the ACLU, not the RNC or the DNC. The author of our liberty and all liberty is God.
Too often down through the ages and in the relatively brief history of our nation, too many people have claimed authorship of liberty through their policies and practices, and too often they have gotten it wrong. They have turned liberty into a commodity. They have packaged it with instructions and warning labels and put a price tag on it. Not for themselves, of course, but for everyone else. In doing so, these so-called “authors” are committing plagiarism of the worst kind.
God’s liberty isn’t for some and not for others. It isn’t a club membership that must be bought or earned. God’s liberty is free, and God’s freedom is meant to be liberating.
Liberty should transcend politics, but it’s through politics that we organize our civic values and our goals for ourselves and each other. And liberty has taken a beating as of late with our political systems polarized to the point of nobody agreeing about much of anything.
When we sang the hymn in church Sunday, I noticed the American flag near one door and the Christian flag near another. That’s a fine and proper way to begin the week leading up to our most American of holidays. Next Sunday or the one after that both flags will be stowed away for another year. That’s fine and proper too, because we still will worship the one true God who is the one true author of liberty. And perhaps if we can honestly embrace that fact, “Let freedom ring” will become more than just a July 4thsentiment.