The Sixth Sunday after Pentecost
July 5, 2026
Did you know that there have been two organizations with overall responsibility for planning and conducting the commemoration of America’s 250 years of independence? The older one is the U.S. Semiquincentennial Commission, established by Congress in 2016 to plan and orchestrate the commemoration through “America 250,” [show “America 250” hat] a bipartisan group that worked with the federal agencies, especially the Department of the Interior, which has authority over our National Parks, Monuments, and Historic Sites, and with state and local governments, civic groups, and the Smithsonian Institution. America 250’s leadership is inclusive, with senators and representatives, cabinet secretaries, academic historians, and other prominent Americans who fully reflected our national diversity.[i]
The other organization is “Freedom 250,” a newly created subsidiary within the National Park Foundation, which Congress created in 1967 as a tax exempt organization to conduct private fundraising for the National Park Service. In nearly 60 years the foundation has raised more than $1 billion for our national parks. When it became clear that America 250’s commemoration would be objective, including recognition of events that we might prefer to forget or ignore, the Trump Administration created Freedom 250 in 2025 to also receive a transfer of $100 million of the congressional appropriation originally planned for America 250 to plan and conduct the subjective commemoration President Trump wanted. Freedom 250 aligned itself with President’s Trump’s Executive Order of March 27, 2025 “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” which directed Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, among other things, to
(iii) take action, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law, to ensure that all public monuments, memorials, statues, markers, or similar properties within the Department of the Interior’s jurisdiction do not contain descriptions, depictions, or other content that inappropriately disparage Americans past or living (including persons living in colonial times), and instead focus on the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people or, with respect to natural features, the beauty, abundance, and grandeur of the American landscape.
Secretary Burgum’s guidance to implement this directed the National Park Service to encourage visitors to inform the staff of “any signs or other information that are negative about either past or living Americans.”
Our nation has had great achievements, and much (but not all) of our national story has truly been an inspiration to people throughout the world, especially Thomas Jefferson’s words in the Declaration of Independence:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government.”
The exercise of these rights by those who signed the Declaration of Independence was costly. The historian T.R. Fehrenbach wrote that
Every signer was proscribed as a traitor; everyone was hunted. Most were driven into flight; most were at one time or another barred from their families or homes. Most were offered immunity, freedom, rewards, their property, or the lives and release of loved ones to break their pledged word or to take the King’s protection…Nine signers died of wounds or hardships during the [war.] Five were captured or imprisoned, in some cases with brutal treatment. The wives, sons, and daughters of others were killed, jailed, mistreated, persecuted, or left penniless. One was driven from his wife’s deathbed and lost all his children. The houses of 12 signers were burned to the ground. Seventeen lost everything they owned…Their fortunes were forfeited, but their honor was not. No Signer defected or changed his stand throughout the darkest hours.[ii]
As our reflection paragraph for this liturgical season reminds us, God suffered for those men and their families and with those men and their families, as God always suffers with people everywhere who seek to gain or maintain their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, especially with those who are suffering. God is always with us.
The Declaration of Independence listed 27 grievances against King George III for usurping the rights of the colonists through Parliament’s laws. The last one blamed the king for having “excited domestic insurrections amongst us,” meaning the British had encouraged rebellions by enslaved Black Americans but there is no evidence that this happened. It’s a reference to the promise of Lord Dunmore, the royal governor of Virginia, made in 1775 after fighting had broken out in Massachusetts, that enslaved men in the colony who joined the British army would be granted freedom. Some enslaved men him at his word, managed to escape from their plantations, and joined the British army on islands in Chesapeake Bay. When the peace treaty was signed in 1783 the British navy transported most of these men, along with their wives and children, to Nova Scotia and Jamaica. But those who were left behind on the docks when the British navy departed were taken back into slavery by men that George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and other plantation owners had sent.
Many students I give tours to know that the southern signers of the Declaration of Independence supported slavery, but they usually don’t know that many of the northern signers in shipbuilding, shipping, and banking businesses also supported the slave trade from Africa to North America, and the shipment of rice, wheat, and corn from southern plantations to Britain. Nor do they know that at least two-thirds of the signers had been slave owners, either previously or currently, including Caesar Rodney of Delaware, whose statue in Wilmington had been removed from a square after the George Floyd demonstrations, but has now been installed on Freedom Plaza on Pennsylvania Avenue as part of Freedom 250.
My tour groups’ knowledge of Black Americans’ struggle for equality is limited: they know who Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks are, but they don’t know who Medgar Evers, Daisy Bates, or Barbara Johns were. They don’t know about sunset towns, the Tulsa race riot, the violence against the Freedom Riders, about racial covenants in homeowner deeds, or about racial discrimination in our military.
God suffered for and with those enslaved families who fortunately gained their freedom outside the U.S., God suffered for and with enslaved families who never gained freedom, and God continues to suffer with their descendants who experience racism since their ancestors’ emancipation. God is always with us.
This same grievance in the Declaration about encouraging domestic insurrections also claimed that King George III
“endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”
But the British government didn’t create warfare on the American frontier. The violence was primarily due to the huge influx of White colonists who had responded to the widespread news throughout the colonies and western Europe that there was good farmland in the Ohio River Valley. They began settling there –our first immigrant “invasion”– creating the rivalry between the British colonial governments and the French fur traders and their Indian allies that produced the French and Indian War. In the Royal Proclamation of 1763, following the Treaty of Paris that ended that war, Britain prohibited colonial settlement west of the crest of the Alleghany Mountains, reserving all the land to the Mississippi River for Native Americans. This was the first reservation for Indian tribes in North America, and the treaty – like all the other treaties creating reservations in America – our colonial ancestors broke by establishing settlements on that land. Yet we blamed, and many of our history books still blame, the Native Americans who attempted to protect their land with violence, beginning in 1774 with Lord Dunmore’s War and again a few weeks just before the Declaration was signed.
