Independence Day

“It is through the teachings of religion and the commitment to religious faith

that we can maintain our freedoms and pass them on to our children.”

From a July 4 sermon by The Rev. Jerome F. Politzer, retired rector of St. John’s Chapel in Monterey, California. St. John’s, an Episcopal church, uses the 1928 Book of Common Prayer.  Fr. Politzer serves on the advisory council of Episcopalians for Traditional Faith.

Today we commemorate the two hundred and thirty-fourth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

The Fourth of July is a time for remembering those great events that took place leading to the founding of our nation. It is also a time to rededicate ourselves to the essential principle of freedom, which is behind the sacrifice and devotion of our ancestors, and the underlying principle in all that we do today.

A few years ago, I took a trip through New England. I spent a day visiting the Lexington Common in Massachusetts where the first shots rang out, beginning the War of Independence. As you recall, it was in April 1775, as the separation was growing between the colonies and the mother country, that a contingent of 700 British regular infantrymen set out from Boston toward Concord, Massachusetts, to search for ammunition and arms that had been stored there by the American militia.

The growing rift between the colonies and the mother country had reached a point where no longer was reason possible. Someone once said that the loss of the American colonies by England occurred in a fit of absentmindedness.

When one looks back at the early history of the relationship between the colonies and the mother country one can see a continuous level of loyalty and devotion between the people who had settled this country and England. Unfortunately, as sometimes happens in human affairs, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Gradually the ruling powers in England lost touch with their colonies, and became so oppressive that finally, the people who had settled this country as loyal subjects felt that they had to stand up for their rights as Englishmen – the rights that were God-given gifts to all Englishmen. The result was a growing separation and, finally, the outbreak of warfare.

As I stood on Lexington Common I recalled the story of how the local militia had been aroused throughout the whole area and had gathered there to oppose the oncoming British soldiers. When the British army arrived early in the morning they found the Minutemen drawn up before them with their muskets. The British colonel ordered them to disperse. Being unwilling to be the cause of the outbreak of hostilities, the officer in command of the militia ordered his men to leave the area. As they were going, shots broke out and about twenty Americans became casualties.

We do not really, I think, grasp the significance of this confrontation if we think of the American militia as being simple farmers who suddenly threw aside their plows, hoes and shovels and picked up their guns. They were a well-trained militia. They had been fighting in the defense of their towns and their farms for years on the side of England. They had been organized first against the Indians in King Philip’s War. Then they joined with British regulars in the French and Indian War. For citizen soldiers, they were well-trained and well-equipped. By the time that day was over, thousands of the militia had gathered around Concord to defend their homes and their property.

Following the confrontation at Lexington, the British army marched on to Concord where some 500 Minutemen had gathered at what has been called ever since Concord Bridge. While the main body of soldiers was searching the town of Concord, the commanding officer sent out a detachment to secure the bridge. In the town they found a large store of arms, including ammunition, muskets, and cannons. They took these to the Town Square and set them on fire. The Minutemen gathered at the bridge saw the smoke and flames arising several miles away, and believed that the soldiers had set their town on fire. They began to advance on the bridge.

The commanding officer of the British detachment ordered them to disperse, and they refused to do so. The British soldiers opened fire, killing the commanding officer of the militia along with several others. With that, the battle was on. The British, outnumbered at that point, retreated to the town. They began to retreat from Concord toward Lexington, and the militiamen swarmed on them like hornets from every tree, rock, and stone wall. There was a terrible slaughter.

I walked around Concord Bridge and retraced the trail. It is called the Battle Road. These locations are all national parks now. One can still see the terrain over which the British retreated. Along this route, they lost about half their men. Fortunately for the British detachment, another contingent of a thousand soldiers had marched down from Boston to meet them in Lexington, and they were able to retire without being totally annihilated. These events were some of the “great and terrible things” about which the book of Deuteronomy speaks on this Independence Day. Warfare is never pleasant. Freedom has never been given away. It has never been obtained without a struggle.

Commemorating this battle is a statue of a Minuteman at Concord Bridge. On it is engraved the first stanza of Emerson’s stirring poem about this significant event in the life of this nation. It reads:

“By the rude bridge that arched the flood, their flag to April’s breeze unfurled, here once the embattled farmers stood, and fired the shot heard ’round the world.”

