Just the Other Day

I can’t believe that our nation’s semiquincentennial is almost upon us. It seems like just the other day that we were celebrating the bicentennial! I never heard the word semiquincentennial until recently, much less used it. Fifty years ago, I knew how to pronounce the word bicentennial and what it meant. It takes effort to remember how to say semiquincentennial. We have the option of calling it the bisesquicentennial or the sestercentennial, but that does not help a lot.

I never took Latin in school, so semi and quin and sester get me confused, especially when you start combining them. Even bi confounds me sometimes. I’m still not sure when bimonthly means twice a month and when it means once every two months! The same with biweekly. Does it mean every two weeks or twice a week? It apparently can mean either, which makes it confusing!

So to avoid confusion the “powers that be” who name this sort of thing have dumbed down the name of this year’s Independence Day celebration to “America 250.” We would not want to require schoolchildren or ordinary Americans to learn a new big word!

Whatever you call it, this July 4^th marks the 250^th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. It is a Super-Duper Independence Day. Or as the White House calls it, One Big Beautiful Opportunity for a MAGA rally and a cage fight!

It does not feel like a special Fourth of July to me. I am not in a celebratory mood, and I am not the only one. America does not feel like celebrating. Just the opposite. It feels to me like the country is in shock. Too much bad stuff has been happening. It is hard to celebrate when you are in grief and shock.

This national holiday feels more like a memorial service, rather than an anniversary or birthday celebration. These days a funeral service is often referred to as a “celebration of life.” I guess we could call it that. We can celebrate the past, while being careful not to whitewash history or edit out the bad parts of our national history. But there is not much to celebrate about the present condition of our nation.

I am old enough to remember America’s Bicentennial celebration. Everyone was excited. People dressed up in colonial garb in church. It was a big deal. Gerald Ford was president, and there was no partisanship in the celebrations. The impeachment and resignation of Nixon was still too fresh in the national memory for that.

I was in seminary in 1976. While vacationing at my family’s summer home in New Hampshire that summer, I was invited to preach at a small church. I preached a sermon I had written for my quarter-time church in rural Kentucky. I still remember what I preached. I can’t remember what I ate for supper last night, but I can remember what I preached fifty years ago!

I chose the text of Jesus’s first sermon in his hometown congregation of Nazareth. Jesus read from the scroll of the prophet Isaiah, who prophesied seven centuries earlier:

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

In my sermon I talked about the biblical celebration of the Jubilee Year. I entitled my sermon “Jesus’ Declaration of Independence.” It is a great scripture text, and I expounded the text the best I could at the time. It was one of my first sermons, so I am sure it was not so great. Yet the congregation expressed polite appreciation afterwards.

Jesus’ first sermon was not as well-received by his hometown congregation. They kicked him out of the building and attempted to throw him off a nearby cliff. I suspect that if Jesus preached the same message today, he would receive the same type of reception in most congregations.

King Charles III of Great Britian spoke to a joint session of Congress recently. In his remarks he reminded us that “the modern relationship between our two nations and our own peoples spans not merely 250 years, but over four centuries. It is extraordinary to think that I am the 19th in our line of sovereigns to study, with daily attention, the affairs of America.” He went on to say, “The Founding Fathers were bold and imaginative rebels with a cause. Two hundred and fifty years ago, or, as we say in the United Kingdom ‘just the other day,’ they declared Independence.”

The king put our present troubles in perspective. The long history of England dwarfs the short sprint of the American Experiment. Two and a half centuries is “just the other day” to the British. Our nation’s history is an even shorter time when viewed from the perspective of the human history of the Americas, or the 300,000 years of Homo sapiens, or the two million years of the Homo Genus.

Compared to the Earth’s 4.5-billion-year history, human existence is just a blink of an eye. If the history of our planet were compressed into a single calendar year, modern humans wouldn’t appear until around 11:30 PM on December 31^st. So it is all a matter of perspective. At the moment things seem grim in our country. But just wait a day, and things will change.

It took a humorous remark spoken by an English monarch to put the present plight of the United States in a different light. We need to see the present crisis in our democracy from a bigger perspective. Two hundred and fifty years is “just the other day.” These present troubles are temporary. This too shall pass. It may pass sooner than we think. There are hints that the tide may already be changing.

This is the way of history. The tides of history ebb and flow. Yin and yang flow ceaselessly on. The unjust rise to power and fall under the weight of their own hubris. It is just a matter of time. It is unfortunate that we are seeing an ebbing of rights exactly when the nation is celebrating a special anniversary. It makes it harder to celebrate. But in the midst of the sad state of our nation, we can celebrate a greater truth.

The greater truth is that we are part of a Reality bigger than these United States of America. We are part of a larger movement than Western culture or the human race. We are part of a bigger whole than this planet or solar system. Bigger than the universe. We are part of the Biggest Whole imaginable. All of history is but a wisp of smoke in comparison to eternity.

Years from now this present moment will be seen as “just the other day.” When all modern nations are ancient history, what is eternal will remain. That lesson of the transitoriness of human existence is something to celebrate! And it took an English king, who is also the Head of the Church of England, to remind Americans of it! That is the irony of this Fourth of July.

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