The Questions We Must Ask
This is part of an ongoing series as we prepare for July 4th, 2026. We're sharing new posts weekly leading up to the 4th.
Rev. Sawtell offers three sets of questions for sermon preparation, small group discussion, or even responsive reading. They are not rhetorical. They are genuinely open — and in that openness lies their power.
1 - What makes us a nation?
Is this a done deal, once and for all? What is making us and unmaking us as a nation right now? James Baldwin wrote that "a People" do not come into being automatically — they become a People through what they are willing to face together. (The Fire Next Time, 1963, referenced in “Becoming a People” by Cameron Trimble 3/31/26)
2 - Where does it begin?
In 1000 AD with Polynesian arrival in Hawaii? At Pueblo communities in New Mexico in 1300? In 1619 with the arrival in Virginia of the first of the kidnapped and enslaved African people? 1620 and the Mayflower? Or 1776 and the Declaration of Independence? Who gets to name the founding?
3 - Where does it end?
Death of democracy? Fracturing of community? The great divide? On the auction block, in detention centers, storming the US Capitol—with no accountability? Or — when we give up? The question is not academic. It is a choice being made right now, by all of us.
We Can Tell a Different Story
We get to make new choices about how we tell our histories, how we narrate our present, and how we cast a vision together for the future.
Dr. Amanda Udis-Kessler offers us new words in her song “We Can Tell a Different Story,” written to an old tune—the “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
We are both/and people, holding anger and vision, reality and prophecy, imagining what Spirit can do.
We Can Tell A Different Story
Amanda Udis-Kessler, May 30, 2026 (tune of the Battle Hymn of the Republic)
We can tell a different story. We can sing a different song.We can make a better country that is beautiful and strongWhere we welcome every person and we know that they belong:America for all!
Praise the Source of all creation!Heed the holy invitation!May we be a loving nation:America for all! (chorus)
Though the stories we’ve inherited ignore the harm we do,Though they hide our many horrors and they sanctify the few,We will tell a different story that will finally be true:America for all!
Chorus
We can cultivate the courage to accept our painful past.We can learn to love our neighbors with a care so free and vastThat we come to be the country that we ought to be at last:America for all!
Chorus
Additional Musical Resources
Music carries memory across generations and binds communities in ways that prose cannot. The songs below are organized by liturgical function — each selected for how it speaks to this specific moment of 250th anniversary, authoritarian erasure, and the long work of faithful resistance.
Gathering & Opening
Wonder
This Is My Song
Text: Lloyd Stone / Music: Finlandia (Sibelius) — Love of country held alongside love of all peoples. A direct and gentle counterweight to exclusive nationalism; sings the beauty of many lands, not just one.
Gathering
Gathered Here in the Mystery of the Hour
Traditional round — Simple, meditative, nonverbal in a sense. Draws the congregation into shared presence before anything difficult is named.
Gratitude
For All That Is Our Life
Text: Bruce Findlow — Gratitude for the complexity of lived experience, including struggle and survival; fits the "Claiming Joy and Gratitude" ritual organically.
Lament & Remembrance
Lament
Strange Fruit
Abel Meeropol / Billie Holiday — Among the most searing anti-lynching works in American music. Use as a solo or spoken performance during the Prayer for Remembering; do not sing it casually. Its weight is the point.
Memory
My Country, 'Tis of Thee (with additional lament verses)
Traditional melody with supplementary verses that name historical wounds. Singing a beloved melody with unfamiliar, honest words is itself a liturgical act of reclamation.
Perseverance
Woyaya
Osibisa — "We are going, heaven knows where we are going / but we know within." For the Moses-on-a-long-journey moment: communities moving through uncertainty without knowing the destination.
Justice, Resistance & Dignity
Resistance
We Shall Overcome
Traditional civil rights anthem — Do not dismiss it as too familiar. Sung slowly, with hands joined, it still does what it has always done: it makes the congregation's body remember that they are not alone and have never been.
Inclusion
Somos el Barco (We Are the Boat)
Lorre Wyatt — The pluralism of this land as gift, not threat. Especially resonant given current attacks on Latino/a communities; bilingual performance is powerful.
