Fourth of July and the Substance of Things Hoped For

Fourth of July was one of my favorite holidays as a child. 

Growing up on an Air Force base, the fourth seemed personal and intimate. I was surrounded by military uniforms. They would bring out tanks and jets to touch, and climb on, or pretend to drive. There would be weapons on display, enshrining a sense of power and prestige. Bands would play our patriotic songs, and we would sway to their music, donned in our best outfits of red, white, and blue.

We were enthralled with this annual celebration. 

It felt good to be on top, and the fourth of July celebrated the American exceptionalism that I was taught to revere.

As I grow older, I look back on those times with a dizzying confusion.  A sense of completion was manifest in those fourth of July celebrations. But the further I grew into my awareness and re-education, the more I realized that the fourth of July should be less a celebration of arrival than it is a celebration of the “substance of things hoped for.”

The America I was told was already great is still sick with years of unacknowledged oppression and suppression - particularly of Black people. People who had been told their freedom had arrived, but still they found themselves and their communities shackled with invisible bondage.

As a Christian, I feel a cognitive dissonance in my celebration of a holiday, centered on freedom, by a country that has yet to acknowledge the institutional enslavement that built this country and its economy from the ground up. 

I only knew to celebrate the white men who drafted the declaration of our independence and fought to ensure that independence continued. But I never spent a moment reflecting or honoring the black bodies that, for generations, were forced to produce the America I know and reap the fruits of.

As an American, it is right to acknowledge and celebrate one of the truly unique and wonderful things about America - it is a land governed by a people. And for that governance, it is an exception to the forms of government that came before it in the Western world.

As Christians who also find themselves to be American, we have been given a model of reconciliation that pours out of the gospel. Our Christian duty and obligation as reconcilers does not stop where our national identity begins. 

American Christians, particularly white American Christians, must seek to be salt and light in a nation that has yet to repent and recognize its ongoing promotion of systems of inequity, and we must lead the way.

This fourth, as you grill your burgers and hot-dogs, and as you hang your American flag and light sparklers, keep in mind that this moment of celebration is less about where we have arrived. This fourth should instead be a focused celebration of an America that still has a lot of work to do.

May we continue to do the hard work in our own hearts and minds, our families, our workplaces, our churches, our streets, and our nation to have an America that is celebrated for being truly great - An America that is the “substance of things hoped for”.

- Emily Thien