SPEAKER_00: Two hundred and fifty years ago, in a warm room in Philadelphia, fifty six men signed their names to a document.
SPEAKER_00: They pledged to each other three things their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.
SPEAKER_00: Many of them lost all three.
SPEAKER_00: What they gave us has endured for two and a half centuries.
SPEAKER_00: This weekend we celebrate that gift.
SPEAKER_00: America is not perfect, no nation is, but two hundred and fifty years is a long time.
SPEAKER_00: Two hundred and fifty years of self-government, two hundred and fifty years of a country conceived in liberty, that deserves gratitude.
SPEAKER_00: That deserves reflection, and that deserves above all a return to the source.
SPEAKER_00: Because here is a truth we sometimes forget.
SPEAKER_00: The American experiment was never built on the confidence of a man, it was built on the confidence in God.
SPEAKER_00: Listen to these words.
SPEAKER_00: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by the Creator with certain unalienable rights, endowed by their creator.
SPEAKER_00: Our rights do not come from Washington.
SPEAKER_00: They do not come from the courts, they do not come from the crown, they come from God.
SPEAKER_00: And what God gives no man can take away.
SPEAKER_00: That is why America has endured, not because we're the strongest, not because we're the richest, but because at the foundation of this nation there is a confession.
SPEAKER_00: Our liberty is a gift, and the giver is God.
SPEAKER_00: Only one Catholic signed the Declaration of Independence.
SPEAKER_00: His name was Charles Carroll of the Carrollton.
SPEAKER_00: He was the wealthiest man in America at the time.
SPEAKER_00: He had the most to lose.
SPEAKER_00: He signed anyway.
SPEAKER_00: And when he put down his pen, he added these words, of Carrollton, so that the king would know exactly which Catholic to hang.
SPEAKER_00: That was courageous.
SPEAKER_00: That was his faith.
SPEAKER_00: Two hundred and fifty years later, we honor that faith by living it.
SPEAKER_00: But my brothers and sisters, if freedom is a gift from God, then freedom must be lived toward God.
SPEAKER_00: And this is where the gospel meets this Fourth of July weekend.
SPEAKER_00: Listen to the words of Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: Come to me, all you who labor in our burden, and I will give you rest.
SPEAKER_00: We hear those words and we think of our private burdens, the mer mortgage, the diagnosis, the wayward child, the empty side of the bed, the anxiety that greets us at three in the morning.
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
SPEAKER_00: Christ speaks to all of that.
SPEAKER_00: He speaks to every heart in this church today.
SPEAKER_00: He knows your name, he knows your weight, but it's also as a nation.
SPEAKER_00: He's saying, Come to me, all of you, all you who labor, all you who are burdened, not just individually, but as a people.
SPEAKER_00: America is tired.
SPEAKER_00: Look around.
SPEAKER_00: We're a nation of great wealth and great emptiness, great technology and great isolation, great freedom and too often great confusion about what freedom is.
SPEAKER_00: The founders knew something we're forgetting.
SPEAKER_00: They knew that freedom without virtue is not freedom, it is slavery in disguise.
SPEAKER_00: John Adams said it plainly.
SPEAKER_00: Our Constitution, he wrote, was made only for a moral and religious people.
SPEAKER_00: It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other form.
SPEAKER_00: He was not being sentimental, he was being realistic.
SPEAKER_00: People who lose their moral center lose their freedom, no matter how many rights they claim.
SPEAKER_00: Archbishop Fulton Sheen understood this.
SPEAKER_00: He said the modern world confuses freedom with license.
SPEAKER_00: But license is not liberty.
SPEAKER_00: License is the slavery of the appetites dressed up in the language of choice.
SPEAKER_00: Real freedom is not the freedom to do whatever you want.
SPEAKER_00: Real freedom is the freedom to do what you ought.
SPEAKER_00: The freedom to become what God made you to be, the freedom to love.
SPEAKER_00: That's why the gospel today is more American than any parade.
SPEAKER_00: Because Jesus is something strange.
SPEAKER_00: Take my yoke upon you.
SPEAKER_00: A yoke.
SPEAKER_00: Think about that image.
SPEAKER_00: A yoke is what binds an ox to the plough.
SPEAKER_00: A yoke is a symbol of labor, of restriction, of submission, and Jesus says, put it on.
SPEAKER_00: Why?
SPEAKER_00: Well, because there's no such thing as a human being without a yoke.
SPEAKER_00: Every one of us is yoked to something.
SPEAKER_00: If you're not yoked to Christ, you are yoked to something else.
SPEAKER_00: To money, to pleasure, to things, to your ego, to fear, to your pride, to the opinion of the crowd.
SPEAKER_00: Something drives you.
SPEAKER_00: Something bends your neck.
SPEAKER_00: The question is not whether you will wear a yoke.
SPEAKER_00: The question is which yoke will you wear?
SPEAKER_00: And here's the paradox of the gospel.
SPEAKER_00: The yoke of Christ is the only yoke that sets a man free, because his yoke is truth, his yoke is love, it is grace, it fits the human heart because his yoke was made for the human heart.
SPEAKER_00: And this is freedom, the freedom the founders reach for and never fully grasped.
SPEAKER_00: Not the freedom of doing whatever we please, but the freedom of being who we are made to be, a free people under God.
SPEAKER_00: Zacharias saw it in centuries before.
SPEAKER_00: He prophesied a king riding on a donkey, not a war horse, a donkey, a king who would banish the chariot and the warrior's bow, a king whose dominion would stretch from sea to sea and whose reign would bring about peace.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus is that king, and his kingdom is the only kingdom that does not end.
SPEAKER_00: Empires rise, empires fall, Rome fell, the British Empire fell, communism fell, and many in this room fled it and know the cost of freedom in a way that most Americans have forgotten.
SPEAKER_00: One day this republic too will pass into history.
SPEAKER_00: Only the kingdom of God endures forever.
SPEAKER_00: But while we're here in this beautiful, imperfect, extraordinary country, we have a mission to be salt, to be light, to bring the gospel into the public square, to raise our children in the faith, to love our neighbors, even the ones who disagree with us, to live, as Saint Paul says today, according to the spirit and not according to the flesh.
SPEAKER_00: Why?
SPEAKER_00: Because the soul of America will not be saved at the Capitol.
SPEAKER_00: The soul of America will be saved on this altar.
SPEAKER_00: Yes, this altar.
SPEAKER_00: Because every time the Eucharist is offered in every corner of this land, from cathedrals and great cities to country chapels on dirt roads, the true freedom of the sons and daughters of God is being renewed.
SPEAKER_00: Every mass is a declaration of independence from sin, from death, from despair.
SPEAKER_00: Every communion is a signature on the deepest character of all, the new covenant of the Lamb.
SPEAKER_00: Two hundred and fifty years ago, brave men pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.
SPEAKER_00: Today Jesus does something greater.
SPEAKER_00: He pledges his body and his blood.
SPEAKER_00: He gives us not a document but himself.
SPEAKER_00: So bring your burdens, bring your fears for this nation, bring your gratitude for the freedom we enjoy.
SPEAKER_00: Bring the invisible weight you have been carrying all week.
SPEAKER_00: Lay it here, on this altar, on his shoulders.
SPEAKER_00: Here, the humble king who rides on a donkey, he is the gentle master whose yoke is easy.
SPEAKER_00: He is the bread of freedom, he is the rest of the weary, he is the hope of every human heart, and he is the true and lasting freedom of every people who will kneel before him.
SPEAKER_00: So may God bless you, may God bless this parish, and may God bless the United States of America.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.