I love America. I love Jazz and rock and roll. I love fried chicken, and F16s. But this last 4th of July I found myself wondering, do I love those things because they are American? Or is it just because they are familiar to me. Anyone anywhere can make a similar list of things that they know and love about their country. My baseball is someone else's soccer. My barbeque is someone else's sushi. So have spent a lot of time wondering: what does America truly stand for? And what about that, can I truly be proud of?
The answer to this question didn't come as readily as it has in the past. If we honestly consider past and current events in our nation, there are many things of which we should not be proud. In many cases, our country's history has been like that of the rest of the world---the powerful subjugating or destroying the weak, awful cruelty inspired by racism and prejudice, and widespread grief and suffering caused by actions of greed. In today's media you can hear plenty about our nation’s shortcomings: the shameful state of our politics, the relatively poor performance of our primary and secondary schools or our excessive use and waste of food and other resources to name a few.
Despite all of this, I am proud of my country. The value expressed by my country of which I am most proud is HOPE. America has been called the land of opportunity. I believe the most emotional, human sense of this expression is that America is the land where you can hope for a better life. I believe that this spirit of hope is akin to the hope that Jesus Christ offers us through the atonement. He is sometimes called the Hope of Israel. As Moroni wrote in the book of Ether, "whoso believeth in God might with surety hope for a better world." Because of Christ we are made free; free so that if we do our best to live according to correct principles we can receive all that the Father has.
In like manner, many have, and continue to come to America with the hope of a better world for themselves and their families. The monument of the Statue of Liberty was opened in the year 1886. Emma Lazarus' poem entitled The New Colossus is mounted on a plaque inside the monument. The words that she gave the statue are actually what inspired the subject of this talk. The poem describes the statue speaking to the countries from which American Immigrants came,
“Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries She
With Silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest tost to me.
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
From the year 1880 to 1930, over 27 million people immigrated to the United States. 12 million of these came through Ellis Island floating past Lady Liberty on their way to their new home. By the end of that period in 1930, 1 in 5 Americans was a first generation immigrant. They all came because of one thing. Hope. Hope that if they worked hard, and did their best, they could make a better life for themselves and their families.
This spirit of hope persists today, although sometimes it is harder to see. Fortunately, the scriptures help us understand how we as Americans and Christians can perpetuate this Spirit.
The scriptures, specifically the Book of Mormon, are full of prophesies about our country and its prosperity. Here is one of my favorites found in 2 Nephi:
“And if it so be that they [meaning us] shall serve [God] according to the commandments which he hath given them, [this] shall be a land of liberty unto them….And if it so be that they keep his commandments they shall be blessed upon the face of the land, and there shall be none to molest them, or to take away the land of their inheritance; and they shall dwell safely forever.”
You’ll notice that the scripture says the Lord will require us to serve Him to merit the blessings of this Promised Land. This is because the great nation of the United States came to be for one purpose. This is expressed in the 10th article of faith:
“We believe in the literal gathering of Israel and in the restoration of the Ten Tribes; that Zion (the New Jerusalem) will be built upon the American continent”.
The United States was founded and is prospered by the hand of God so that Zion can be established.
So our mission in serving God in the Promised Land is to help establish Zion. How do we do that? The most practical description of Zion I’ve found is in Moses 7:18
“And the Lord called his people ZION, because they were of one heart and one mind, and dwelt in righteousness; and there was no poor among them.”
Notice that the Lord didn’t call his people Zion because they were all full tithe payers, or had super clean kitchens, or were all baptized, or had perfect lives. They were Zion because they were of one heart and one mind.
Now being one in the scriptural sense has long been a confusing concept for me, but I have come to learn that if I am one with Bro. Gerald or Sis Feland, it does not mean that we just always agree, that we don’t ever fight, or that with always smile and speak kindly to each other. It’s more fundamental than that. Being one with them means that I view him as my equal. That I understand, that deep down, where it counts, he and I are the same. Zion is not a perfect people, but it is a people that understand this concept.
You can see the Spirit of the Lord speaking voicing this through the founding fathers. On July 4, 1776 they signed the Declaration of Independence, which read,
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are [all equally] endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Once upon a time, there was a Zion in America. It’s described in 4th Nephi:
“[After Christ came] there were no contentions and disputations among them [the Americans], and every man did deal justly one with another.
“And they had all things common among them; therefore there were not rich and poor, bond and free, but they were all made free, and partakers of the heavenly gift.
“…And there were no envyings, nor strifes…There were no robbers, nor murderers, neither were there Lamanites, nor any manner of –ites; but they were in one, the children of Christ, and heirs to the kingdom of God.”
The scripture says that there were no contentions, no class or even racial distinctions. Each person believed that all others were his or her equal. And Mormon summarized “surely there could not be a happier people among all the people who had been created by the hand of God.”
So our job as Americans is to establish Zion by doing the same. Naturally, Satan has worked constantly to prevent this.
Exactly 20 years before Emma Lazarus penned her sonnet for the statue of liberty, Abraham Lincoln delivered what is now known as the Gettysburg address. The United States was in the middle of a brutal civil war, a war threatening to drive Americans apart over a question of racial equality. I’d like to read a bit of it for you now:
“For score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
“Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.
“The brave men, living and dead, who struggled [on this battlefield] have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract…
“It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Abraham Lincoln perhaps didn’t know it at the time, but the “great task” he mentioned is not only to preserve the union, but to further God’s design to establish Zion.
It is therefore for us here to be dedicated to that cause. This is a time when politics are polarized, rhetoric intends to instill fear and suspicion, and terrorism haunts the news. I believe these are tools Satan has devised to drive us apart from each other. After Christ came, the Nephites enjoyed Zion for 200 years. In the 200 hundred years after that, the nation went from the happiest ever created by God to being depraved, “without order and without mercy, brutal, delighting in everything save that which is good.” This colossal fall from grace started with a small group that decided to break off and call themselves Lamanites. This led to them no longer holding goods in common, to the distinction of social classes, pride, conflicts, and ultimately the annihilation of the Nephite nation.
Satan is very good at driving people apart. No wonder the Lord warned in the Doctrine and Covenants: “Beware of pride [which is the belief that you and I are different], lest ye become as the Nephites of old.”
Brothers and sisters, we cannot allow Satan to fool us into obsessing over our differences. God did create us equal, and believing it is what establishing Zion is all about.
With that in mind, I pray that we as Americans and disciples of Jesus Christ may give hope to the world. I pray that we can say without regard to race, social status, sexual orientation, or political party ‘Bring us the tired, the poor, the abused child, the overwhelmed mother, the discouraged father, the youth filled with self-doubt. Bring them to us, and we will show them through the pure love of Christ that they are our brothers and sisters, and that if we work together, we can make a better world for us and our families. In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.