Sermon | The Rev. Canon Ranjit K. Mathews | June 21, 2026

The Rev. Cn. Ranjit K. Mathews

Preaching series: America, America

June 21st, 2026: 7:45am & 10:30am

Trinity on the Green, New Haven

Gracious God, I pray that you would take our hands and feet and that you would work through them, our minds and think through them and that you would take our hearts and set them on fire for the Realm of God. It is good to be here with at Trinity on the Green, and I am grateful to Luk and Heidi for the kind invitation to be a part of the America, America preaching series. I have long admired Jon Meacham, as a historian and as an analyst. The fact that he is a faithful Episcopalian, doesn’t hurt either. And that is one of the reasons why I selected, “The Soul of America,” as my my book of choice.

Meacham moves into this writing with a deep, deep appreciation of our contradictions as a country, of a dialectic that moved through last week, where last Sunday we celebrate Flag day, and then this past Friday, we commemorate Juneteenth. As we celebrate, as citizens of the United States the 250 years of the signing of the declaration of Independence, we also have to tell the more factual truth, buried within that reality. If we are honest, we have truly only been a democracy since 1965, when African-Americans were granted the right to vote, which means that this country has only been a multi-racial democracy for 61 years. And that I think is part of our collective problem as a country. There is a tendency to pass on myths without scrutinizing them. It is in this moment, that as Episcopalians and most of us as citizens of this country we can more clearly lean into truth telling about who we are…as a nation. In his latest Podcast, the writer Ezra Klein calls this time, “dystopian,” and that may be altogether correct, but as people of faith, this precise moment is also “apocalyptic,” in the very real and literal sense of the word, which means in the Greek, “an un-veiling.”

This moment is unveiling for us the very myths that we have parroted for so long.  

As Episcopalians, it is on us to be courageous enough, as we pray that God would make us in the post communion prayer to live into the Gospel today, that the Gospel comes to set us against one another, father against son, mother against daughter. Are you with me, my siblings? We must realize that there are times where the both/and does not work, that we need to tell the truth about our reality. This is the Gospel, my friends. As Archbishop Tutu said so many years ago, which still rings for today, “if you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If the elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse, and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.” For only when we tell the truth about our reality, and discard the myths that have precariously lifted up up; can we truly lament, and then and only then, can true repentance happen.

Meacham scours history, of course in the Soul of America, and he offers a very nuanced and deep understanding of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr – a persistent Christian, who didn’t let us wade in our myths. And in his last Sunday sermon in Washington, King said, “it seems I can hear the God of history saying, “that was not enough! But was hungry, and ye fed me not. I was naked, and ye clothed me not. I was devoid of a decent sanitary house to live in, and ye provided no shelter for me. And consequently, you cannot enter the Kingdom of Greatness. If you do it the least of these, you do it unto me.” It was my former advisor at Union Theological Seminary, Dr. James Cone, considered the father of Black Liberation Theology, who said that “it was satanic not to talk about Jim Crow.” Are not going backward as a country, wherein states, particularly in the south, African Americans are being discriminated again, as we cheat them through now legalized gerrymandering.

In Soul of America, Meacham was trying to show all of us Americans, that we are an experiment that has never happened before in the history of the world shows that the United States of America is a perfectly imperfect country; with perfectly imperfect people, with many pivotal actors willing themselves to be about change in the world.

I appreciated the sourcing and research that he does in writing this book, for example, when he lifts up Sinclair Lewis 1935 novel, “It Can’t Happen Here,” and tells the story of the rise of an authoritarian state in an America that abandoned liberal democracy and sought stability in fascism. In his book, Robert Penn Warren wrote, “We have to deal with the problem our historical moment proposes, the burden of our time.” And this is what the invitation is, as people of faith, it is actually our calling as Christians to take up the mantle of “Repairing the Breach” of which a large breach it is. As Americans, as we celebrate July 4th in a couple of weeks, may we remember that as followers of Jesus our call is to proclaim the Gospel, and to not just shy away from tacking the inequalities of our nation. Jesus said that he would be with us, even until the end of time, through the Holy Spirit. During my last year of seminary in New York, I did my field education at the St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in West Harlem. I loved my time there, and one of things I loved is that they nicknamed themselves the “I am not Afraid Church.” In their history when the city was not repairing or filling in the potholes around the Church, Fr. Castle and parishioners celebrated the Eucharist in the potholes, causing huge traffic snarls. In the end, though, the potholes were taken care of. What risks are we willing to take, like we read in the Soul of America, for the Gospel, so that God’s love can be heard more broadly; but more specifically in the breach. Can we speak to the breach, preach to the breach, but more importantly embody like Dr. King and others of the civil rights movement dared when they gave their lives for the Gospel? Do we dare…can we imagine putting our bodies on the line?   

One of our former, more consequential Presidents, Theodore Roosevelt, in closing, said this was the American way, “I ask in our civic life that we in the same way pay heed only to the man’s quality of citizenship, to repudiate as the worst enemy that we can have whoever tries to get us to discriminate for or against any man because of his creed or birthplace.” It is amazing, is it not how the themes of this book, many of the quotes that Meacham shares can still so eerily ring true today. That as Americans, as we approach the 250th celebration of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, that we might focus on the quality of our citizenship. Friends, the quality of our citizenship. Oooff. As people of faith, Episcopalians, can we not invite God to help us have a deeper, theological and spiritual imagination; an imagination that might allow us to be bolder in our witness for the ways of justice in our country. This is exciting, because this is within our mandate as Christians within our baptismal covenant, to honor the dignity of all human beings.  As Dean Winnie Varghese, the Rev Dr. Kelly Brown Douglas and Canon Stephanie Spellers write in their lates Op-Ed about Juneteenth, “Faith does not permit us to be passive observers of history, remaining silent and on the sidelines while others proclaim and enact untruths in the name of God. Indeed, faith compels us to participate in God’s liberating work in the world. Faith calls us to the struggle for freedom. Faith propels us to refuse to be divided against one another.”

My prayer friends is that those of us here within the Episcopal Church in Connecticut would take up the call of the Gospel and be unafraid of the obstacles that may be in front of us. With God and a fervent will, may we emboldened that God is calling us for this exact moment.  

Amen.