Deep Summer starts for me with Independence Day: Kapow! go the fireworks, and Whoosh! go gobs of folks out of town, us included.

It’s good to stop a second before the vacation/evacuation really takes hold and realize what we are celebrating with the 4^th of July. The tradition we celebrate is one of revolution, rebellion, independence, and standing up for ourselves. It deserves our clear and conscious recognition that with the Declaration signed in 1776 we turned our backs on a long history, even as we affirmed important aspects of that history. We said that God gave us liberty and did not want us to be subjects but citizens, neither victims nor exploiters, neither slaves nor masters. (It took a while to get all that worked out; sometimes it seems we have to work that out over again each generation.) 

We probably forget too often how much that idea of American independence and freedom from a foreign crown was rooted in a deeper and older tradition, that claimed YHWH for our only King and Jesus as our only Lord. The gentry and intellectuals of 1776 may have been, at least some of ’em, Deists and skeptics; the boys that stood the line at Lexington and the ragtag band at Valley Forge knew just their Bible and fought for it quite as much as for their homes and families. The Christian Revolution lay beneath and around the American one, and always will.

So when we take our summer rest—and everyone should, as land should lie fallow, and bears must hibernate—we can remember and consecrate that rest for the ongoing struggle to which we soon return, to make our community, nation, and world a truer, kinder, more just and holy place. We rest, so we may recommit to the Revolution that doesn’t end til King Jesus comes to his own.

                                                                        In Christ,

                                                                          Frank Fuller+