Clergy Epistle

July 4, 2026

Welcome and Introductory Remarks

Good morning, and welcome to St. Anne's on this Independence Day.

Before we begin, I want to offer a word of thanks all of each of you. Your presence, your voice, and your prayer is a blessing. Worship is never a spectator's exercise, and I am grateful to each of you for the part you play in offering it this morning.

The liturgy we use today is not incidental. Two hundred fifty years ago, in the early days of July 1776, Anglican clergy throughout the colonies faced a liturgical crisis that was, in truth, a crisis of conscience. The Book of Common Prayer bound them by oath to pray, Sunday by Sunday, for the King's Majesty and for the Royal Family.

On the last Sunday of June that year, those prayers were still, perhaps uneasily offered. By the following Sunday, the seventh of July, in a great many parishes they were not; for something had already shifted in the sanctuary before it shifted in the streets.

This morning, in keeping with what we understand to have been that early-July practice, we offer this liturgy without those two prayers and a modified versicle. This is not as a small antiquarian gesture. Rather, it is as a way of standing, for one hour, where our spiritual forebears once stood: caught between an old loyalty and an uncertain new one, unsure yet what God intended to do with them.

I do not want us to romanticize that moment.

It was not triumphant.

It was frightening.

People who shared the same chancel found themselves, within months, unable to sit in the same room. The crisis of 1776 was not merely political; it was, for the Church, genuinely spiritual. It was a rupture in loyalty, in liturgy, and in the felt presence of a settled order that Christians of that generation had assumed, wrongly, was permanent.

If we are honest, every generation of the American Church has had to relearn that our ultimate allegiance was never owed to a crown, nor even to a republic, but to the God who outlasts both.

And so this morning our prayer is twofold.

First, it is a prayer of thanksgiving. We prayer it is a genuine, unhurried thanksgiving for two hundred fifty years of what we might call the American project: for its remarkable, unfinished, often self-correcting pursuit of ordered liberty, and for God's evident patience with a nation that has, like every nation, fallen short of its own founding words.

Second, it is a prayer of intercession, offered in the same spirit as those anxious clergy of July 1776: not confidence in our own wisdom, but trust in God's providence to guide a people who cannot fully see the road ahead of them.

Let us, then, keep this day not as partisans of any single reading of our history, but as Christians who believe that the God who was sovereign over the conflicts of 1776 remains sovereign over our own moment, and who has never once relinquished His government of the nations to their own devices.

Welcome and Introduction to the Independence Day Matins

The Rev. Manoj Mathew Zacharia, Rector of St. Anne’s