READ: Jeremiah 29:4-14; Romans 13:1-8; and Mark 12:13-17

It’s strange how one remembers snatches of some letters or publications from the past, but forgets others. One I often recall from a few years ago is the story of the sailor who was fishing with a man who could not swim. The man caught a really big fish. Leaning over to net it, he fell into the water. Immediately the man began splashing wildly about yelling, “Help, save me! Help, save me!”

The sailor calmly reached out and grabbed him by his shirt and pulled him up. But the shirt ripped off the man’s chest and he sank back into the water. Almost immediately he came back up again yelling, “Save me! Help, save me!”

Once again the sailor calmly grabbed for the man. This time he caught the hair of his head, gave a little yank. You guessed it. The man’s toupee slipped off his head and he went back under.

The balding, shirtless man came up a third time, yelling, “Help, save me! Save me!”

The sailor reached out a third time, but this time grabbed the other end of the body. He got a firm grip on the man’s leg and gave it a yank. But wouldn’t you know! The man had a wooden leg in the place of one blown off in World War II and it came off in his hand!

As the drowning man kept yelling and splashing around calling, “Help, save me! Save me!” the sailor turned impatiently and said, “How can I save you if you won’t stick together?”

An appropriate thought for any time, but especially for the time when we are celebrating the birthday of our nation. The old phrase, “united we stand, divided we fall,” is certainly more than a “catchy” political slogan. There is a logic and a reality here which has been absolutely crucial to our development as a nation and as the church. This is certainly a timely reminder, too, in this day and time when we seem to be more and more torn asunder by a multitude of little special interest groups, or what I would call “one issue people.” It seems almost that we have become a people who have lost sight of the larger picture – that we have lost sight of how each issue relates to the whole.

So, whether it is our nation or our church that we are talking about, one of the things July 4th does is remind us how crucial our relationship with each other really is to our destiny. You don’t have to be a genius to understand, when you really think about it, that there’s more to “sticking together” than our culture today is conveying to us. Like the fisherman in the story, we could very well “drown” if we forget this reality.

Pastor Larry Long