July 5, 2026

So, if you go down I-95 and you go through Northern Virginia, you deal with that absolutely atrocious stretch of road between Springfield and Fredericksburg. Once you get down south of Richmond, just on the other side of Petersburg, you can turn and take I-85 as it goes southwest into Dinwiddie County, Virginia. It's in the Piedmont region.

If you know anything about the geography of the Mid-Atlantic, we basically have three different regions. Right along the coast, you have the Tidewater—that kind of sandy, loose soil that goes all the way to the ocean. You have the region we live in here, the Piedmont—this kind of rocky, hilly, sloping region. And then you have the mountains—the Alleghenies on the far end and the Blue Ridge Appalachians here in the middle. This geography plays a vital and important role in the history of our church tradition as Episcopalians, and in the history of the earliest European settlement of our country.

Down in Dinwiddie County, when you get off the highway and take some back roads, you come across Sappony Church. Sappony Parish features a wood-framed church built between 1725 and 1726 that still stands to this day. Part of that is absolutely mind-blowing to me. It is the resting place of the Reverend Devereux Jarratt and his wife.

Reverend Devereux Jarratt was a prominent and important figure in the life of the Church of England in Virginia prior to the Revolution, and then in the years after the Revolution as we established our own identity as Episcopalians. Jarratt was a proponent and significant supporter of the First Great Awakening, and specifically the Methodist renewal within the Church of England that was being promulgated by John Wesley. He felt very strongly that this gave a vitality and a new energy to the church in Virginia, which by that point was recognized as a staid and rather solemn affair. It was the church of the powerful elite right on the coast. It was not only the church of the elite, but it was quite literally the political power center; the vestries of the churches would act as agents of the state within each of their parish boundaries. Jarratt broke through all of that with a sense of renewed life in the evangelical awakening, offered through the spirit of this new age of religious vitality.

But in 1784, things collapsed. Jarratt, for so long a strong, ardent supporter of Methodism, had promised all of his fellow Episcopalians that they had nothing to worry about. He had assured them that this vital and new way of experiencing God was not a threat to the church, but a deepening of its commitments and convictions. It was not there to undermine the power of the church, but instead to renew it and make it ever stronger for its mission and ministry in the world around it.

However, in 1784, John Wesley ordained a set of elders for the American context in the years immediately after the Revolution. In so doing, he created a fundamental rupture with the newly established Episcopal Church and created essentially a new denomination that would become Methodism in the United States. Jarratt, by that point an old man, essentially retired from his ministry. He kept moving forward, but he was so disheartened and devastated by this promise not kept—by the years that he had dedicated to showing the beauty and the vitality of this faith, only for it to seemingly have been ruptured.

I want to invite us this morning to spend a few minutes reflecting on that, because I think there are, in some ways, some parallels for us. What we experience in our service today—the language and the structure of this traditional form of our prayer book—has a staid and solemn character to it. It can feel like a cold, unapproachable faith that lacks vitality, a spirit of new life, and transformation.

I also think there's a connection this weekend with the observances we have around the 250th anniversary of our country. There is a sense in which this rupture is true for some of us, maybe even many of us, in the ways we are experiencing this moment in our life as citizens. The promises, the foundational beliefs, and the things that we held so vitally true about who we are and who we believed ourselves to be seemingly have been undermined, ruptured, and torn away.

We hear a beautiful passage from Jesus at the end of our reading from St. Matthew's Gospel today: "Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am meek and lowly in heart, and ye shall find rest unto your souls."

As I prepared for this service over the weekend, I couldn't help but think of that incredible poem etched on the side of the Statue of Liberty—Emma Lazarus's 1883 poem, The New Colossus—and its most famous second stanza:

"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she

With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

This is the promise of what we claim to be: the promise of a place of respite, of new life, of transformed life, and of opportunity for goodness, joy, and safety. Yet, I suspect many of us in this moment wonder how true that is of us today. How accurate of a picture is that for who we claim to be as a people? So many people I know have wrestled with how, or even whether, to celebrate this weekend and how to mark this occasion, considering all of the difficulties, challenges, and pains that we are experiencing as a society and a nation today.

And yet, I think we have a forerunner in the example of Devereux Jarratt—one who, even during a great rupture in his life, nevertheless maintained fealty and commitment to the principles of his faith, to the principles of this way of living transformed lives in the spirit of new life in God. Though we were a sort of state apparatus in our historical context, we have a ministry now of truth-telling, of justice-seeking, and, as the Catechism says, of respecting the dignity of every human being and being ministers of that truth to a world so desperate to hear it.

I think in this moment, both as people of faith and as citizens of a country that has the best of ideals in its DNA, we have an invitation once more to recommit ourselves to those ideals. We need to be reminded of them anew. Even in this moment of darkness, we can rest in the assurance of better days ahead, while recognizing that Jesus routinely reminds us through his gospel ministry that we have a call and a mission to embrace and live out those principles. We are called not just to be the proclaimers of this good news, but to embody it in an enfleshed way—to be committed to these principles in our very lives.

Remarking on the 250th anniversary of our country a couple of days ago, the mayor of New York City said this: "What a privilege each of us has to live in a nation that every one of its inhabitants can shape. What a responsibility each of us possesses to prove ourselves worthy of all those who came before. What power each of us holds to bring America ever closer to the greatness so many have seen when they looked upon these shores—the greatness that for 250 years has been America."

By right, in his lived experience and the experience of his people, he has many valid reasons for looking askance at the promises we have made as a country to refugees and to others who have sought new life here. And yet, he doesn't take the tact of criticism. He doesn't take the tact of rejecting who we are as a country or abandoning it altogether. Instead, he invites us to embrace it anew—to embrace the best of who we can be, and to remind us that to embrace that call is to take up our own responsibility to make this country the best that we can make it.

Coming back again to the fundamental point that we are a people of faith—to take St. Paul's words, we are a people set apart. We, too, have a moment and an opportunity to remember our call to be transforming agents in the world around us, to proclaim the goodness and dignity of every human being, and to work for the justice and peace of every people and every place.

So this week, as we celebrate this Sunday, and as we reflect on who we are as a people celebrating the 250 years that we have gathered together under this flag and under this identity of being citizens of the United States of America, may we feel the whole of this call anew. May we champion the best of who we are and be the people of compassion, love, and grace that we most ideally can be and should be, now and always.

Amen