Independence Day is one of only two national holidays set aside for observance in our church calendar. (Do you know the other one?*) And like all holy days, it comes with its own set of rituals and ceremonies, both inside and outside the church.

The civic and national observance of Independence Day is one with which we’re all familiar: flags and fireworks, hot dogs and parades, family gatherings and trips to the beach. Up in the small town in Maine where we’ll be this Fourth of July, the day is a joyful celebration of Americana: decorated antique pick-up trucks and kids on red-white-and-blue-streamered tricycles, slowly looping around the tiny downtown area in one of the world’s slowest parades. At our house, we’ll be making our usual “flag cake” with whipped-cream, strawberries, and blueberries in a geometrically-sketchy approximation of the Star-Spangled Banner.

The Church’s observance of Independence Day is a little different. It doesn’t quite contradict the patriotic celebrations; but you might say that at the very least, it complements them.

The Church is, after all, not an American church. Americans make up just a small minority of the global Body of Christ. But even our Episcopal Church isn’t an entirely-American institution: the Diocese of Haiti, after all, is our largest diocese, and the Episcopal Church includes dioceses and parishes in Cuba and Taiwan, Latin America and even Europe.

And so the Church’s readings and prayers for Independence Day carefully remind us that our nation is not the only community to which we belong; and patriotism is not the ultimate value in Christian ethics. “You have heard that it was said,” Jesus reminds us in the Gospel appointed or the day, “‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have?” (Matthew 5:44-46) The ancient author Ben Sira adds a reminder of the impermanence of national life in the first reading for Morning Prayer: “Sovereignty passes from nation to nation on account of injustice and insolence and wealth… The Lord overthrows the thrones of rulers, and enthrones the lowly in their place. The Lord plucks up the roots of the nations, and plants the humble in their place.” (Ecclus. 10:8, 14-15)

The Bible, it turns out, is a bit skeptical about patriotism.

Or rather, the Bible is skeptical of patriotism that’s not tempered by love; of national pride that’s not tempered by humility. A love of country that manifests as love of the neighbor is good. A love of country that manifests as hatred of the enemy is not. A love of country that leads us to seek justice, so that the nation might become a more perfect union, is good; a love of country that leads to the arrogant boast that we are already perfect? Not so much.

No human institution is perfect—no church or country or family is unaffected by the deep imperfection of human nature—but imperfection and love, thank God, can coexist. So I’ll be eating my flag cake, this Fourth of July, and I’ll be praying that we may love our enemies, care for our neighbors, and give thanks for all the nations of the world and of our Church.

* It’s Thanksgiving Day! (To be fair, Labor Day also gets a prayer, but not an entry on the calendar or special readings.)

The story of our Eucharistic Prayer begins with the blessing of creation. It continues with the messiness of the Fall. And it culminates in the ongoing story of redemption. But there’s just one problem: the story it tells isn’t really our story at all.

Eucharistic Prayer 1 from Enriching Our Worship, the prayer we’ve been using for the last few weeks, reminds us of a millennia-long series of acts in which God rescues the people again and again.

It begins with Abraham, with whose family the narrative arc of the whole Bible really begins:

Through Abraham and Sarah
you called us into covenant with you.

It continues with the Exodus, the people’s years of wandering in the wilderness, and the generations of prophets who reminded recalled people’s attention to the need to love God and their neighbor:

You delivered us from slavery,
sustained us in the wilderness,
and raised up prophets
to renew your promise of salvation.

The prayer finally culminates in the life and death of Jesus:

Then, in the fullness of time,
you sent your eternal Word,
made mortal flesh in Jesus.
Born into the human family,
and dwelling among us,
he revealed your glory.
Giving himself freely to death on the cross,
he triumphed over evil,
opening the way of freedom and life.

What I notice in this prayer is that it’s not about us, but it is for us. We are not the characters of the story, but we have been invited to make it our own story. God didn’t actually call “us” into covenant; God called Abraham and his descendants, the people who would become known as Israel. God didn’t deliver “us” from slavery or sustain “us” in the wilderness; God rescued the descendants of those Israelites and guided them through the wilderness. God didn’t send prophets to “us,” but to the people who lived around them, with very concrete messages for their own days and times. The eternal Word of God became flesh in Jesus and dwelt among “us,” but only in the broadest, human sense.

The Bible is not a set of rules or laws to apply to our lives. It’s not a compendium of thoughtful sayings about the nature of the universe. If it were, it would be easy to understand its relevance for us. Universal truths, after all, are universal truths. But the Bible is not a rulebook. It’s not an abstract philosophy. It contains these things, at points. But mostly it’s a series of stories about other people, written in a language we don’t speak by people we don’t know in places most of us have never been and will never go.

But this strange old story has a mysterious power: it invites us into itself. When we say that Jesus “opened the way of freedom and life,” we mean many things. But one thing that we mean is that Jesus opens the way for all people to join the people of God. Jesus invites us to make their story our own. Jesus invites us to walk in their way of love, and to become part of the story ourselves, and the promises God made to those ancient, far-off figures become promises God makes to us.

Every week, our Eucharistic Prayer—whichever words—retells this whole story, giving thanks to God for things done long ago and far away. It reminds us of the good things God has done for God’s people in the past, and then, in Communion, it unites us to the Body of Christ, to the whole body of God’s faithful people before us, and sends us out to continuing living the story of God’s love, for generations to come.

A Reading from the Acts of the Apostles.

Then after completing their mission Barnabas and Saul returned to Jerusalem and brought with them John, whose other name was Mark. Now in the church at Antioch there were prophets and teachers: Barnabas, Simeon who was called Niger, Lucius of Cyrene, Manaen a member of the court of Herod the ruler, and Saul. While they were worshiping the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, “Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them.” Then after fasting and praying they laid their hands on them and sent them off. (Acts 12:25-13:3)

Here ends the Reading.

