And the 250th Anniversary of the American Revolution (Part One)
Sunday, June 28, 2026
1.
“Where there is no vision,” we read this morning, “the people perish.” “Where there is no vision, the people perish. But happy are those who keep torah…” That’s the familiar verse out of today’s reading from Proverbs. Or, the very contemporary translation of Eugene Peterson goes like this: “If people can’t see what God is doing, they stumble all over themselves…” “If people can’t see what God is doing, they stumble all over themselves; but when they attend to what [God] reveals, they are most blessed…”
The particular vision around which our United Church of Christ gathered years ago did not insist on or even hope for a Christian nation on this continent. Instead, our forebearers imagined a wildly pluralistic democracy. And the church as a partner in that project. They anticipated conversation, dialogue, even civil disagreement with a thousand other religions, traditions and communities. And they trusted—as we still do—that an educated and committed democracy would champion freedom and human rights, collaborative wisdom, and the kind of justice that involves and honors us all. “Attending to what God reveals” is so much more than cherry picking biblical texts. For our United Church of Christ, it’s always meant meeting other traditions, seeking common ground, discerning the Spirit’s wisdom together. And listening for the still, small voice that says: ‘You are one people. All of you. And you share one planet. All of it. So build a better future together.”
This past week, we in the UCC celebrated our 69th birthday. Did you all see that? In 1957, this denomination, our denomination, was born in a season of ecumenical spirit and hope. Indeed, there was a movement in the 50s to name our denomination the “Uniting” Church of Christ—so passionately did our founders believe in the project of pluralism and unity and mutual liberation as God’s own dream for the church.
So yes, we resist the dangerous clamoring for a Christian nation, or an American theocracy. And yet, we in the United Church very much believe and have always believed that faith requires public action, community involvement and passionate participation in multicultural, multiracial, multifaith movements for justice, kindness and peace. And, it kind of goes without saying, that that kind of participation is a hallmark of this very congregation in Durham.
So over these next three weeks, I’d like to explore with you our unique religious tradition and how it meets the moment of the nation’s 250th anniversary. What do we bring to the table? How might our particular tradition offer both insight and motivation to a nation that has, in many ways, squandered its vision and settled for a politics of stumbling instead?
2.
Let’s begin with a 19th century preacher, whose commitments seem right at home here, among us, in Durham.
Maybe you caught some of the dedication events as the Obama Presidential Center was opened in Chicago last week. In his own remarks, the former president recalled the ministry of Theodore Parker, a Unitarian minister in the 1850s, who first articulated the line that Martin Luther King, Jr., a Baptist minister in the 1960s, would make famous. “I do not pretend,” Theodore Parker said in his West Roxbury pulpit, “to understand the moral universe. The arc is a long one. My eye reaches but a little ways. I cannot calculate the curve…I can however divine it by conscience. And from what I see,” he said, “I am sure that it bends toward justice.” A century later, Dr. King would thunder from a hundred American pulpits: “The arc of history is long indeed, but it bends, it bends toward justice.”
Right off the bat, a question that begs asking in 2026 is this one: “Do we still believe it?” Can you and I still divine the long arc of the moral universe? Can we still say—with Dr. King and so many of our heroes—that it bends toward justice? I want to suggest this morning that it is the vocation of the United Church of Christ to insist that we can. It is our calling not only to insist that we can, but to be about the work of bending that arc together, building wonderfully diverse coalitions of Americans to bend and pull and believe and heal and move together on the arc that bends toward justice. We’ve got a long history of doing just that—imperfectly at times, but doing just that.
What makes Theodore Parker’s 1853 sermon all the more meaningful is its context: its context in the ministry of a man and a church committed to the idea of protection, of safe passage, of sanctuary. Because that’s what was going on in his congregation in the 1850s—when he first spoke of the arc being long. In more than a few ways, you see, you and I are standing on Theodore Parker’s shoulders. In 1850, he had welcomed, he and his West Roxbury church, in his own parsonage, the fugitive Ellen Craft, a former slave and a member of his congregation. Together, at great cost to their reputations, they had protected her there. In his parsonage. In that same year, as you may know, the Fugitive Slave Act was debated fiercely (and eventually passed) by Congress in the ‘Compromise of 1850.’
