Before the fireworks of July 4 come quieter moments. Before the speeches about freedom come older words of scripture:

Enduring love and faithfulness meet; justice and peace kiss.

Those words from Psalm 85 describe the moral vision of a healthy society.

Christians have long understood that faith must take social form. It is not only belief but a way of life, practiced in community.

The early Anabaptists described the church as a covenant community — believers freely committing themselves to follow Christ together in lives of truth, justice and peace. They recognized a distinction between the kingdom Christ calls his followers to embody and the political order that governs the world.

The Schleitheim Confession distinguished between the order of the world and the way of Christ, calling believers to a different kind of life shaped by the Spirit.

That vision raises a question worth asking as a nation marks its 250th year.

Not: Are we strong?

But: Are we just?

And do we seek the peace that justice makes possible?

One of America’s most beloved patriotic hymns offers a prayer that echoes this hope:

America, America, God mend thine every flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law.

Those words are unusual for a patriotic hymn. They are not a boast but a confession.

Liberty, the hymn suggests, cannot survive on enthusiasm alone. It must be confirmed in character. Self-government depends on self-control. Freedom requires a moral architecture strong enough to sustain it.

We are tempted to drift from covenant toward something like a lottery.

A covenant asks: What am I responsible for?

A lottery asks: What can I win?

A covenant binds people together in shared promises. A lottery isolates them in private hopes of sudden fortune.

A republic cannot be sustained by lottery logic. It requires the slower, quieter work of covenant — neighbors making and keeping promises with one another.

The old hymn says this well. Liberty must be confirmed in self-control. Freedom requires restraint, responsibility and a willingness to bind ourselves to something larger than private gain.

In a season when public life feels driven by the drums of war — against foreign enemies and against one another — the hymn points in another direction.

Away from conquest. Toward repentance.

Away from shouting crowds. Toward councils of peace and tables of covenant.

For Christians, the sign of the cross has never been a banner of triumph. It is first a summons to humility. The cross does not call us to conquer our enemies. It calls us to confess our sins.

Abraham Lincoln spoke with humility in his Second Inaugural Address. Instead of claiming God’s favor for one side in the Civil War, he observed that both sides read the same Bible and prayed to the same God — and that the nation itself might stand under judgment for the sin of slavery.

The task ahead, Lincoln said, was “to bind up the nation’s wounds” and “to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

It was not a speech of triumph. It was a call to humility before God.

Perhaps such a spirit is fitting for a nation marking its 250th year — not louder celebration, but deeper honesty.

God mend our every flaw.

Because liberty rests not in the fireworks above a nation but in the character of the people beneath them — and in communities willing to practice truth, justice and peace together.

Nate Showalter is a pastor, historian and writer based in Los Angeles. He has served international congregations in Nairobi, Taipei, Shanghai and Hong Kong, and LMC congregations in Lancaster, Pa., and Boston.