When worship ended on Sunday, September 16, 2001, a man rushed toward me, his hands rifling through pages of a hymnal, asking why we’d not sung “God Bless America.” Then a bit befuddled he asked “What number is it anyway?” I said “Sir, it’s not in the hymnal. Irving Berlin wrote it for radio. It’s a little short for a hymn anyhow.” I think I left him more befuddled.
Which American songs are in our hymnal and which aren’t? I am quite fond of “America the Beautiful” (#696), with its eloquent awe over America’s beauty (“amber waves of grain,” “purple mountain majesties,” “alabaster cities”). I wholeheartedly wish we would pray “God shed his grace on thee,” on America that is. Grace is mercy, and we are more than desperately in need of God’s mercy. Grace also heals, and makes us more like Christ. The hymn’s last stanza includes “God mend thine every flaw.” No triumphalism here. A grateful notice of the beauty of home coupled with a plea for grace, mercy and healing: just lovely.
“My Country, ‘Tis of Thee” (#697), in addition to praising nature (“rocks and rills, woods and templed hills”), gives us the rousing “Let freedom ring,” which Martin Luther King deployed as his great repeated cadence in his “I Have a Dream” speech in August, 1963. I’m pondering the 4th stanza’s phrasing, “Freedom’s holy light.” As we champion and celebrate freedom, can we perceive it as a light – and a holy light?
“The Star-Spangled Banner” and “God Bless the USA” aren’t in our hymnals. “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” used to be in, but is no more. I wasn’t privy to the reasons for that decision. It was composed by the abolitionist Julia Ward Howe in 1861, as she was inspired hearing soldiers singing “John Brown’s Body lies a-mouldering in the grave, his soul is marching on.” She glimpsed in Union army campfires images of those profound, rather scary judgment texts in Scripture: Isaiah 63, Revelation 14 and 19. Her song is militaristic, and so clearly about one moment in history, yet a critical moment when all the carnage did spell the end of slavery.
“Lift Every Voice and Sing” is in our hymnal (#519), and is known as the Black National Anthem. The words, written by the great preacher James Weldon Johnson (and set to music by his brother Rosamond), are stirring, picking up again on liberty “ringing.” It’s a hopeful lunge forward out of “the dark past,” spoken of as “Stony the road we trod, bitter the chastening rod, felt in the days when hope unborn had died.” “Yet!” “Yet with a steady beat, have not our weary feet come to the place for which our fathers sighed?” Moving. The last stanza should be a prayer for all of us this July 4: “God of our weary years, God of our silent tears, thou who hast brought us thus far on the way… Keep us forever in the path, we pray. Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met thee… shadowed beneath thy hand, may we forever stand, true to our God, true to our native land.”
Theologically, “This is My Song” (#437) is spot on, singing to “God of all the nations” – “This is my home, the country where my heart is… but other hearts in other lands are beating with hopes and dreams as true and high as mine.”
Back to “God Bless America.” Popular blogger John Pavlovitz wrote that God doesn’t bless America for the same reason God doesn’t curse America: God doesn’t see America. Relying on John 3:16 (“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son”), Pavlovitz reminds us that God’s love is “universe-sized, and yet it is individually delivered, bigger than a continent or nation of border or land or country.”
Certainly, God’s blessing implies we are to live as blessed – which isn’t prosperity and comfort for us, or any superiority above other nations and peoples, but responsibility, displaying and enacting God’s goodness, even being a “light to the nations.” God’s blessing would move us to live more God-like, Christ-like lives and share distributing the blessings God has blessed us to share with others. So as we’d pray “God bless America,” we pray “God bless Ukraine,” “God bless Haiti,” or “God bless Gaza” – or “God bless those in our own country who aren’t feeling so blessed.”