And under that law, as you’ll recall, Northerners were required to round up and turn over men and women (like Ellen Craft) who had managed to escape slavery, so that they be inhumanely returned to their Southern “owners.” The abolition of slavery and the demise of the Fugitive Slave Act was Theodore Parker’s fervent cause, deeply planted in his religious and moral convictions. Because the liberty of one’s body and mind were divinely given, inalienable rights, he saw slavery as the greatest abomination there could be against God and nature, and the most corrupting force in democratic society in these United States.
What would Theodore Parker be preaching today?
Now interestingly, most Boston clergy in the 1850s refused to oppose that legislation. Some even supported it as a constitutional obligation, arguing that it was the only way to "save the Union." Others argued that catching fugitive slaves was somehow sanctioned by scripture. (Show me where they found that one.) But Theodore Parker proclaimed that the Compromise of 1850 violated Christian ideals and threatened all free institutions and governments. He preached and rallied against it, calling for churches and church folk to defy and break the law once passed.
And in time, he helped Ellen Craft to escape to Canada.
And then, in 1854, Theodore Parker and other members of the Vigilance Committee he had founded agitated on behalf of another captured fugitive named Anthony Burns. And yes, that was the young fugitive’s name: Anthony. Anthony. This time, for his organizing, Theodore Parker was arrested and indicted by a grand jury for obstructing the duties of a federal marshal. And sadly, that same federal marshal with hundreds of others soon seized, tried and marched Anthony Burns to Boston harbor. Where he was put on a ship and set back to Viriginia in chains. As many, many in Boston watched.
3.
And that was the moment. That was the context for the sermon. That was the troubling, bewildering, heartbreaking provocation for Theodore Parker’s gospel. It wasn’t a moment of triumph, or wildly satisfying victory. It was a moment of darkness, sadness and loss.
“I do not pretend to understand the moral universe,” he preached in Boston that Sunday. “The arc is a long one. My eye reaches but a little ways. I cannot calculate the curve...” And then, my friends, this: “I can divine it by conscience,” Theodore Parker said. “And from what I see, I am sure it bends toward justice.”
He couldn't see it. Not all of it, but he believed it anyway. And then he kept fighting. Creating sanctuary for fugitives. Advocating, organizing for an end to slavery. Insisting on a vision of pluralism and justice for all.
As President Obama put it this week, Theodore Parker's words were “a declaration of faith, a defiant call, not to abandon hope or give way to fear, but to stay true to our better selves, and true to one another, and to keep fighting...even in the face of cruelty and bitter disappointment, even in the face of impossible odds.”
Recently I have heard dear, dear friends talk about leaving this country, this continent, if things don’t change soon. Politics is no longer simply a dirty word; it's abhorrent to so many of us. I heard a family member last week talk about buying a place in Mexico, and I heard friends at a wedding yesterday talk about moving to Costa Rica or South Africa or Scandinavia where life would surely be better. And I confess that that kind of talk breaks my heart a little bit. It flies in the face of so much I believe.
So this morning, my friends, as a United Church of Christ, let’s recall instead the ministries of Theodore Parker and Martin Luther King. And how they and so many others fought the good fight to make America—imperfect as it is—a holy place, a safe place, and a good place for all of our children and all of our neighbors. And let’s recall with the deepest respect the faithful journeys of Ellen Craft, and Anthony Burns, and yes, the other Antony—beloved by this congregation—who counts on us every day for his safety and his family’s future.
Where there is no vision, the people perish. But by faith, there is indeed a vision. It’s been passed along to us—through generations of believers, and through these past 69 years by the United Church of Christ. It’s a vision of community—multicultural, multiracial, multifaith; it’s a vision of communion—many generations caring for one another in villages of common concern and cities of shared hopes.
And if our politics have wandered off that map, if our dreams are shattered by greed and violence, we cannot, we will not leave it all behind for another place. We will commit to this place.
Because our Christian faith insists on our faithful resistance, on our devotion to the land that does not and has never really belonged to us. But is a gift. A gift to be shared. A gift to be offered as shelter and sanctuary. A gift we cherish as we fight for one another’s freedom, for one another’s dignity and for the future of our many children. So let us dive in all over again. Let us believe with fresh hearts and open minds. And let us build that future together.
Amen and Ashe.
