A Better Country: Independence Day 2026 (Matthew 5:43-48)

July 4, 2026, Independence Day, National Day, Season after Pentecost

Matthew 5:43–48, Psalm 145, Hebrews 11:8–16, Deuteronomy 10:17–21

Grace, mercy, and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ be with you on this Independence Day.

The BCP 2019 recognizes Independence Day as a National Day with its own Collect and appointed readings, and the Collect gives us a careful theological frame for everything we remember and celebrate today: “Lord God, by your providence our founders won their liberties of old: Grant that we and all the people of this land may have grace to exercise these liberties in righteousness and peace.” (BCP 2019, p. 636) Before we go any farther, notice what the Church asks us to confess. The winning of our liberties is placed beneath the providence of God, not merely the genius or virtue of our founders. And the petition is not simply that we might retain those liberties. We ask for grace to exercise them rightly.

That is a much more searching prayer than it may first appear. Freedom is a genuine good, and we should be grateful for it. But freedom can be exercised well or badly. A nation can possess enormous political liberty while its citizens become increasingly enslaved to anger, appetite, greed, resentment, addiction, fear, or self-will. The question the Church brings to Independence Day is therefore not simply whether we are free, but what kind of people we are becoming with the freedom we have been given.

Our primary text this morning is Matthew 5:43–48, the final antithesis in this portion of the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus begins in verse 43: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’” (Matthew 5:43, ESV) The command to love the neighbor comes directly from Scripture, but “hate your enemy” does not. That second phrase represents the sort of conclusion fallen human beings easily draw. If I owe love to those who belong within my circle, perhaps those outside the circle, especially those who threaten or oppose me, are exempt from that love.

Jesus refuses that conclusion. In verse 44 he says, “But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” (Matthew 5:44, ESV) On any day of the year that command is demanding. On Independence Day it is especially pointed. This is a day shaped by the memory of political liberty won through conflict with an adversary, yet the Church does not set aside the Gospel for a National Day. She brings the Gospel to bear upon it. Our love of country, however legitimate, is never permitted to become an excuse for hatred.

That does not mean Christians must pretend there are no enemies, no genuine injustices, no dangerous ideologies, or no circumstances in which nations must defend their people. Jesus is not asking us to call evil good. Christian love is not moral indifference. But neither truth nor justice gives us permission for contempt. Even when another person is genuinely our enemy, Jesus still says, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”

Jesus explains why in verse 45: “so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.” (Matthew 5:45, ESV) He points us to the generous providential goodness of the Father. Sunlight is not reserved for the righteous. Rain does not fall only upon fields owned by those who honor God. The just and unjust alike live every day surrounded by gifts they did not create and could never demand.

When Jesus tells his disciples to live as sons of their Father, he is not saying that loving enemies earns our place in God’s family. Grace comes first. Rather, children increasingly come to resemble the Father whose grace has claimed them. The love Jesus commands is the fruit of belonging to him, not the price of admission.

Verses 46 and 47 press the point further: “For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others?” (Matthew 5:46–47, ESV) Natural affection works by reciprocity. We love the people who love us. We greet the people who greet us. We defend our own, support our side, and find it much easier to think generously about people who think generously about us. Jesus asks what is distinctly Christian about that.

National identity can intensify exactly this tendency. We love our country, our fellow citizens, our history, our institutions, and those who have sacrificed for us. That affection can be entirely proper. Many in this congregation served in the armed forces or had parents or children who did. That service is honorable, and the liberty preserved through such service is a genuine good. The Church does not diminish that. What the Church does is place love of country within a larger allegiance, because the disciple of Jesus must also learn to pray for the person who stands on the other side.

The soldier who served honorably in defense of his country served a real good, and that same soldier remains a disciple of the One who commands love of enemies. Those are not contradictory obligations. Christian love does not erase the difference between friend and enemy. It determines how we treat both.

Jesus brings the section to its conclusion in verse 48: “You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”(Matthew 5:48, ESV) The Greek word is teleios (TEH-lay-os), meaning complete, whole, or mature. Jesus is not describing anxious perfectionism, as though salvation depended upon flawless performance. In this context, the completeness concerns a love that is no longer confined to those who love us back. The Father’s generosity extends even toward the unjust, and his children are called to grow into a love that is not governed simply by reciprocity or tribal boundaries.

