Independence Day 2025

 Lectionary: 381

...you will go to my own land and to my kindred
to get a wife for my son Isaac."
The servant asked him:
"What if the woman is unwilling to follow me to this land?
Should I then take your son back to the land from which you migrated?"
"Never take my son back there for any reason," Abraham told him.

On this Independence Day, our lectionary gives us an abbreviated version of Genesis, chapters 23 and 24. As we hear it, the passage concerns the transition of God's covenant with Abraham and Sarah to Isaac and Rebecca. That is certainly a major concern as we know that the loss of a tradition requires only the neglect of one generation. Moses urged his people to "drill these commandments into your children" lest they lose their faith in God. If that happens, they will rediscover their former drudgery in another land, perhaps Palestine or Babylon. 

But this attenuation of chapters 23 and 24 neglects another tradition that demands our attention on Independence Day, particularly as democracy is threatened in the United States, and has been overcome in many parts of the world. Rebecca. and not Isaac, is the protagonist of Chapter 24. 

Abraham recognized Isaac's simplicity; and when he decided to find a wife for his son, he turned the project over to an intrepid, unnamed servant. That servant encountered a charming, young woman who showed much initiative. Without asking or being asked, she provided water for his camels and, over her family's objections, decided to go immediately with the servant to meet Isaac. 

Genesis says nothing about Abraham's blessing of Isaac, but we do hear the blessing her family gave to Rebecca. And Genesis then tells us how Rebecca and the son she favored, Jacob, tricked the gullible old man Isaac, and swindled Esau of the privilege of first born son. God's promise to Abraham passed to Jacob due to a woman's initiative. This apparently was God's plan all along -- and the rest is history.

"Remember the ladies!" Abigail, the wife of John Adams urged him as he went off to Philadelphia and the Congressional Congress. The delegates in 1776 had other matters, more pressing if not more important, and American women were not accorded the right to vote until 1920. But the Spirit of Rebecca persists even yet in American politics and the world. They are still here, still demanding, and will not be ignored. 

If freedom means only liberation of American white men from English rule and not the right of women and other minorities to participate in decisions that affect them, freedom becomes a hollow word. 

Democracy, as I was taught, honors the rights and responsibilities of citizens. But in today's America, many support a fictitious and arbitrary definition of citizenship, and say it applies only to some. For them, the word citizen doesn't include those who dwell in the city, but is rooted in vague opinions about who we think should belong. 

Failure to recognize the dignity, willingness, abilities, and responsibilities of any minority must lead only to unrest and violence; whereas welcoming and receiving their intelligent input may lead to peace and prosperity. Even a prison warden must see that. l have watched within my lifetime the expansion of that recognition even to people with severe learning disabilities; it makes little sense to deprive intelligent, capable, willing, and generous persons the right to participate due to their uncertain origin. 

Nor will satisfaction come when everyone is alike. When African-American, Asian-American, and Native American people become White People the tensions will only be worse. And when women become men, expect a catastrophe of biblical proportions. 

Clearly, those who intentionally discourage and frustrate everyone's participation disagree with me. But the problem has become a crisis and will not be resolved by vindictiveness and violence. Tear gas, Molotov cocktails, assassins' bullets are the choice of cowards; they settle nothing. 

On July 4 we pray for the intrepid spirit of Rebecca, a restless, migrant woman who welcomed uncertainty and found love in a foreign land.