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THANK YOU, MR. JOHN ADAMS
In the desire to get in the spirit of the event we celebrate this fourth of July weekend, I have revisited David McCullough’s wonderful biography of John Adams 1776. A couple of years ago, I heard on National Public Radio that of all the books of biography then on the market, McCullough’s work on Adams was a best seller. Some day I will have to pick up his Pulitzer Prize winning book, “Truman.”
You have to admire the way historian McCullough gives us colorful snapshot pictures on the character of John Adams, culled from the voluminous correspondence still extant between John and his wife, Abigail. For instance, John Adams was ambitious to excel, to make himself known, but he had nonetheless recognized at an early stage that happiness comes not from fame and fortune and all such things, but from a habitual contempt of them. Doesn’t that sound like a good Calvinist from the 18th century? Adams rather prized the Roman ideal of honor, and in this, as in much else, he and Abigail were in perfect accord. Fame, without honor, in her view would be “like a faint meteor gliding through the sky, shedding only transient light.” More than one sub-prime lender in the past two years could well have benefited from that insight, with thousands of people’s mortgage payments in much sounder shape.
Adams was a close observer of human folly as displayed in everyday life, fired by an inexhaustible love of books and scholarly reflection. He read Cicero, Tacitus, and others of his Roman heroes in Latin, and Plato Thucydides in the original Greek, which he considered the supreme language. This makes my recent attempts at resurrecting French in preparation of visiting our son and family in Paris in a couple of weeks, small potatoes. He also loved English poetry, which he took with him on his considerable journeys. He would tell his son, Johnny, “You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket.”
All this contributed greatly to his spirited determination and eloquence in the cause of American rights, liberties, and freedom in which he played no small, if not the leading, part.
But let's come closer to that event which we celebrate this weekend.
July 1, 1776, 232 years ago this past Tuesday, was a hot day in Philadelphia. To make matters worse, a storm struck with thunder, lightning, and pelting rain like our 4th on Friday night. Delegates to the Continental Congress were meeting in the state house, and a fateful decision was about to be made. Adams rose to speak, logically, clearly, carefully, and “looking into the future, saw a new nation, a new time.” This is what he said. “Objects of the most stupendous magnitude, measures in which the lives and liberties of millions born and unborn are now before us. We are in the very midst of revolution, the most complete, unexpected, and remarkable of any in the history of the world.”
Two New Jersey delegates, Frances Hopkinson and the Rev. John Witherspoon arrived late, after Adams had been speaking for nearly an hour and was concluding. Witherspoon was a Presbyterian minister, the only clergy there. He was president of the College of New Jersey, later Princeton, and he asked if Mr. Adams would mind repeating his address. Adam’s good naturedly objected that he wasn’t much of an actor, but other delegates urged him, and Adams began again and delivered the hour-long speech a second time.
The debate lasted nine hours. A preliminary vote on the matter of declaring independence from Great Britain was taken, and nine colonies voted in favor. A motion to adjourn for the night was adopted. The tension at the City Tavern, where many of the delegates were lodging and where they talked long into the night, increased as word reached Philadelphia of the sighting of a hundred British ships off New York.
They began again on the morning of July 2, at 9:00 a.m. At 10:00 a.m., the storm returned outside. A vote was taken. No colony opposed the motion. The colonies had declared their independence. McCullough reflects: "It was John Adams more than anyone else, who made it happen. Further, he seems to have understood more clearly than any what a momentous day it was and in the privacy of two long letters to Abigail, he poured out his feeling, as did not one else."
Adams wrote this to his wife: “The second of July, 1776 will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated as the Day of Deliverance by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illumination from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever more.”
The Continental Congress discussed the matter and refined the document for two more days. They debated over every word. Jefferson wrote these lines. “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. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
Don’t you just love that slice of history? Don’t you love the fact that a Presbyterian minister from Scotland was there, played an important role and signed the declaration, committing an act of treason against the crown? John Knox would have been proud of him! Don’t you love the constant references to the Creator, to the will and providence of God, and the invocation of the idea that freedom is at the heart of the whole enterprise?
They voted for a final time on July the 4th, and lined up and signed it, and sent it out for the world to hear.
Freedom is at the heart of it all. So why raise all this in a Christian church, other than it is timely for this weekend and historically interesting? Just this. The Christian faith in which John Adams was a profound believer, speaks of freedom. Jesus says, “if the Son of Man makes you free, you will be free, indeed.” Paul says, “for freedom Christ has set us free. For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters, only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love becomes slaves to one another.”
The Christian definition of freedom, because it is freedom in Christ, defined by his self-giving life, differs fundamentally from the popular, cultural, secular definition. The modern definition of freedom has to do with my autonomy, my independence, my sovereignty. So freedom in the abstract sounds like the right to do whatever you please. But those brave souls who signed the Declaration of Independence weren’t thinking about declaring their right to do whatever they pleased for their own self-realization and gratification. They were declaring independence in order to become a new nation, and perhaps more than anyone else in history, they knew that freedom from external political coercion was freedom to serve the common good, and that it was going to require serious sacrifice; people were going to die for it, and fight to defend it, and work very hard to maintain it.
Perhaps the late Thomas Merton put it all together when he observed: “I do not find in myself the power to be happy doing just what I like… On the contrary, if I do nothing but what pleases my fancy, I will be miserable most of the time. This would not be so if my will had not been created to use its own freedom in the love of others.”
John Adams hoped that the birth of freedom would be commemorated in churches. And a fitting way for that hope to be fulfilled is for churches to remind the world that freedom to do whatever one wants to do is simply license and is ultimately self-destructive, that real freedom is the liberty to give oneself fully and generously to others.
That’s the greatest reversal of all. Real freedom is found in the act of serving another person, a church, an institution, a county, a cause greater than yourself.
David McCullough wrote: “What in another time and society might be taken as platitudes about public service, were to John and Abigail Adams a life-long creed.
On behalf of a nation, thank you, John and Abigail Adams.