CELEBRATING AMERICA AT 250 YEARS

CELEBRATING AMERICA AT 250 YEARS

Fr. Luke A. Veronis

This weekend our nation celebrates Independence Day, and this year carries special significance as we mark the 250th birthday of the United States of America. It is an important moment to reflect upon our country, our history, and our identity as American Orthodox Christians.

How should we celebrate this auspices anniversary?

I think it’s helpful to answer this by first looking honestly at ourselves. In our lives as Orthodox Christians, we hold together two seemingly contradictory truths. On the one hand, we see ourselves as beloved children of God. We know that each of us are created in His image and likeness. This means that within us lies an unlimited divine potential. We can become holy. We can become saints. We can be united to God, participating in His very life because each of us is an icon of Christ.

On the other hand, we also know that we are sinners. We have turned away from God countless times. We are icons of Christ that have become distorted and broken. The image of God within has been covered by our passions, our ego, our selfishness, our pride, and our countless sins.

And so, every Orthodox Christian live with this holy paradox. I know I am a beloved child of God, and I know I am also the first among sinners in need of continual repentance. The saints understood this well. The closer they drew near to God, the more they recognized both God's infinite love and their own sinfulness and need of continual repentance.

This is the spiritual lens through which I want us to think about and celebrate our country today. Let us celebrate America’s 250^th birthday not with arrogant patriotic pride and triumphalism, as well as not with ignoring our past sins and failures. Instead, let us look honestly at our nation with deep gratitude and celebration, together with sincere humility and repentance.

Let’s begin with gratitude, because gratitude is surely due. This country has represented something remarkable in the history of the world It has been, at its best, a land of freedom and democracy in an age when most of humanity lived under the boot of tyrants and kings. It has been a land where creativity is not stifled but set loose, with people dreaming something into being that did not exist before. It has been, again and again, a land of opportunity, opening its arms to immigrants and strangers in every generation, offering them not a guarantee, but a chance - the chance to build something better for themselves and for their children.

We are the country carved with the words of Emma Lazarus at the base of the Statue of Liberty in New York harbor - words that promised the world we would welcome “the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Millions of people, including many of our own grandparents and great-grandparents, came through those waters clutching little more than a suitcase and a prayer, and this country gave them a place to stand and hope. I think of my own Greek immigrant grandparents who arrived here with nothing other than their faith in God and hope for a better future. They worked hard, sacrificed, built families, established churches, passed on the treasure of faith, and created opportunities that they could scarcely have imagined in their homelands.

So today, let us give thanks, real, unhesitating thanks, to Almighty God for the blessings He has poured out on this nation and on us through it.

But - and here is where the paradox comes in - we must be careful. We must be very careful not to let that gratitude curdle into arrogance. We must be careful never to believe in what is sometimes called “American exceptionalism” - the idea that we are somehow above the moral history of every other nation, that our sins don't count the way other nations' sins count, and that God has loved us more than any other nation.

Because America, like every nation on earth, is a human nation. And human nations, like human souls, are icons that get smudged. We do not have to search hard for the smudges. We know them. There is the genocide and displacement of the native peoples who were here long before any ship reached these shores. There are the centuries of slavery — human beings bought and sold and beaten, made in the image of God and treated as property, and then the ongoing racism that has mistreated countless people. There is the killing of innocent children in the violence of the womb. There is the destruction our wars have brought upon other peoples, sometimes for just cause and sometimes not. And there is the flood of a certain kind of Hollywood morality - a gospel of consumption, self-indulgence, sexual immorality, and senseless entertainment - that we have exported to the entire world, tempting and reshaping the desires of billions of people.

If we are honest about our own personal sins, and we must be, every time we stand in this church, then we must be equally honest about our national ones. This is not unpatriotic. This is not disloyalty. This is exactly what the holy prophets of Israel did for their own beloved nation, the people of God, again and again. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos loved their people fiercely, and it was precisely because they loved them that they refused to flatter them. They called the nation of Israel to repentance because a nation, like a person, cannot be healed of a wound it refuses to acknowledge and name.

So how do we hold this all together? How do we celebrate 250 years of a country we love while also confessing 250 years of sin? The same way we hold together our own lives every time we come to the Sacrament of Confession: with sobriety, with honesty, and even with joy. Sobriety, because we refuse to get drunk on our own false mythology. Honesty, because love that cannot face the truth is not love but vanity. And joy, because in Christ, confession is never the end of the story. It is always the doorway to healing.

God bless America, and let us mean it not as a slogan, but as an actual prayer for our nation that, like each of us, still needs blessing, still needs mercy, still needs to turn back toward the Lord every day.

This brings me to one final aspect of our celebration today – the gift of freedom. What does it actually mean to actually be free?

We celebrate freedom as a great American virtue. Yet Saint Paul gives us a vision of freedom that cuts against how the world usually understands it. The Great Apostle writes to the Christians in Corinth, “You were bought with a price; do not become slaves of men” and yet, astonishingly, in the very same letter, he calls himself a slave of Christ. He even says that those who are called in freedom are called precisely so that they might become “slaves to righteousness,” slaves to Christ.

That sounds like a contradiction until we understand what freedom truly implies. The world tells us freedom means the absence of any master, for us to do whatever we want, to answer to no one, and to follow every appetite wherever it leads. Yet, this isn’t freedom. This is slavery to our own passions, which never stop demanding more. True freedom, Christian freedom, is not the absence of a master but finding the right Master. When we give ourselves freely to Christ - when we become, as Saint Paul says, His slaves, His servants, His own - we discover, paradoxically, that this is the only bondage that truly sets us free. Because Jesus’ yoke is easy and His burden is light.

So, this is the freedom worth celebrating. Let’s not celebrate the freedom to do whatever we please but the freedom to become who we were truly created to be: icons of God, restored and shining, beloved children living lives of humility, love, and service. That is the freedom our founders could point toward but never fully define because it is not a political freedom at all but a freedom only Christ can give.

Let me close, on this remarkable anniversary, with this prayer:

Lord Almighty, the Giver of life, we entrust the United States of America into Your loving care. We remember Your words, "Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord." You are the rock upon which every nation should establish its foundation. You alone are the true source of our cherished rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Send Your Holy Spirit to enlighten the hearts of our nation's leaders and all its people. Help us to live lives of humility, love, and service to others, constantly repenting for our sins while seeking to follow Your commandments. Remind us how our nation was founded on the adage, "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free," and inspire us to respect every human being, for all are created in Your image and likeness. May we treat every person in this country with dignity, respect, and love. Remind us that true happiness is rooted in seeking and fulfilling Your will, not in the pursuit of material riches or superficial pleasures. And as much as we love our country, let us never forget that our ultimate loyalty lies in You alone.

Through the intercession of Your Holy Mother, the Blessed Theotokos, with all the saints of America, Saints Innocent, Herman, Juvenaly, and Olga of Alaska, Peter the Aleut, St John Maximovitch, St Alexis Toth, St. Raphael of Brooklyn, and Elder Ephraim of Arizona, have mercy on us and save us. Amen.