SPEAKER_00: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be ever pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our rock and our Redeemer.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.
SPEAKER_00: I was in Philadelphia this past week, and as you can imagine, the city was alive.
SPEAKER_00: It was electric.
SPEAKER_00: You had World Cup games.
SPEAKER_00: You had folks from all over the world coming in for that.
SPEAKER_00: You also had folks from all over the world and all over the country coming into Philadelphia for the 250th anniversary of our nation.
SPEAKER_00: Philly, as probably most of you know, is the cradle of the American Republic.
SPEAKER_00: It was the original capital.
SPEAKER_00: And yeah, so it was bringing people from all over.
SPEAKER_00: And while I was there, I also visited Christchurch, which some call the nation's church.
SPEAKER_00: It's the very first episcopal parish after the revolution.
SPEAKER_00: And it played a central role in the creation of the American Republic.
SPEAKER_00: Many of the signers of the Declaration of Independence worship there.
SPEAKER_00: Betsy Ross, whose house is around the corner from there, had her own individual pew.
SPEAKER_00: The first bishop of the Episcopal Church is literally buried in the sanctuary, kind of like if there was a tomb right there.
SPEAKER_00: To me, anyway.
SPEAKER_00: And then some dude named Benjamin Franklin is buried in the burial grounds there as well.
SPEAKER_00: And this one stopped me.
SPEAKER_00: I should have known this.
SPEAKER_00: The first African-American man ordained to the Episcopal Church worshipped at this church during this exact time in history, the Reverend Absalom Jones.
SPEAKER_00: And so standing in that place with that history surrounding you, the uh the lessons and the memorials everywhere, and the promise of the American experiment that all men are created equal, and that human dignity is the basis of what makes us fit to govern ourselves, not religious code, not hereditary privilege, not class, not property.
SPEAKER_00: All of that created a really weighty, powerful moment for me, this kind of heady and exciting moment.
SPEAKER_00: But then, of course, I learned some other things, right?
SPEAKER_00: I learned that the declaration, one of the declaration's most powerful signers, is also buried there along with his family.
SPEAKER_00: Major Pierce Butler, a plantation owner, and an enslaver of grossest magnitude, along with his grandson, who had staged the second largest slave auction in American history called the Weeping Time.
SPEAKER_00: And of course, it's well known that Benjamin Franklin himself had been an enslaver as well.
SPEAKER_00: And so this old jarring contradiction came back into focus for me.
SPEAKER_00: As like kind of a lay historian myself, it's a very common feeling, that contradiction of our American heritage.
SPEAKER_00: The American promise of human dignity has always been held by the teeth over and against folks that will profit on the subjugation of others.
SPEAKER_00: Dignifying every human being has always been a breathless fight.
SPEAKER_00: There is a particular kind of breathlessness that I think we all know in understanding this divided identity, this divided and contradictory identity and heritage.
SPEAKER_00: We feel it in our bodies before we can name it, the tightness when a conversation turns to American privilege, the bracing during family dinners, dinner discussions, the way shoulders rise or tighten when someone says our country with either contempt or with worship?
SPEAKER_00: Have you ever felt demeaned by a national story or a national heritage with no room for you?
SPEAKER_00: Or have you ever felt implicated by a national story or heritage that flatters you?
SPEAKER_00: If so, then you already know something about the suffering that Paul is talking about in Romans chapter 5.
SPEAKER_00: And Paul, who annoyed plenty of people in his lifetime, and he still annoys plenty of us, he tells the Roman Christians something quite ridiculous about that conflict and that suffering, that we rejoice in these sufferings.
SPEAKER_00: The tension of who belongs and who deserves is a tension that creates suffering among us.
SPEAKER_00: So that might sound absurd, so let's walk through what Paul is actually doing in that passage in Romans chapter 5.
SPEAKER_00: Paul wrote to churches in Rome made up of people with every reason to despise one another: Jews and Gentiles, the conquered and the conquerors, the respectable and the disreputable, the wealthy and the poor, pride running in opposite directions, histories that had severely wounded one another.
SPEAKER_00: Imagine the friction of asking them to share a table and to call each other family.
SPEAKER_00: The Jews were law-abiding and pure, the Gentiles were modern and broad-minded.
SPEAKER_00: Each jockeyed for their privilege to be more privilegy, and often they acted to demean and disinherit each other.
SPEAKER_00: It would have felt quite like suffering.
SPEAKER_00: So when Paul says we rejoice in our sufferings, he isn't being stoic or sentimental.
SPEAKER_00: He means the suffering of staying in relationship with people who don't think the others belong.
SPEAKER_00: Quite literally, this suffering is the work of reconciliation.
SPEAKER_00: This is not a tidy proverb, but a promise that hard relationships across difference can grow hope where hope seems barren.
SPEAKER_00: That is what Paul is implying in that famous verse.
SPEAKER_00: Suffering conflict produces endurance, and enduring through conflict produces character, and character in conflict produces hope.
SPEAKER_00: And hope in conflict does not embarrass us because God's love has been poured out on all who suffer and endure this suffering.
SPEAKER_00: The letter to the Romans understood that universal divine belonging.
SPEAKER_00: That's the principle of the book of Romans, universal divine belonging.
SPEAKER_00: That this belonging caused Jews and Gentiles to suffer one another together.
SPEAKER_00: And if it did that, then we shouldn't be surprised by how honestly reckoning with our nation's history produces conflict and suffering among us.
SPEAKER_00: Comb through the real stories of America, its glory and its cruelty together, and people will get angry.
SPEAKER_00: Relationships will be strained, if not fractured.
SPEAKER_00: You'll be accused of hating your country or of betraying it, because many of us want the most privileged privilege.
