Transcript:

The Rt. Reverend Kym Lucas:

Greetings, beloved in Christ. I hope that you are well on this day. On July 4th in the year 1776, the Second Continental Congress voted to adopt the Declaration of Independence. In that document were these words, "We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." These are good values, righteous even, but they are only good and righteous if all in fact means all. Even as the founders penned these words, they knew they were not living them.

The systemic attempts at the annihilation of the Indigenous peoples who lived in this land, the enslavement of Africans, the consolidation of economic power in the hands of a few. These activities belied the veracity of those expressed values. And that dichotomy, the dichotomy between the expressed values of this nation and the lived reality of this nation continues to haunt us even now. It is evident in the brokenness and the division and the economic disparity that we see all around us.

Our scriptures tell us more than once that God shows no partiality. We are all created and redeemed in love, and our creator does not preference any race, any language, any gender, any class, or socioeconomic level. Our God loves us all. For those of us who root ourselves in the Gospel of Jesus Christ, a distance between what we say we believe and how we live is not acceptable. We are called to live the values of the Gospel we claim. And that Gospel teaches us that every human being is a beloved child of God, loved, valued, and deserving of abundant and meaningful life without persecution and without oppression.

If those of us who claim Christ would actually commit ourselves to living lives that reflect Jesus… Not the Jesus of our prejudice, not the Jesus of our preference, but the Jesus that we find in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, if we committed ourselves to living lives that reflect that Jesus, in living lives that reflect the values of love and compassion and mercy that that Jesus shows to us over and over again, if we were committed to that, then perhaps our country could actually embody the values it claims.

Blessings.