America's Original Sin

Contemporary Worship

June 21, 2026

Wow.  Amazing that we are only 13 days away (one each for the original colonies) from celebrating the 250^th birthday of our dynamic and cherished country.

In the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln spoke of the Civil War as a great test to see whether our beloved nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, would long endure. It is wonderful to recognize, two and a half centuries years into the project, that our beloved country is still enduring, even as we strive for fullest fruition of the propositions of equality and liberty.

After I was inspired watching Ken Burn’s series on the American Revolution, I saw last month that Netflix featured a special on Thomas Jefferson. So, I cranked it up and I’m glad I did.  We all know those famous words Jefferson penned as the primary author of the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." And how the Declaration became the catalytic gospel of liberty launching a new nation and inspiring freedom world-wide. What I never heard was that Jefferson's original draft also contained a lengthy condemnation of slavery.

In that draft, Jefferson wrote of King George III: "He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, capturing and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere."

But that charge never appeared in the final Declaration. Why? The Continental Congress removed it. Delegates from colonies like Georgia, already massively dependent on slavery economically, objected. National unity was considered more important than confronting the divisive issue.

Therefore, even at our nation’s birth, slavery was already the great contradiction.

The founders proclaimed liberty while tolerating bondage. They spoke of God-given rights while denying those rights to the women, slaves, and native Americans living among them. Some historians have called slavery America's original sin. Whether one agrees with that phrase or not, it captures an important truth. From our country’s founding, there was a gap between our ideals and our practices.

And perhaps no one embodied that contradiction more clearly than Thomas Jefferson himself.

Jefferson owned hundreds of enslaved people during his lifetime. He benefited economically from their labor. Yet at various points he wrote powerfully against the injustice of slavery which his very actions propagated. In his book, Notes on the State of Virginia, he referred to slavery as a "moral depravity." He described it as a "hideous blot." In one of his most famous statements, he wrote: "Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever." Jefferson understood that slavery violated the very principles he cherished. He saw the contradiction. He recognized the sin. But recognizing a sin and abandoning a sin are not always the same thing, right?

That confession brings us to our assigned lesson of Romans 6. Paul asks a startling question: "What then are we to say? Should we continue in sin in order that grace may abound?"

Some of you have heard the misunderstanding put this way:  “Christianity’s a great system. We love to sin.  God loves to forgive. Life is good!”  That’s not the way our faith works, Paul objects.  Paul teaches that Christians are not merely people who acknowledge sin. We are people who die to sin. Through baptism we have been united with Christ in his death and resurrection. Our old self has been crucified. Our old life is meant to be left behind. Notice how radical Paul's language is. He does not say we should manage sin. He does not say we should tolerate sin. He says we have died to sin.

The challenge for Thomas Jefferson was not that he could not identify slavery as wrong.

He clearly could. The challenge was he never separated himself from the system he condemned and eventually became entangled deeply in it.  Now of course, on this Father’s Day we’re not trying to pile on one of our Founding Fathers.  We’re using Jefferson’s struggle to better understand our own.

Just like Jefferson, most Christians can identify certain sins in their lives. We know the habits that damage our relationships. We know the resentments we continue to nurse. (In any rite of confession and forgiveness, the screens in our minds are full of images we quickly acknowledge as disobedient to God’s plans). We know the greed, pride, selfishness, bitterness, envy, and fear that cling to us. We know what God is asking us to surrender. Sometimes we even speak eloquently about these problems, like Jefferson. But recognizing a sin is easier than crucifying it, right?

Jefferson's talk without the walk reminds us that human beings have an extraordinary capacity to see the truth while simultaneously resisting it.

That is why Paul does not merely call us to awareness. He calls us to repentance and transformation. In verse 11, he says this, "So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus." The gospel is not simply information. It is invitation.  Thank goodness Jesus not only teaches what is wrong. He also provides power to become something new. Right.

But our gospel today is a tough one, because we hear once again that standing up to sin can also stir all kinds of conflict, right?  (as Kendra preached last week, playing with the difficulty of change).

In Matthew 10 today, Jesus sends his disciples into a world he knows will not always welcome the truth. So he tries to prepare them. Three times Jesus tells them not to be afraid. "Do not be afraid of them." "Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul." "Do not be afraid; you are of more value than many sparrows." Then Jesus says something that still shocks us (verse 34): "Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword." Here, Jesus is not encouraging violence, of course. He is warning that pursuing truth—and what we feel is right and just--can really stir folks up, even divide people, and comes with a high cost.

