A Word from Fr. Chip about Liberty

The fourth of July is one of the few holiday’s my family actually celebrated together when I was growing up. Sparklers and snappers, grilled burgers and dogs, time outside with my siblings, and then fireworks that evening. It was a time of special happiness that I remember fondly and now with some reservation.

We celebrate the Fourth of July as a nation because we know that our rights and civil liberties had to be fought for and should not be taken for granted. Our country only exists because some people believed what others did not; that humans should be recognized in themselves as having all of the necessary qualities to be respected and live a life of dignity.

This pure sentiment was corrupted from the outset by the enslavement of other human beings, their freedom denied them for greed’s sake. Our nation thrived on the economy created by those atrocities. The celebration of freedom and pursuit of happiness in light of that threatens to ring hollow.

In all my time as a student of history I’ve found a strange assumption has begun to creep into modern popular thinking about the past, both as Christians and as citizens, that our forebears accomplished work that actually takes generation after generation. A misplaced belief that the work is done, rather than passed to us to continue.

We can see this clearly in how crystalized some doctrines have become in the Church. It’s easier to take what others have said as Gospel. We’re not helpless in this respect and we can turn to face the wind pushing us along the path of comfortable momentum and walk against it.

There is no need to throw away our inheritance of traditions and knowledge in this pursuit. We can learn the ways those thoughts, beliefs, and opinions were formed and then apply what’s of worth from those methods to our own day and age. Realising too that developing our own tools and methods of thoughts apart from our inheritance is how our country and the Anglican Communion started.

My prayer for us this week is that we can all celebrate the independence of our country with renewed hope for the future, to take up the work that generations that came before have entrusted to us, and to change what was unjust in our past so that one day God’s perfect freedom will reign.

In Peace,

Fr. Chip