"God mend thine every flaw..."

This weekend marks the 56th anniversary of the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, Sunday, September 15, 1963.  The four young girls pictured above were killed at 10:22, as they prepared to sing in the choir that morning. Their names are—Addie Mae Collins (14), Cynthia Wesley (14), Carole Robertson (14), Carol Denise McNair (11).  Members of a KKK splinter group planted about 15 sticks of dynamite under the church steps.

This year also marks the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the first twenty slaves from Africa to the British Colony of Virginia (1619).

In conversations about racism in America these days we're hearing phrases like, "baked into our culture" and "foundational to our culture."  When I was chaplain to a residential school community, where there were students from all fifty states, I asked a young man from a historical slave state, "What's happened to all that hatred?" He said, "Oh, it's all still there; my father has a bar in the basement and when he invites his friends over, they all talk that way." 

There's some movement to have the patriotic song America the Beautiful replace the Star Spangled Banner as our national anthem. It is a very honest, almost hymn-like song. The second verse is perhaps the most aware and urgent.

O beautiful for pilgrim feet,
Whose stern, impassioned stress
A thoroughfare for freedom beat
Across the wilderness!
America! America!
God mend thine every flaw,
confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law!

A nation confessing its flaws! How fresh is that! May we feel it, even to repentant tears as we sing it. 

"A broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise."  Psalm 51:17