I laughed out loud while reading Morning Prayer on Tuesday morning, as I sat in bed with a cup of coffee. Tuesday was the Feast of Saint Mark the Evangelist, a great and prominent saint: the author of one of the four Gospels; the patron saint of the Egyptian Christian heartland of Alexandria and of the great city of Venice, home of the Basilica di San Marco itself; a man whose name graces five Episcopal churches in this diocese alone. And this was the sum total of the text mentioning Mark in the New Testament reading appointed for the morning: “Barnabas and Saul returned to Jerusalem and brought with them John, whose other name was Mark.” (Acts 12:25) The rest of the story barely mentions him; when the Holy Spirit speaks to congregations gathered in Jerusalem, it is to say, “Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul.” Poor Mark is left behind.

It’s not that this reading was chosen poorly for a day meant to celebrate St Mark. In the New Testament, the figure of “Mark” or “John Mark” barely appears. He’s mentioned in passing on occasion in the Acts of the Apostles or in the letters of Paul. Mark (the same Mark? another one?) also appears in the First Letter of Peter, where Peter calls him “my son Mark.” But these men named Mark never speak a word. They undertake no heroic acts. They’re not commended for their great faith. They’re listed in passing, and otherwise passed by. Even the Gospel of Mark itself doesn’t contain the name “Mark.” Its text identifies no author; while ancient manuscripts circulated with the title, “According to Mark,” the evangelist does not reveal himself to us at all. Where Paul would begin a letter, by identifying himself (“Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God…” [Romans 1:1]), Mark simply dives right in: “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” (Mark 1:1)

Like so many of the titans of the early Church, the details of Mark’s story are simply not known. This mysterious evangelist, who’s believed to be the first to write a Gospel, the first to record in written form the details of Jesus’ life so that they would be made known to future generations, leaves us knowing next to nothing about himself.

And I think he might have liked it best that way.

In my seminary New Testament class, on our final exam, we were given a few random verses from different books of the New Testament, and asked to identify or guess the book from which they came and explain our reasoning. So our study group collected, for each author, a few little “tells.” Mark was easiest: he writes with a plainness and immediacy that’s remarkable to see. (In fact, the adverb “immediately” appears 27 times in Mark’s short text; four times in the first chapter alone!)

Mark writes with focus, attention, and energy. His prose is not polished; there are very few frills. He is focused on, fascinated by, the person of Jesus and the story of this one year in his life. He can hardly spare a letter for description or context or a nicely-phrased way to set the scene: It’s all “Jesus did this, then immediately Jesus did that, then immediately Jesus did another thing.” You can hardly imagine Mark saying a word about himself, of all people, when there’s someone else’s much more interesting story to tell.

This might seem strange, in our era of artful author portraits and dust-jacket biographies, but to me, it seems like a relief. What matters, in the end, is not what Mark did or who he was. What matters is not his skill at building up the plot or the quality or polish of his prose. What matters is not the mistake he made when he was thirty years old, or his regrets about mistakes he’d made along the way. What mattered in the end, was the story he had to tell—a story so exciting and so strange he had to set it down immediately, his pen skipping along the page.

So here’s to you, Saint Mark, whoever you were. May we all be inspired to follow your example, sharing the good news of what God is doing in our world and in our lives. And may we all be comforted by the knowledge that, in a couple thousand years, whatever good or bad we’ve done, nobody but God will remember the details.

We’ve reached one of my favorite times of year.

I don’t mean in the church calendar, although I love the season of Easter as much as the next guy. (Did you know that it’s a season, fifty days long? There are even daily Easter devotionals, just like in Lent! You can sign up for one here.)

I don’t mean in the changing seasons; I do love this springtime warmth, although I have to admit that my eyes have been burning from ragweed all week long.

No, I mean something else. We’ve reached one of my favorite times of year: BAA jacket week.

It’s not so much the Marathon itself that I love about this week, although watching the astounding performance of world-class runners is fun. It’s not the vague feeling of regret I feel every year, never having run a marathon, and finding myself thinking yet again that maybe next year I will. No, it’s the fact that for this one week of the year, I almost literally can’t walk down the street without seeing someone half-limping down the sidewalk, proudly wearing the official Boston Athletic Association windbreaker they earned by running in this year’s marathon. And every time I see them I say congratulations, or give them directions, or just smile to myself. You’ve done a hard thing, I think to myself. Well done.

Not everyone is cut out for running a marathon. (Like I said, I never have.) But every one of you reading this has, I know, done a hard thing, and nobody has given you a jacket, and people may or may not have said, “Well done.”

I don’t know what it was, or when it was, or if it’s even over yet. Maybe you’re still somewhere on Heartbreak Hill. But every one of you has done a hard thing in your life, and here you are. Whatever it was, you endured it, or you are enduring, or you can’t imagine that you could ever endure it, but here you are. You’ve earned your jacket. And when I see you, I know, and I say to you (in my head—I’m not this weird), “Well done.”

Jesus appears to his disciples after the Resurrection still bearing his wounds. He shows them the marks that have been left by what’s been done. And yet they’ve been transformed. The places of pain have become proof of the resilience of his life, and they remind his disciples and us that the power of suffering and death is never strong than the power of love and life.

You may not have visible scars. It may be that nobody’s ever given you a commemorative jacket. But I know that you’ve endured tremendous things, and come out on the other side. I know that for you, as for Jesus, the power of God’s love is stronger than anything else; that there is nothing that could ever separate you from God’s love; that when God looks at you, God sees you with eyes of compassion and love, and says, “Well done.”