Telling the Truth About America at 250 or George Washington's Favorite Bible Verse
Preached at Blue Ocean Faith Columbus on Sunday, July, 2026
Reminder: I never stick completely to my written sermon. This isn’t a transcript, but the written sermon I was using when I preached.
Friends, listen for a word from God in the Book of Micah, the 4th Chapter, verses 1-5.
In days to come
the mountain of the Lord’s temple
shall be established as the highest of the mountains
and shall be raised up above the hills.
Peoples shall stream to it,
2 and many nations shall come and say:
“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,
to the house of the God of Jacob,
that he may teach us his ways
and that we may walk in his paths.”
For out of Zion shall go forth instruction,
and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
3 He shall judge between many peoples
and shall arbitrate between strong nations far away;
they shall beat their swords into plowshares
and their spears into pruning hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation;
neither shall they learn war anymore;
4 but they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees,
and no one shall make them afraid,
for the mouth of the Lord of hosts has spoken.
5 For all the peoples walk,
each in the name of its god,
but we will walk in the name of the Lord our God
forever and ever.
This is the word of God for the people of God.
I have a distinct memory of a series of books with orange covers and black-and-white images telling the stories of great and famous Americans. Called The Childhoods of Famous Americans, the books, which had a decidedly Christian bent and extolled values like hard work, resilience, and faith, were meant to present these Americans as children with relatable experiences and struggles. In most cases these stories were highly sanitized and included stories that were at best apocryphal if not completely fictious. If not the same series—it was first published in 1939 and remains in print today though with different bindings and images—I imagine you also grew up with these hagiographies of the United States’ (white, male, straight) founding fathers, and perhaps a few founding mothers and one or two righteous people of color who through hard work or the ability to pass as white managed to be the first BIPOC person in their field.
Washington’s Verse
While no one is on record having asked George Washington what his favorite Bible verse was and he thankfully didn’t claim that it was “too personal” to discuss, the verse Washington reached for again and again, in letters to friends, to fellow officers, to a Jewish congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, was Micah 4:4: “they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees, and no one shall make them afraid.” Historians count nearly fifty times he wrote it out, across four decades, from the Revolution through his presidency and into retirement at Mount Vernon.
He loved the image of a man laying his sword down and going home to his own patch of ground, safe, unbothered, free of the noise of empire. It’s a beautiful picture. If you’ve visited Mount Vernon, you can image an older, tired Washington walking the grounds of his estate, sitting under shady trees, and being attended to by the over 300 people working the land and main house.
And there it is, the partial vision of Washington’s vision. While he quoted an image of universal, unafraid rest under vine and fig trees, the very people who built his estate, served in his home, and tilled its fields were slaves; people not only deprived of the freedom for which Washington fought, but human beings who could never sit under a vine of their own. Human beings literally bound to the land and to Washington, their master. The United States’ founding generation loved Micah’s verse, but only for themselves. They took the fruit of the vision and left the roots in the ground. They cut down the proverbial cherry tree and definitely lied about it.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Yesterday, we marked 250 years since those words and the document containing them were first signed. Having celebrated with picnics, fireworks, and voices raised in patriotic songs, tonight, we need to ask a harder question. Not whether America’s founders quoted good scripture. Whether Micah’s vision has ever actually described the United States and whether it does now.
Reading the Prophet
Micah wasn’t writing court poetry. He was an eighth-century BCE farmer-prophet from the small town of Moresheth, watching Assyria swallow nation after nation and watching his own leaders in Jerusalem get rich while they did it. The chapter right before tonight’s text is one of the harshest passages in the whole prophetic corpus. Micah tells the rulers of Israel they “hate the good and love the evil,” that they “tear the skin off my people” and “eat the flesh of my people.” He goes after the judges who take bribes, the priests who teach for a price, the prophets who preach peace to anyone who pays them and declare war on anyone who doesn’t. Chapter three ends with Jerusalem itself, the holy city, reduced to a plowed field and a heap of ruins because of what its leaders did to the poor.
And then, chapter four opens with this: “In days to come the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established as the highest of the mountains.” Peoples will stream toward it. Many nations will come. God will judge between them and arbitrate their disputes, and the result won’t be one empire swallowing the rest. The result will be swords beaten into plowshares, spears into pruning hooks, nations will no longer even study war, and everybody, not just the powerful, will sit under their own vine and their own fig tree, with no one to make them afraid.
This same vision of the future appears almost word-for-word in Isaiah 2. Scholars place Micah and Isaiah in the same historical period, but don’t know who borrowed from who or even if they were both drawing from older, established visions of peace. We also need to remember that more than one author wrote we know of as the Book of Isaiah and the same may be true of Micah. Rather than one individual, many of the Bible’s prophetic texts are in fact the writings of prophetic schools or sects either founded by the original prophet for whom they were named or their immediate disciples. What’s important, though, is this was a shared hope of an occupied and exhausted people.
And notice where this vision sits in the book. It comes right after the worst of the indictment, not instead of it. Micah doesn’t soften chapter three to make room for chapter four. He lets the ruin stand, the plowed field, the heap of rubble, and only then does he say, “in days to come.” The hope doesn’t erase the accusation. It depends on it. You don’t get to the vine and fig tree by skipping the part where the prophet names exactly who tore the flesh off the poor to get comfortable.
The Vision
Notice what the vision does and doesn’t promise. It doesn’t promise one nation on top forever. It promises an end to the arms race itself, weapons melted down into tools that grow food instead of objects that end life. It doesn’t promise a gated peace for the strong. It promises “no one” afraid, a peace with no exceptions clause. And it locates security not in the size of an arsenal but in the size of somebody’s own vine, their own fig tree, ordinary and unspectacular and theirs.
For many of us, there is a certain discomfort, though, in measuring security based on the amount of land we own. Washington, a member of America’s ruling, landed gentry, could find peace in land ownership, but the over 300 slaves that he also owned at the height of his wealth, would find such a vision hollow. I believe that Micah’s vision has less to do with actual ownership and more to do with having a place where one can find peace. Peace and leisure to sit under one’s own vine and tree, requires cultivating situations where we can find that peace rather than stake an owning claim to it. Your vine or tree may be a tree in a public park or your favorite table at a local coffee shop.
Finding one’s own peace was something Micah’s audience knew well. They were living with the active fear of being overrun, exiled, even killed. That was the vision America’s founders, all of them, reached for when their war finally ended: a place to try to find peace.
But the 250th birthday of the United States forces us to consider what we’ve built in two-and-a-half centuries and how close (or far) we’ve come to that vision.
The Nation We’ve Built
So, let’s talk about the United States at 250. We are the largest arms dealer on the planet. The United States sells more weapons to more nations than every other country combined, and we have built an economy in more than one town, more than one state, where the plowshare has been beaten back into a sword because that’s where the government contracts are. Our culture of weapons, known as the defense industrial complex, extends its reach into every part of public life, poisoning a country that has always had an uneasy relation with the gun.
We’ve built the largest prison and detention system on the planet and here too we’ve named it prison industrial complex because in the United States we figured out that not only can your company build prisons for the government, you can manage those prisons for the government too. But if these private prisons want to turn a profit, they need a steady stream of inmates. Enter the school to prison pipeline, the methods by which a disproportionately large number of Black and Brown people, particularly men and boys, are over criminalized, over policed, and over adjudicated into years and decades behind bars. Making up approximately 14% of the US population, Black people account for a staggering 42% of the incarcerated population in the United States. I hope we all understand that the cause is white supremacy and the legacy of slavery and racism. Overall, conservative estimates place the incarcerated population in the US at approximately two million people including local jails, state and federal prisons, immigration detention, youth detention, and other incarcerated situations. If that seems low—it is less than 1% of the people living in the United States—almost 5 million Americans are formerly incarcerated, 19 million Americans have been convicted of a felony, more than 79 million Americans have a criminal record, and 113 million adults have had at least one immediate family serve time in a jail or prison.
And while immigration detention remains a small percentage of the total US mass incarceration system, we have witnessed countless examples of people assumed to be immigrants because of their appearance pulled out of their vehicles, off the street, and out of their schools and places of employment to be detained simply because they might be an undocumented immigrant.
We could talk about a healthcare system that leaves people afraid of an ambulance bill before they’re afraid of a heart attack. We could talk about a housing market that has turned home ownership into a fantasy for whole generations. We could talk about how many of our school children have been trained, through drills most of us never had to sit through, to be afraid of the very buildings where they’re supposed to learn, because we have decided, again and again, that easy access to weapons of war matters more than their safety. We could talk about how quickly the word “freedom” gets deployed to protect the powerful and how rarely it gets extended to the people underneath them.
We could talk about how a nation 250 years into its own story still hasn’t figured out how to let every one of its citizens vote without a fight, or how quickly a book gets pulled off a school library shelf the moment it tells the truth about who this country has hurt and who it still hurts. How an honest recounting of American history is labelled as woke and inappropriate for white children, but at six years old Ruby Bridges could face down a crowd of protesters to desegregate a school in New Orleans.
Many of us know this fear from the inside, not as a headline but as a Tuesday or Wednesday. We know what it is to watch legislatures debate our right to exist, to wonder whether this year’s session ends with our families more protected or less. Micah didn’t write “no one shall make them afraid” as a suggestion for some people. He wrote it as the whole point.
None of that is a story about individual meanness. It’s a story about what a nation builds when it decides, over and over, across 250 years, that some people’s lives and their national inheritance matter more than others. Micah would call that what it is. Not a series of unfortunate policy choices. Idolatry.
Whose God Do We Walk After
Which brings us to the verse almost nobody quotes, the one right after the one Washington loved. Verse five: “For all the peoples walk, each in the name of its god, but we will walk in the name of the LORD our God forever and ever.” Micah doesn’t picture a world where every nation gets absorbed into one uniform empire, worshiping one uniform god. He pictures nations still walking their own paths, side by side, unafraid of each other, while Judah keeps walking in the name of its own God. Security doesn’t require sameness. Peace was never supposed to mean uniformity.
Here’s the real question this birthday puts in front of us. Every nation walks in the name of some god, whether it admits to one or not, and many of those gods are far more natural or human than they are divine. In whose name or in what’s name does the United States actually walk? Based on 250 years of evidence, we have often walked in the name of a god of market growth, a god of empire, a god of whiteness, a god of the national arsenal, and god of the border wall. That god has an American flag on its lapel and Micah’s own verse in its mouth, but none of Micah’s vision in its policy.
We do not have to walk in the name of that god. That was never the only American god available. There has always been another thread, quieter and harder to kill, running through abolitionists, suffragists, and labor organizers. Through the Black church, the Queer liberation movement, and every immigrant congregation that ever built a sanctuary out of nothing. It’s a thread that keeps walking in the name of a God who actually means it when God says no one shall be made afraid.
Where This Leaves Us
Two hundred fifty years in, the truth is this. America has never fully been the vine-and-fig-tree nation its own founder quoted into being, and pretending otherwise on a birthday doesn’t make it truer. In fact, America was never the vision of George Washington because Washington’s America ensured peace and security only for men like himself while literally building itself through the labor of people with no freedom and significant fear. But Micah was writing neither an apology nor a eulogy. He was writing a summons, addressed to people who could still choose which god to walk after and what kind of “days to come” they were building toward.
We don’t get to fix the nation on Sunday or by next Sunday. That was never the assignment. The assignment is smaller and harder: to keep telling the truth about the distance between the vision and the reality; to keep refusing the god of the arsenal even when it’s dressed in the right flag; and to keep walking, however imperfectly, in the name of the one whose peace was never for sale and was never reserved only for a certain and select few. Where that leads each of us this week is between you and the God who is still, even now, in the business of beating swords into something that can grow food.
Amen.