That takes us directly back to the Collect. We ask God for grace to exercise liberty “in righteousness and peace.”Matthew 5 tells us that righteousness and peace require more than having the correct political convictions or belonging to the right side. They require hearts being transformed by the grace of God so that even opposition does not turn into hatred.

Our reading from Deuteronomy 10 shows the same pattern from another direction. Moses says, “For the LORD your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great, the mighty, and the awesome God, who is not partial and takes no bribe. He executes justice for the fatherless and the widow, and loves the sojourner, giving him food and clothing.” (Deuteronomy 10:17–18, ESV) Then comes the command: “Love the sojourner, therefore, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt.”(Deuteronomy 10:19, ESV)

Notice the order again. Moses first describes God’s character and then tells God’s people how they are to live. The Lord is mighty and awesome, but his greatness is not expressed through indifference toward the weak. He executes justice for the fatherless and widow and cares for the sojourner, those who lacked the ordinary protections of family, property, and established place within the community. Israel is to remember what vulnerability felt like because Israel herself had once lived as a sojourner in Egypt.

The Hebrew word translated sojourner is ger (GARE), a resident foreigner living among Israel without many of the ordinary protections enjoyed by the native-born. We should be careful about trying to make an ancient Israelite category map neatly onto modern American immigration law. It does not. The ancient world had no exact equivalent of our borders, visas, citizenship statutes, courts, and immigration categories, and Scripture should not be manipulated to produce a predetermined partisan answer.

At the same time, that does not allow us to escape what Deuteronomy actually says. God cares about the vulnerable foreigner, and his people must reflect his concern. Scripture also affirms the legitimacy of civil government, law, and public order. A nation has the authority and responsibility to establish and enforce laws, including laws governing its borders. Those truths do not cancel one another. We can affirm lawful government while insisting upon basic human dignity, because no legal status can erase the image of God from a human being. The proper Christian frame is care for persons, respect for lawful authority, and refusal of contempt.

Hebrews 11 then widens the picture by reminding us that Christians themselves share something of the sojourner’s condition. Abraham obeyed when God called him to go to a place he would receive as an inheritance, yet Hebrews says that he lived there “in tents with Isaac and Jacob, heirs with him of the same promise.” (Hebrews 11:9, ESV) Why? Verse 10 tells us: “For he was looking forward to the city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God.” (Hebrews 11:10, ESV)

The strange thing is that Abraham truly received an earthly country, yet even there he lived as a pilgrim. Hebrews 11:13 says that the patriarchs acknowledged themselves to be “strangers and exiles on the earth.” They were not indifferent to the earthly places God gave them. Abraham dug wells, entered agreements with neighbors, cared for his household, purchased land, and buried his wife there. He was invested in the earthly place while knowing that the earthly place was not the final one.

Then verse 16 gives us the phrase that titles this sermon: “But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one.” (Hebrews 11:16, ESV) A better country does not mean the earthly country is worthless. It means that earthly citizenship is reordered by a higher citizenship and an ultimate home.

That is the proper posture of a Christian citizen. We can say with genuine gratitude, “This is my country.” We can care deeply about what happens here, honor its best inheritance, defend its legitimate liberties, participate in elections, serve in public office, work in its institutions, serve in its armed forces, build communities, teach our children its history honestly, and seek the flourishing of our neighbors. Christians should not withdraw from civic life merely because this world is passing away.

But we do all of that as people who are looking for a better country. Our deepest citizenship belongs to the Kingdom of God. When earthly and heavenly allegiances conflict, the Christian knows which one must prevail. When they do not conflict, the Christian gives to the earthly city the best of what the heavenly one asks: honesty, courage, justice, service, restraint, mercy, responsibility, and love.

This heavenly citizenship should actually free us to be better earthly citizens. Because America is not the Kingdom of God, we do not have to pretend that our history is sinless. We can give thanks for what is good and repent of what is evil. Because no political party is the Church, we can admit when our own side is wrong. Because no election decides whether Christ remains King, we can work hard without panic and lose political battles without behaving as though the throne of heaven has become vacant.

Our Psalm helps us keep that order clear. Psalm 145 says, “Great is the LORD, and greatly to be praised, and his greatness is unsearchable.” (Psalm 145:3, ESV) This is not a psalm about the greatness of a nation. The praise belongs to the Lord. Later the Psalm declares, “Your kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and your dominion endures throughout all generations.” (Psalm 145:13, ESV) No earthly nation can say that.