God suffered for and with Native Americans and the settlers and continues to suffer for and with their descendants. God is always with us.
In August, Sharon and I will be driving to Wisconsin for vacation. On the way home we’ll stop at the second oldest European missionary settlement in Ohio, the village of Gnadenhutten, settled in 1772 along with the villages of Schoenbrunn and Salem. The name Gnadenhütten means “huts of grace” or “mercy huts” and figuratively “log tabernacle.” Its residents were pacifist Lenni Lenape (Delaware) Indians who had been converted to Christianity by Moravian missionaries from Germany, who moved with their converts from the Delaware River area east and southeast of Scranton to avoid encroachment from settlers and the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy. In Ohio they were called the Moravian Lenape.
Moravians were descendants of the followers of Jan Hus, a would-be reformer of the Catholic Church a hundred years before Martin Luther in what is now the Czech Republic. After the Catholic Church burned Hus to death as a heretic, the Moravians emigrated to Pennsylvania, establishing Bethlehem, and to Old Salem (now Winston-Salem), North Carolina. The hallmarks of their faith were and are their piety and their pacificism.
In September of 1781, the Wyandot and Lenape tribes allied to the British forced the Moravian Lenape to resettle in a new town on the Sandusky River in northwest Ohio. Due to a lack of food, in early February of 1782 a group of them were allowed to return to Gnadenhütten to harvest crops and collect stored food. The next month, 160 Pennsylvania militia, many of whose families had been killed by other non-pacifist Lenape and other tribes allied to the British, arrived there and pretended to be friendly, so the Moravian Lenape fed them. The militia promised to take them to Fort Pitt (now Pittsburgh) for protection, but then demanded that they hand over the guns and hatchets that the Indians used for hunting. After they complied, the militia accused them of committing raids against American settlers, which the Moravian Lenape forcefully denied, explaining their Christian faith made them pacifists. The militia nevertheless held a council and voted, 142 to 18, to kill the Indians whether or not they were pacifists.
The militia told the Moravian Lenape of the vote’s outcome but gave them permission to prepare for their deaths by praying and singing hymns in separate buildings for men and women. Through the night as the Indians prayed and sang, the militia got drunk on the Indians’ communion wine, which they’d stolen. In the morning the 95 Indians were led to killing huts, one for men, and the other for the women and children. Their hands were tied, they were stunned by blows to their heads from butchers’ mallets, and then they were killed with hatchets and scalped — 28 men, 29 women, and 36 children. The militia piled the bodies in the buildings, plundered their food and possessions — It took 80 horses to carry it all — and set fire to the village, burning it to the ground.
Two of the Moravian Lenape boys somehow escaped and spread word of the massacre. Although the missionaries confirmed it, the militia denied it. Many settlers nearby approved of their actions and so they were never charged with a crime. Moravian Lenape survivors in nearby villages fled to Canada; some later returned for a few years and then moved to Kansas where their descendants remain.
God suffered for and with the Moravian Lenape who died and shares the suffering of the tribe’s descendants. God is always with us.
I plan to pray at the historical marker there and leave a donation. Why do I bring this up? Because my grandmother knew Moravians from Bethlehem, because our Seekers Racial and Ethnic Justice Ministry Team has begun an effort at reparations and I want to do my part, because I want to honor their assurance that God would be with them in their suffering.
In October we Seekers intend to celebrate 50 years of our status as an independent Christian congregation within the tradition of the Church of the Saviour. I am glad that Seekers Church has taken on the process of reexamining ourselves in preparation for this anniversary. With special thanks to our weave team, our four groups have done a lot of interesting work looking at our documents and revising them or creating new ones as needed for our current situation. Some thought has been given to possible new structures. Some discussions have considered revising our core beliefs and practices. It hasn’t been easy – we have had differences of opinion within our groups and to the extent information has been shared between them, differences of opinion have arisen there too.
I wonder, though, whether our process has been deep enough. Our present Seekers community has been shaped in part by our past; “our past is not even past.” Perhaps as part of our process everyone in Seekers should read or reread the books Elizabeth O’Connor wrote about the Church of the Saviour: Call to Commitment and Journey Inward, Journey Outward, and our past as Seekers Church in Marjory Bankson’s, Stalking the Spirit in a Do-It-Yourself Church. it. Like other longtime members of Seekers, I remember some of the challenges we faced, the difficulty in communicating our deepest feelings and understanding of what we were trying to do, the hurt feelings of those whose ideas we didn’t adopt, and the efforts at peacemaking we undertook. There was suffering. God was with us.
Stalking the Spirit was published 12 years ago. It may be time for an updated edition. Would anyone like to lead a class on Stalking the Spirit? Would anyone like to take on writing the update? What new challenges have we faced? Where have we succeeded and where have we fallen short of our ideals? Whose feelings have we honored and whose have we hurt? Whose gifts have we evoked and used and whose gifts have we failed to honor? Do we need to take time for take an honest accounting? Do we need to have a period of confession and atonement?
Can we make this small part of the Body of Christ that we love so dearly into something better? And dare we, like the signers of the Declaration of Independence, risk everything in the attempt – “with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor”? For God will be with us, delighting in us, and sharing any suffering we face. God is always with us.
May it be so.
[i] https://america250.org/about-america250/a250-leadership
[ii] T.R. Fehrenbach, Greatness to Spare (Princeton, MJ: D. Van Nostrand Company, Inc., 1968., 2000, p. 247.