SPEAKER_00: And here's the question at the center of it all.
SPEAKER_00: How do you bring, how do we bring together the people demeaned and disinherited under any cultural heritage, along with the people privileged by that same heritage?
SPEAKER_00: What could possibly draw both into one hope, one family, one kingdom that is larger than any particular nationalist vision?
SPEAKER_00: One answer in the air right now runs the opposite way of Paul's argument.
SPEAKER_00: Just last year, the vice president argued in a speech about statesmanship that American citizenship can't be reduced to the idealism of the American creed.
SPEAKER_00: And he named the Declaration of Independence as insufficient because it is too inclusive.
SPEAKER_00: He is wary that the Declaration's words are too thrilling and compelling and that they open the doors for millions and even billions of people who would want to come under this American experiment.
SPEAKER_00: And that sort of vision of belonging should instead be reserved for those who can claim the right lineage, prove the right loyalty, and assimilate to the right ideology.
SPEAKER_00: But Paul condemns exactly these sorts of moves in the book of Romans, especially chapters 3, 4, 5, 9, 10, and 11.
SPEAKER_00: The letter is explicitly about opening wide the doors of belonging.
SPEAKER_00: Paul names instead of those ideologically exclusive principles, Paul names instead the self-giving love and sacrifice of Jesus, which treats every people and every person as undeserving of supremacy and all deserving of God's grace and love poured out.
SPEAKER_00: Listen, folks, even if you're unsure of the claims of the Christian faith, what none of us needs to be confused about is what God's or what God's work in Christ Jesus meant to Paul.
SPEAKER_00: And what it meant to Paul was the throwing wide the doors of belonging.
SPEAKER_00: It meant God's radical acceptance of all peoples above and beyond all nationalist identities.
SPEAKER_00: This is exactly what the whole letter to the Romans is about.
SPEAKER_00: The conflict over heritage and belonging is exactly the type of suffering that Paul rejoices in.
SPEAKER_00: What's more, instead of toward an ethnic or religious or social prestige, Paul reaches instead for our common humanity and specifically our common fragility, failure, and fault as the basis for all our need of God's grace.
SPEAKER_00: It didn't matter that the Jews had a holy and magnificent law, it didn't matter that Rome had unrivaled power, it didn't matter that Greece had sophisticated culture.
SPEAKER_00: Every person and every heritage fails in ways.
SPEAKER_00: However fiercely we argue for purity or supremacy, we all fall short of God's profound kindness.
SPEAKER_00: And here Paul says, no one earns their way out of that predicament.
SPEAKER_00: Listen to where these verses go.
SPEAKER_00: While we were still weak, at the right time, Christ died for the ungodly.
SPEAKER_00: God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, those who miss the mark and harm relationship.
SPEAKER_00: That's what sin is, is when you harm relationship.
SPEAKER_00: At that time, Christ died for us.
SPEAKER_00: Not while we were worthy, not while we held the right lineage or loyalty or law.
SPEAKER_00: While we were still weak, still ungodly, still even enemies of one another, Christ died for us.
SPEAKER_00: This is the love Paul says has been poured into our hearts.
SPEAKER_00: And if God's love comes only to the undeserving, then no heritage gets to claim superiority before God or before one another.
SPEAKER_00: And notice also what Paul does not do.
SPEAKER_00: He never despises Roman identity or Jewish identity.
SPEAKER_00: He simply assumes every identity, however good its gifts, carries real guilt and real fragility, and so all of us, privileged and disinherited alike, need the same gift, a love we did not earn, knitting us into a family we do not define.
SPEAKER_00: So let me end back in the churchyard in Philadelphia.
SPEAKER_00: For 45 years, Benjamin Franklin was an enslaver.
SPEAKER_00: And across those same years, the Reverend Absalom Jones, I mentioned him at the beginning, he was the first African-American priest ordained in the Episcopal Church.
SPEAKER_00: And they lived in the same place, same town, same time, Franklin being a bit older.
SPEAKER_00: Benjamin Franklin was an enslaver, Absalom Jones, born enslaved, once owned by a vestryman, by a leader in that church.
SPEAKER_00: They maneuvered the same town, the same congregation, the same circles of reform.
SPEAKER_00: And for decades, the one who was oppressed by American heritage had to suffer the presence of the one who profited from that same American heritage.
SPEAKER_00: Absalom Jones endured the suffering caused by the likes of Benjamin Franklin.
SPEAKER_00: Jones endured a whole city and nation of Franklins.
SPEAKER_00: And here's what I think we often don't really think together, or maybe we forget, when Franklin finally converted on this issue of slavery, from being a man who bought and profited on human beings to becoming the president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society and spent the end of his life petitioning Congress to end slavery.
SPEAKER_00: That conversion in Benjamin Franklin did not come from nowhere.
SPEAKER_00: It was pried loose over years by the steady, dignified, enduring witness of the very people his heritage had degraded.
SPEAKER_00: It would be very easy to historically imagine that Absalom Jones's endurance directly discipled Benjamin Franklin's character during their decades of suffering together.
SPEAKER_00: So, in this time when we are approaching the 250th anniversary of American heritage and American identity, there is going to be a lot of tuga-war on what that heritage means and who that privilege is for.
SPEAKER_00: We will not despise the slow work of staying present and telling the truth.
SPEAKER_00: The love poured out for us while we were still undeserving is being poured out still.
SPEAKER_00: We are not each other's final enemies.
SPEAKER_00: We are children of God together.
SPEAKER_00: And just like the early Christians and just like Absalom Jones, we suffer and endure together so that the character and hope and love may be poured out on all people in an all deserving American heritage.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.