It was a good Fourth of July. I puttered in the garden until it got too hot to be outside, then took a nap for an hour, a most unusual indulgence. Dan played a round of golf with some friends. Afterward he prepared platters of jumbo shrimp, his Fourth of July specialty.

Toward evening we rode Dan’s old gas powered Harley golf cart, complete with fringe on top to our neighbor’s. It was a little tricky keeping three pounds of shrimp from bouncing out of my lap since Dan seems to regress into his drag racing mode occasionally, but mercifully the ride was very short. We met several new couples and some old friends. It amazes me how much perfect strangers can have in common. In my case it was connecting with fellow teachers and quilters and people who like to eat. And Christians. As our host prayed before the meal, I knew I was in the family and with family.

After dark, we watched local fireworks from the deck. It was  spectacular enough that I was happy to avoid all the Fourth of July congestion in McCall. Flames of color shot up into the sky, unfolding like gargantuan flowers. The detonations resounded and reverberated over the valley and into the peaks like the sound of cannons. The words of our national anthem written decades  after the Declaration of Independence “and the rockets red glare, the bombs bursting in air, gave proof through the night…” were written in the sky above me. America’s Independence was not won without cost.

Late into the night I pondered words which are integral to my American heritage: liberty, freedom, rights. Are they the same and thus, interchangeable? It would seem so but they are not the same at all. Freedom is the ability to make choices and decisions without external coercion. Liberty is the legal, moral, societal   framework in which freedom can function. The Preamble to the Constitution states that clearly and precisely.

The word rights is more perplexing and troublesome because in this  shifting linguistic   era,  language has become the enemy’s post modern playground.  The words may be old and deceptively familiar, but their meanings shift like sand in the wind.  Presently,  we Americans are very much about our  civil,  cultural and moral “rights”  : civil rights, legal rights, the right to life, the right to choose, animal rights, states’ rights, constitutional right, gay rights,  marriage rights, the right to die.  The right to have rights.

What right do we really have?

In the Declaration of Independence, our forefathers  made very clear the new citizen’s inalienable rights and where those rights came from:

“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.”

The Constitution expanded those rights to include others in the Bill of Rights. However, increasingly  these are under  attack from every politically correct  quarter and from people who use  law suits as a way to get what they want when they want it and how they want it. The list of what is “inalienable” has grown very large.

Might it not be that one of the causes of this country’s s present precarious moral, social  and economic brink  is that the tail is wagging the dog? If everything becomes a “right”, then there really is no such thing as a right anymore. If we’re entitled to anything we want, (not need), gluttony and avarice rule.  In the world’s  order ,  the more people receive a right,  the more rights they demand.  Demands breed more demands.

As American Christians we are citizens of another kingdom   living out our lives in this country. We’re in the world but not of it. Thus, we are blessed with freedom and liberty and those inalienable rights legally given to us. We are free to live, pursue happiness, to have liberty. Among our rights are freedom to worship and the right to vote. Or not.

But there is a problem  specific for the American Christian. In Christ we have given up every right to ourselves. In accepting the life of Christ, we surrender everything to Him, including this idea, however good it might be, that somehow we’re entitled. Confessed as a sinner, I have been bought with the price of Jesus’ blood sacrifice and like Paul, bind myself to the Lord as His bondservant. I am only free because He has set me free to do the will of the Father. How different that is from  what I expect as an American. It is a unique  position, a place of opposing principles.   And therein lies the dilemma.

Might it not be that Christians are more in error  than non believers because we pursue our American rights more than we surrender ourselves to the Creator of all our rights.? Jesus lived in His world and accepted all things required of Him, but first and foremost  He gave everything of Himself to the Father. Is it possible that ceaselessly  demanding our  perceived  inalienable American rights has become the “American idol”  we worship. That is not the call of Christ to follow Him. In God’s  very different  order and economy, the more   we give up our right to ourselves, that is the less we demand,  the more we receive.

Reborn into Christ’s  world and  giving up every right to ourselves, in the kingdom where Christ will reign we are already free.  He is our liberty and justice; He is the truth;  in Him  “ eye has not seen and the ear has not heard”  the  happiness God has prepared for us. Bereft of every right to ourselves, we become truly free, liberated to fall before the Lamb singing “Holy, Holy, Holy”, all our rights forgotten in the glory of the living Lord.

EAG