Dignity
For Everyone Born
Shirley Erena Murray / Brian Mann — A place at the table for every person: LGBTQ+ folk, immigrants, the elderly, the young. A direct sung refutation of Project 2025's theology of exclusion.
Peace
Ain't Gonna Study War No More
Traditional spiritual — Joyful, eschatological, defiant. The imagination of a people who refuse to be defined by empire; works well as a sending hymn with movement.
Wonder, Creation & Sending
Joy
When Our Heart Is in a Holy Place
Joyce Poley — Joy and wonder as spiritual practice. Beauty as resistance against despair. Pairs directly with the "What do I love?" ritual.
Creation
Touch the Earth, Reach the Sky
Joyce Poley — Creation care and embodied wonder. Useful for services naming climate change and the desecration of the Earth in the name of fossil fuel addiction.
Sending
Go Now in Peace
Natalie Sleeth — A simple, tender benediction. The congregation sent into the world not merely inspired but commissioned: bearers of love into a world that desperately needs it.
Photo by Marius Masalar on Unsplash
Notes for Worship Planners
Rev. Sawtell is explicit: do not try to use all of this in one service. Pick and choose. These resources are meant to be used across multiple Sundays leading up to July 4th, not crammed into a single liturgical marathon.
Hold the tension. The most powerful liturgy this season will hold joy and lament in the same breath — as the "Dearly Beloved" meditation models. Do not resolve the dissonance prematurely. The Church, Sawtell reminds us, knows how to do this. It is one of the gifts we bring.
Name specific histories. The prayers are most powerful when paired with concrete naming: the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, the forced removal of Cherokee families on the Trail of Tears, the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, the ongoing contamination of Cancer Alley. Specific names and dates are themselves acts of resistance against erasure.
The "Claiming Joy" ritual is not lightweight. Inviting congregants to write or speak "I love…" statements — then reading them aloud as a prayer — is a countercultural act when despair is the ambient condition. Do not underestimate it. Keep and return to these expressions of gratitude.
Prepare for the Moses moment. Some congregants will arrive having lost hope that their resistance matters. Sawtell's Moses reflection is for them: outcomes and long lifespans are not the point. The burning bush is always holy ground. Courageous curiosity that turns aside from the worn path is itself the vocation.
End with a charge, not a comfort. The congregation should leave not merely moved, but sent. The benediction is not the end of the service — it is the beginning of the week's witness.
Download the Full Liturgy Resource Collection
Rev. Allyson Sawtell's complete We Tell a Different Story worship packet is available as a free PDF under Creative Commons license (attribution required, noncommercial use). It includes additional prayers, the full "Three Questions" framework, and pastoral guidance.
A Final Word
There is a long tradition in US-American religious life of congregations who have refused the idolatry of nationalism — who have understood that faithfulness to God and faithfulness to a sanitized flag are not the same thing. From abolitionist pulpits to the movement churches of the Civil Rights era to Sanctuary congregations today, religious communities have always been among those who insisted on telling the fuller, truer, harder story.
This July 4th, that tradition continues. And as the first rant asks, with both fury and grief: What in God's name are we celebrating? The answer, for congregations of conscience, is not the mythology of an unexamined exceptionalism. It is the ongoing, costly, beautiful work of becoming the nation our best documents claimed we could be — while naming honestly how far we have yet to go.
"Outcomes and long lifespans are not the point. Courageous curiosity that looks beyond the worn path and asks 'What if?...' is the point. Start to make that happen and perhaps someone will someday continue the work and walk the path. And you can know, now, 'you did good!'"— Rev. Allyson Sawtell, on Moses.
Tell a different story. A more complete story. A story that holds the horror and the grace together, that refuses to erase a single beloved child of God from the record, that insists — against all evidence some days — that healing and justice are still possible.
That is the work. That has always been the work. And you are not doing it alone.
About This Series
"We Tell a Different Story" is an ongoing series preparing for the 250th anniversary of July 4th, 2026, offering liturgy, prophetic witness, and resources for congregations of conscience. Read the other posts below:
