What Makes a Nation Great?

The Fourth of July is a great holiday — a time for parades and fireworks to celebrate our nation’s birth, a time to give thanks for the many blessings which we enjoy in this land.

For most people it is also a three-day weekend, a time to savor the joys of summer, or just to relax and rest a bit.

Houses of worship also commemorated the holiday by praying for our nation, giving thanks to God for the blessings we have — and repenting for the ways we as a nation fall short of what God would have us be.

In the Episcopal Church, the Scripture readings proscribed for Independence Day call us to pause in our celebrations to reflect on what makes a nation great in God’s eyes.

The first reading is from Deuteronomy, where Moses reminds the people what is important to God just before they enter the long-awaited promised land.

 “The Lord your God is the great God, mighty and awesome . . . who executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and who loves the strangers, providing them food and clothing.

“You also shall love the stranger,” Moses tells them, “for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”

Widows, orphans, strangers, or as the Bible also says, resident aliens.

Time and time again in Scripture we are told that God measures the greatness of a nation not by its military might, not by the wealth of its richest citizens, not by its technological or scientific accomplishments.

God’s judgment of a nation is based on very different indicators — how a nation treats the poorest of the poor, the ones Jesus calls “the least of these.” They include the same categories today as in Moses’ time — the widows, the orphans, and the resident aliens.

Those groups are not doing so well in our nation today.            

Widows and orphans most often means women and children who do not have a man to help care for them. Throughout history and throughout the world, single women with children are the poorest of the poor.            

Today, even families with husbands and fathers are having a difficult time. A recent "60 Minutes" segment reported that close to 25 percent of our nation’s children live below the poverty line.            

That’s hard to comprehend. Almost one in four children in one of the wealthiest nations in the world lives in poverty.           

And the reality is worse than that. The poverty line, as defined by the government, is a family of four living on less than $22,000 a year.

Make a few dollars more than $22,000 and you are not classified as poor, although that may be news to people living in those situations.

The "60 Minutes" story focused on Seminole County, Florida, home to Disney World, advertised as “the happiest place on earth.”

In the last school year, more than 1,000 students in this county lost their homes. School administrators estimate that between five and 15 more children in their district become homeless every day.

The "60 Minutes" reporter talked to a group of kids who had lost their homes or who were in danger of becoming homeless. Some of those who still had shelter had little else. Their parents were often forced to choose between electricity and food.

Kids talked with great authority about studying by candles and flashlights. Others knew firsthand what it means to be hungry.

“You can’t sleep,” one boy said. “Your stomach hurts because it doesn’t have any food in it. Your stomach is like a black hole. It’s empty.”

Homeless shelters are not an option for many of these families because most of them do not allow males and females to stay together. Husbands and wives have to split up. Sons cannot stay with their mothers or daughters with their fathers.

For many who have lost their homes, the last step before homelessness is an extended-stay motel.In Seminole County, the school bus stops at a dozen or more of those establishments.

We don’t have to go as far as Florida to find families living in these desperate straits. Not too long ago a man called my church for help. He and his wife had both lost their jobs and been evicted from their apartment.

His wife and daughters found room in a females-only shelter. He and his 4-year-old son were sleeping in their car behind a Home Depot. They needed money for gas and food to get them to Virginia, where they could live with a relative and look for work.

I’ve also gotten calls for help from people living in extended-stay motels, like the ones featured on "60 Minutes."

Those motels have been in the news here recently, as well. Down the highway in Lawrenceville, City Councilman Tony Powell noticed a school bus picking up children in front of an extended-stay motel. County officials estimate about 200 children live in such places.

“This is a problem,” Powell says.

And he has the solution — not to help the families who are staying in the motels, but to kick them out.

When Powell was city attorney in 1997, he pushed an ordinance limiting motel stays to 45 days. It has never been enforced. He plans to change that.

“It needs to be enforced, period,” he says.

I wonder what is Christian or patriotic about that attitude.

Resident aliens, the other group whose treatment God uses to judge a nation, have also been in the news this week. Georgia’s harsh new immigration law went into effect on July 1, but it’s impact is already being felt.

At Path Academy in Brookhaven, a charter middle school that serves many immigrant children, almost 70 percent of students are Hispanic and 88 percent are eligible for free or reduced-cost meals.

In a recent news article, teachers there say their students, including those here legally, are terrified by the new law, making them distracted and difficult to motivate.

Some students refused to attend a long-anticipated field trip to Washington, D.C., this year out of fear their parents would be deported while they were gone.

What is even more distressing than these situations is the fact that so few people in authority in this country seem to be concerned about the plight of the poorest among us.

Tax breaks for the wealthiest individuals and corporations matter much more than help for those at the bottom of the ladder.

Recently I was asked to add my name to a letter from pastors across the country calling on Congress to examine its priorities. Here, in part, is what the letter says:

“As Christians, we believe the moral measure of the debate is how the most poor and vulnerable people fare. We look at every budget proposal from the bottom up — how it treats those Jesus called ‘the least of these.’

“They do not have powerful lobbies, but they have the most compelling claim on our consciences and common resources. The Christian community has an obligation to help them be heard, to insist that programs that serve the most vulnerable in our nation are protected.”

This weekend when the prayer “God bless America” will rightfully be on the lips of millions, I also offer this prayer, author unknown, for this country we love:

Grant us, Lord God, a vision of our land as your love would make it:

- a land where the weak are protected, and none go hungry or poor;

- a land where the benefits of life are shared, and everyone can enjoy them;

- a land where different races and cultures live in tolerance and mutual respect;

- a land where peace is built with justice, and justice is guided by love.

      And give us the inspiration and courage to build it, through Jesus Christ our Lord.
     Amen.