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A Sermon on Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30
by Rev. Chris Bohnhoff
Grace and peace to you this holiday weekend, my friends. The 250th anniversary of our country’s founding. A worship space is principally a space of remembering, and through remembering, meaning making. So, it is fitting that we take our sermon time to reflect on this collective history.
I’ve been reading a book that explores our nation’s big birthdays – America, U.S.A., by Dr. Eddie S. Glaude Jr. It examines our history by considering the historical moments surrounding each of our fifty-year anniversaries. But the backdrop of all his anniversary vignettes is the contradiction that has always been at the heart of this nation: that it is both true that the Declaration of Independence names and aspires to universal equality as its central motivation, and it is also true that the founding fathers only meant such lofty freedom for men that the state deemed white. It’s a double identity that still troubles our collective consciousness all these years later.
Glaude writes, “This country, with its ideas and ghosts, remains a bundle of contradictions: a place of freedom, a place of unfreedom; a land of unimaginable wealth and unbearable poverty, where the equality of men and women guides our way and white people stand above it all; where God saturates everything but repeatedly comes up missing in how we live together; where liberty is cherished and selfishness is freedom. America, USA, is a country of longing and restlessness, a place of titillating happiness and paralyzing melancholy; where we confidently know what we are and have little patience with who we really are; where politicians exploit fear and hatred, and where ordinary people, if they decide, can change the course of history. America, USA, is haunted by the madness at its heart, and the reality of race resides there, coiled tight. That fact, and the fear of the doubleness unraveling this fragile experiment, plagues this nation.”[i]
Will you pray with me? Holy One, you set each of us, each a tiny manifestation of your desires for the world, within infinite intersections of stories within stories, millions upon millions of years deep. In this moment, on this land, help us to see and accept all that is and has been; not in order to assign blame or choose good and bad, winner and loser, but to participate in a long, deliberate healing that leads to your commonwealth. Grant us insight, grant us patience, grant us compassion. Amen.
Did you know that just one year after our 50th anniversary, on July 4, 1827, the state of New York outlawed chattel slavery? Before reading Glaude’s book, I didn’t. Since there were other things happening on July 4, July 5 became the day for African Americans and abolitionists to observe what came to be called New York’s Abolition Day. Glaude writes, “New York’s Abolition Day was one of these important moments on the other side of the color line, a precursor to Juneteenth, when Black people in the United States cultivated freedom dreams and called attention to our tragic inheritance. In all of these moments, America’s civil religion – that effort to provide a religious scaffolding for the country to generate consensus – was turned on its head.”[ii]
Glaude uses the term civil religion, first used by sociologist, Robert Bellah, in the 1960s, to describe the set of beliefs, symbols, and rituals that connect the founding of the United States with divine purpose. Although noble in its aspirations, our civil religion has a dark, authoritative impact. With our July 4th festivities as its high holy day, our civil religion lifts up the bright, shiny language of the founding fathers – the language naming life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as the birthright of all people – while conveniently forgetting that the founding fathers very purposefully denied, and that we as a nation continue to deny that birthright to anyone not straight, male, and white. Our July 4th rituals ask us as citizens to pledge our loyalty to such a high purpose, and to join in overlooking the mistakes made as bumps in the road on our way to the divine purpose of freedom.
But the backdrop of white supremacy does not cease to be just because it is not acknowledged. While those who feel free celebrate, those who do not despair at the cruelty of hypocritical celebration. And with freedom celebrations like New York Abolition Day and Juneteenth, they raise their voices and name the hypocrisy.
And those who have claimed the beauty of the nation’s stated values, and pledged allegiance, and watched the fireworks, and then then hear the raised voices impassionately asking for their freedom, are left to question those values and pledges that they made. Or, if that is too painful, they lash out against the ones who reminded them of their country’s hypocrisy and their own complicity.
Over and over again these past 250 years, freedom’s advance has been met with a refusal on the part of white America to sit with the contradiction at the heart of our nation. In the decade after New York’s Abolition Day, July 4 became the most dangerous day to be Black in New York, as white mobs moved through the streets to do violence to Black people. Decades after the Emancipation Proclamation, the Fugitive Slaves Act gave any white person the power to seize or do violence to any Black person simply by claiming they had once been a slave. Jim Crow legalized systemic racism on every level. Thousands of Black bodies were lynched. And with George Floyd among so many Black people wrongfully killed by our legal apparatus, and Metro Surge, we see that the pain underneath our still-present split national personality still drives white America to violence.
In the face of history’s stark tale, and in the face of an administration adamantly and blatantly advancing a violent, white supremacist agenda, what is there to be done?
Moving forward from the pain and violence embedded in our national history calls for a paradigm shift. In today’s scripture reading, Jesus points to the public’s reaction when John preached the message of turning away from selfishness, and Jesus himself practiced radical inclusiveness in his love and care. The public, those enculturated adults labeled them evil and wrong.
In response, Jesus names the wisdom of living life as an infant; as one who learns from what is, rather than judging what is by what they expect to see. Living in this way, Jesus teaches, with what Buddhists call beginner’s mind, is the way to acknowledge the heavy burdens we carry, and to deal with them so that they may be set down. So that we may rest.
The challenge of July fourth and July fifth is that easy and that difficult: to sit within the pain of belonging to a group that holds such holy promise but has so often acted to chop down every effort to live in accord with that promise. Not to rip the burden off, attach it forevermore to the ones we label evil, and exile them far away, nor to ignore the enormity of pain’s burden, but to feel its true weight fully in our own bodies.
It may be difficult to see a path towards collective healing. But our God has, entirely outside of human control or influence, created a world of tenacious, abundant, unexpected, and infinitely diverse life. Perhaps God also desires the healing of our nation.
“Come to me, all you who are weary and carrying heavy burdens,” Jesus said, “and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” (Matthew 11:28-30)
May we place Jesus’ yoke of love and justice for all creation on our own shoulders today and every day. Amen.
[i] Eddie S. Glaude Jr., America, U.S.A. (Crown: New York, 2026), p. 11.
[ii] Glaude Jr, p. 59.
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