This battle began the march on to independence and freedom. This development was taken up by other countries around the world where people were seeking freedom and self- determination. This process is still continuing. It is amazing to see in the 21st century how the desire for freedom has motivated countries that were under communist domination, as well as other countries in Asia, South America, and Africa. They are all trying to establish what we have gained and still maintain.

Following this brief visit to the battlefields where the Revolutionary War began, I went on to the Plymouth Colony to see where the Pilgrim Fathers  had landed. At Plymouth Rock there is tied up in the harbor a replica of the Mayflower. It is a small ship on which more than 100 people spent many days as they crossed the Atlantic. Then we went on to see the recreated model of the Plymouth plantation where the Pilgrims set up their first colony. It was raining. It was hot. Chickens and pigs were everywhere. The Pilgrims lived in huts and slept over each other in bunks above the animals. It was a crude place. It revealed what people will suffer and endure for freedom.

We need to be reminded that the freedom that the Pilgrims were seeking was first and foremost religious      freedom. It was the freedom to believe in God, the freedom to worship as they felt called by God, and the freedom to live by God’s rules.The Bible tells us that where the spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. It is through religious faith that freedom began in the world. It is through religious faith that freedom will survive.

The final leg of our New England tour was to go to the tiny state of Rhode Island and to visit Newport. The opposite of the Pilgrim colony is located there. One can see on the drive along the shore what has occurred in the United States of America since the War of Independence.  The most glorious opulence, wealth, and success that anyone can imagine grew out of the desire for freedom. Along the shore of the city of Newport are mansions called summer cottages, built by the very wealthy families of the eastern seaboard. For instance, the Vanderbilt summer cottage has 80 rooms and was lived in for only several weeks during the summer by the family and their entourage of servants. This demonstrates the potential for human development that freedom releases into the world.

One great critic of both English and American political life, Thomas Macaulay, wrote a very telling paragraph about America. Macaulay was an historian and a member of the British Parliament in the middle of the nineteenth century. He did not like what he saw in America. He did not think highly of American freedom. He said:

Your constitution is all sail and no anchor. Either some
Caesar or Napoleon will seize the reins of government with a
strong hand or your republic will be as fearfully plundered and
laid waste by barbarians in the twentieth century as the Roman
Empire was in the fifth. With this difference, that the Huns
and vandals who ravaged the Roman Empire came from with-
out, and that your Huns and your vandals will have been
engendered within your own country by your own institutions.

He was pointing out the dangers always threatening a democracy. Either some dictator will take advantage of his ability and his opportunity to sway people to his side and will become a leader such as Caesar in the Republic of Rome, or as Napoleon at the end of the French Revolution. On the other hand, heartless people, call them barbarians if you will, “without the law,” will plunder the country. These barbarians deny the truth of God and the role of morality. They are teaching our students in the great schools today. They are bishops in our churches who say that there is a God, but you do not have to pay attention to anything He has said. They are individuals in business and government who have no law and who operate only on the principle of plunder. These are the modern barbarians who threaten our society.

We must always remember that the spirit that gave our ancestors the courage to sail across the ocean, to settle this country, to stand up against the most powerful army in the world, to go on and develop our land and to make it successful and powerful, that spirit which dared those people to be free was the spirit of Jesus Christ.

We need to guard against the dangers of freedom. St. Peter advised his fellow Christians to live as free people not using their liberty as a cloak of maliciousness, but as the servants of God. This is the way we protect ourselves in this country against either the onslaught of a dictator or the abuse of freedom. We must guard against the license that comes when one has no rules and no laws and only uses this freedom that we find so precious as permission for mayhem.

It is through the teachings of religion and the commitment to religious faith that we can maintain our freedoms and pass them on to our children. This requires sacrifice. This requires devotion. This requires committing ourselves to standing up for our religious faith and teaching it to our children.We need to know that to
be a follower of Christ means to stand up against all those forces that would deny true freedom.

On this Independence Day, we are reminded of the heritage that we have received, and are challenged to commit our lives to the principle of freedom. It is something not only to live for, but to die for. In his Lays of Ancient Rome, Macaulay, writing of the days when Rome was a free and powerful republic, spoke of this patriotic and religious commitment:

“How can a man die better than by facing fearful odds, for the ashes of his fathers and the temples of his gods?”

Let us commit ourselves to the heritage that we have received from our heroic ancestors, and to the powerful spirit of liberty that we honor in the traditions of this land.