If your household is like my household, anticipation and excitement are abundant. In these last months there’s been not much to build anticipation and little to get excited about that hasn’t had to be canceled or postponed down the road. But this time it is real and it is happening. Because this time, Hamilton the movie is here. Last summer, Ellen and I saw the show in Kansas City. Before going, I knew of the widespread raving reviews and the fever-pitched excitement throughout the country. I had heard of the long lines and the difficulty in getting tickets. But, I didn’t know very much about the show before I saw it and though I wasn’t skeptical going in at all, I was definitely blown away by the end.
Hamilton tells the story of the earliest visionaries and founders of our country’s work on the American project of a country founded on freedom for all, a voice for the few, shared power, and more. The show is full of themes of unending hope and forgiveness, of a story about a dream that is still being written, of tragedy and pain finding redemption. It is the story of a few people with a dream for an ideal, with a vision for a new reality and how all of that meets the realities of life: death, pain, betrayal, and heartbreak. I’d like to think of the Fourth of July we soon celebrate in the United States with a similar lens, but it is too frequently and readily co-opted into an idolatrous nationalism or an unrealistic celebration of a dream inaccessible to and cut-off from too many, particularly Black folks and countless others relegated to the side and the bottom. We’ve perhaps never marked a Fourth of July like we will in 2020: in the midst of a pandemic and surrounded by racial unrest. This year we can no longer ignore the fact that the American Dream is much more of a nightmare for too many and the freedom promised to all is not given to all. The very ideal of freedom itself has become misshaped and twisted for political gain. This is a Fourth of July in which we can’t help but see that that which we claim to celebrate on that holiday demands so much more of each of us to realize.
If we are to really celebrate the Fourth of July this year, it will demand of us something profoundly un-American: a setting aside of ourselves for the sake of another, even the sake of a stranger. Individualism, the belief that any one person can make it if they work hard enough, an ideal of getting what you deserve without regard for others pervades our country, likely without us even knowing it. This individualism has caused too many to believe that donning a mask limits their freedoms given to them as an American. If our country is to actually make something like the American Dream a reality, we will need to see our freedom is inextricably bound up in our neighbor’s so much so that we simply are not free until they are: free from systemic poverty and pain, from hate and suffering, from unjust structures and powers, and more. Freedom is not simply something we are given, much less earn or deserve, by virtue of amendments in our constitution. Instead, following Jesus means that freedom will look less like what I can do for myself because I want to or can and for my own gain. It will look a lot more like being emptied so that someone else might gain, like working not for my own success or thriving but for someone else’s, like being less concerned for my own well-being so that someone with none might know a little more of what it is to thrive—even like laying down one’s life for our neighbors and for the world.
Our readiness to conflate these two ideals has yielded a country that many will celebrate this weekend and yet is rife with despair, broken to its core, and flawed abundantly. Folks in power and with privilege have shown a lack of ability or willingness or whatever it may be to hear cries telling us about this brokenness and now these cries, this pain, this anguish overflows into our streets. Instead of celebrating this weekend, let us commit ourselves to dreaming again a new kind of dream for our land, for our neighbors, for our communities, for the world.
Perhaps the most famous lyric from Hamilton is Hamilton’s: “I am not throwing away my shot.” Set before us on the Fourth of July 2020 is an urgent call toward living into a new definition of freedom that is not predicated upon rights and privileges but upon the thriving of the forgotten, rejected, de-valued, and disregarded. This is the very ideal for which Jesus gave is life and it is the one to which we dedicate ours. Let us not throw away our shot.