That does not make patriotic gratitude inappropriate. It directs patriotic gratitude toward its proper source. We may be thankful for ordered liberty, constitutional government, religious freedom, the rule of law, representative institutions, and those who have defended them. But we receive those things as gifts held provisionally beneath the everlasting Kingdom of God.

This is also why the political hatred that increasingly shapes our culture should trouble Christians regardless of which direction it comes from. Political opponents are often described not simply as wrong but as wicked beyond redemption, beneath conversation, and deserving of contempt. Yet the primary text before us will not permit the Church to imitate that pattern. Jesus says, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”

That does not mean we surrender truth. There are beliefs and policies Christians should oppose because they are wrong. There are moral convictions the Church cannot renegotiate because the surrounding culture dislikes them. Love does not mean that doctrine becomes adiaphora or that truth must remain unspoken to preserve social peace. A Christian can speak firmly, vote decisively, oppose evil, and contend publicly for what is right while still refusing to hate the person on the other side.

One of the simplest tests is prayer. Can I sincerely pray for the person whose politics anger me? Can I pray for a president I did not vote for, a governor I distrust, a judge whose reasoning I believe is wrong, or a neighbor whose convictions I find destructive? Prayer is not endorsement. We can ask God to correct them, restrain them, lead them into truth, grant them wisdom, bring them to repentance where repentance is needed, and enable them to govern justly. What we cannot do is declare another human being beyond the reach of Christian love.

This is where the Collect becomes more than a liturgical introduction. “Grant that we and all the people of this land may have grace to exercise these liberties in righteousness and peace.” The Prayer Book asks for grace because liberty by itself cannot produce righteousness. Freedom creates room in which human beings may choose the good, but freedom can also create room in which sin expands.

We see that in our own lives. We can be politically free while enslaved to pornography, resentment, money, alcohol, anger, status, consumerism, or the endless need to win an argument. A culture can possess extraordinary external liberty while losing the internal disciplines necessary to sustain a free people. That is why the Collect speaks not only of liberty but of righteousness and peace, and why Memorial Day’s Collect speaks of the disciplines of true freedom.

Christian freedom goes deeper still. Jesus says, “if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.” (John 8:36, ESV) We are not saved by political liberty. We are saved by Jesus Christ, crucified for sinners and risen from the grave. He frees us from condemnation and the dominion of sin so that we may become people capable of using lesser freedoms rightly.

That is the grace beneath the command of Matthew 5. Jesus does not merely stand at a distance and demand that sinful people somehow learn to love enemies by trying harder. He loved his enemies first. At the Cross, the One who commands us to pray for those who persecute us prayed for those who crucified him. He gave himself for sinners who had rebelled against him, and his grace now creates a people whose lives are meant increasingly to bear the family resemblance of their Father.

So what does it look like to exercise liberty in righteousness and peace? Deuteronomy tells us to remember the vulnerable and imitate the justice of the impartial God. Psalm 145 tells us to direct our highest praise toward the Lord whose Kingdom alone endures forever. Hebrews tells us to serve our earthly country as pilgrims whose final home is a better country. And Matthew tells us that even our enemies remain within the reach of Christian love and prayer.

These are not four competing messages. Together they give us a Christian way of being patriotic. We can love our country without worshiping it, cherish liberty without mistaking freedom for self-indulgence, respect lawful authority without imagining that government is absolute, contend for truth without hating those who disagree with us, and participate fully in national life without forgetting that our deepest citizenship is elsewhere.

That posture is not disloyalty to the United States. It is precisely what allows love of country to remain a virtue instead of becoming an idol. The Christian can love America with an open hand because he knows that even the best earthly country is not the city with foundations. We may seek the good of this nation with all the energy our vocations require while confessing with Abraham that we are looking for something better, something no revolution, election, legislature, army, or constitution can finally create.

So today we give thanks to God for the liberties we have inherited. We honor those who labored and sacrificed to secure and preserve them. We pray for those who govern us and for those whose political convictions differ from our own. We ask for courage to defend what is true, humility to acknowledge where we are wrong, justice toward the vulnerable, and wisdom to use our freedom for more than ourselves.

And above all, we pray the Collect the Church has given us: that God would grant us grace to exercise our liberties in righteousness and peace. May he teach us to love even our enemies, to serve this earthly country faithfully, and to hold it with an open hand as those who seek the better country, the city with foundations whose designer and builder is God.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.