And how we’ve seen that dynamic ring true over our country’s 250 years.  ¾ of a million Americans died as we fought over slavery and other issues in the Civil War.  Christian denominations have split over interpretational differences regarding slavery, sexuality, the role of women and more.   The conflict of which Jesus warns we have tasted.  Families disagree. Communities fracture. Comfortable arrangements are challenged. But Jesus seems to encourage us to have the courage to humbly but faithfully keep fostering what we have discerned to be true, with the help and open invitation to always be corrected, if need be, by the Holy Spirit.

Our gospel uses language that feels challenging for sure.

Will we remain silent when the truth is inconvenient? Jesus says: "Everyone therefore who acknowledges me before others, I also will acknowledge before my Father in heaven." Faithfulness sometimes costs us something. It may cost comfort. It may cost popularity and relationships. It may cost long-standing habits and assumptions. But Christ never promised that discipleship would be easy. But he did promise it would be worth it.

Near the end of today's Gospel reading, Jesus says: "Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it."

That is the great paradox of the Christian faith. The world says hold on. Jesus says let go. The world says protect what you have. Jesus says die so that you may truly live.

After he concluded his presidency and illustrious political career, Jefferson retired to his estate of Monticello in Virginia.  Many of you have had the honor of visiting his home, where years earlier, he was almost captured by the British when he served as governor of Virginia.  While Jefferson excelled as a statesman, he struggled as a farmer and businessman, to the point when he was dying, the ex-president faced significant debts.

And it’s about this time in his life that the Netflix documentary really grabbed me.

In a nod to Juneteenth, which our country recognized on Friday, and because it illustrates our lessons, let me share more about this moment, as Jefferson’s health rapidly declines.

With so much of his wealth tied up in land and slaves, many wondered how his final acts, as expressed in his will, would convey his values:  would he stand up for liberty or liabilities?  Free his slaves, as one of the country’s keenest elocutors of liberty?  Or leverage his slaves against liabilities for the wealth of his family?

Let me cite the Netflix special:  “There’s people like President Washington who, upon passing, does free the enslaved people that belonged to him.  But (drumroll . . . . ) Jefferson does not.

Since he’s not willing to sell any of his lands to raise cash, upon Jefferson’s death, there is a huge auction to settle his debt, which advertised “130 valuable Negroes. “It was among the largest sales of enslaved people in the United States. And so on a cold January morning in 1827, the moment arrived to liquidate Thomas Jefferson’s property. Can you imagine what that must have felt like, asks Nia Bates historian from Princeton University, to watch a member of your family be sold?  Sold alongside artwork out of the house, chairs from the dining room, alongside horses and cattle.”

Generations of people never saw their families again.

In one case, Jefferson puts in his will that his blacksmith, Joe Fossett, is freed upon Jefferson’s death and states that Fossett can live in his cabin with his wife and family.  But Jefferson did not free his wife and his family. And so, on the day Joe Fawcett got his freedom, he watched his wife and his children auctioned off to a number of different purchasers. His son, Peter faucet, who was 11 years old at the time, many years later said, “we were scattered all over the country, never to meet each other again until we meet in another world.”  One commentator said that line “our family was divided all over the country” haunts me all the time.

Scores of these slave families end up scattered all over the world all because this one Jefferson family couldn’t figure out what to do with their finances. Jefferson had written about personal Liberty. He had written about equality. He had expressed some of the most beautiful and important sentiments known to man. And yet he could not live out his ideals. Jefferson separated, by sale or gift, 400 enslaved people over the course of his lifetime.  Jefferson actually died on July 4, but Jefferson missed the opportunity to declare independence and freedom for those who served him for decades.

Now, the point of sharing this illustration is not to dump on Jefferson, a founding faither and pinnacle of American vision, right?

The point is to let Jefferson's struggle with hypocrisy—in the midst of trying to serve others well--become a mirror in which we examine our own struggle.

God’s Word reminds us today that seeing and speaking the truth are only the beginning. The harder question for all of us is whether we say yes to the Holy Spirit’s offer to help us die to sin and be raised with Christ to newness of life each and every day.   Every congregation, Christian, and country faces its own version of that challenge.

Where is the gap between what I profess and how I live?

What sin have I identified but really don’t want to let go of? What is Christ asking me to put to death so that new life can emerge?  These are wonderful questions for our beloved country as we keep striving for a more perfect union, as God gives us a future beyond 250.  Likewise, these are critical questions for you and me.  May the Holy Spirit guide as we ask them. In Jesus’ name, Amen.