By Bishop Ann Svennungsen

My son-in-law may never live down the fact that he carried a pocket-sized constitution with him all through 12th grade. I’m not sure I’ve even read its 4,543 words (7,591 if you include the amendments).

Maybe now, as we prepare to celebrate July 4th, would be a good time to read (re-read?) those 30 pages. (An additional six pages gets you through the Declaration of Independence).

An equally compelling reason would be to ground ourselves more deeply in our forebears’ vision of democracy. To be sure, that vision was skewed from the start by the sin of white supremacy and racism. For more than 400 years, the fruits of democracy have been perversely distributed based on the color of one’s skin. Still, in the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., our founding documents can serve as a “promissory note to which every American is to fall heir.”

  • All people are created equal (ok, all men, … don’t get me started).
  • All are endowed by the Creator with the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
  • Deriving their power from the consent of the governed, governments are established to secure the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
  • [Our goal] is to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.
  • Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

In a 2018 article for Expert Forum, American University Professor Gregg Ivers said that Martin Luther King, Jr., was “motivated as much by his admiration for the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as he was God’s word in taking the grievances of black America public.”

He called them the “great wells of democracy.” Calling the Boston Tea Party an act of civil disobedience akin to the sit-ins and boycotts of the civil rights movement, King noted that such nonviolent direct action was in the spirit of the American story.

 

IT WAS IN 1963, in front of 250,000 people on the Mall in Washington, that King said that the “magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence” are a “promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was the promise that all, yes, black as well as white, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Whether it’s Len Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton or David McCullogh’s John Adams or Catherine Drinker Bowen’s Miracle at Philadelphia, the incredible stories of the documents that shaped our nation often engender awe. I sometimes think the authors were writing above their ability. I wonder if they were casting a vision beyond what they were imagining.

Like Amos, it was a vision of justice running down like waters embracing every creature in God’s beloved world. That work is far from done. Somehow, in this day, I believe we are called to work above our imagining, our ability, to make this vision real.