Yes, I know, I'm late on posting this. But, since this is still kind of the Fourth of July weekend and I really didn't want to wait a year to post it, here it is.
The fourth of July is a strange holiday in many ways if you stop to think about it. In a Cinderella style upset worthy of any NCAA Final Four series, a loosely knit, mostly untrained alliance of small nation states challenged the most powerful nation on earth, pulled off the win, and we’ve celebrated ever since. You might imagine that the date remembered for generations would be the date of the final victory, or maybe the date the loser officially conceded defeat. This holiday, however, is as exceptional as America itself.
There probably is not one reason everyone would agree on as to why we celebrate our Independence in early July; after all, the subject here is history, not math. But why not early September instead, when the British gave up by signing the Treaty of Paris, or October when Washington won the last major battle of the Revolution at Yorktown?
One reason is the Declaration of Independence, whose eloquent wording has inspired generations, and still causes awe today. “People don’t talk like that anymore,” quips the character Ben Gates in Disney’s National Treasure. And it’s true.
But Independence Day is for more than paying homage to a bygone era of promulgatory excellence. In America content has often trumped form, and that is certainly the case here, despite the noble embodiment of the Declaration’s ideals.
Some might say celebrating the fourth of July instead of some other significant date is kind of like Babe Ruth’s famous calling his own shot. With two strikes and a booing opposition, what’s remembered isn’t so much the amazingly long home run hit, but the fact that he called it. The Founders were bold enough to declare their intentions to a world that justifiably had its doubts.
In the end, the pessimists may have a point. None of those reasons quite seem to justify blowing up millions of dollars worth of colorful explosives every summer. And it’s still true that there would be no celebration on the 4th of July if Washington had not taken Yorktown, which would have been unlikely if the French had not come, or if a thousand other things hadn’t happened just so.
But there could have been no end without a beginning - a beginning where men and women put incredible faith and effort behind ideals and a God that may have seemed then to only exist on paper and in their hearts. And that’s where the Declaration and the fourth of July get their staying power.
People in tough situations, and that could be many of us nowadays, want to believe that despite the odds they can come out on top, that despite the depravity around them that God and good exist, and that their sacrifices can make a difference for their children. And so, the Fourth of July is a celebration of the future as much as of the past. To celebrate those ideas is to express faith and hope for what can be and how we are a part of it, not simply commemorate what already took place.
It would be hard to find a better reason to celebrate.
