Last week, our pastor announced that we would be having a patriotic service on the Sunday of July 4th weekend.
I won’t be there.
Let me make something perfectly clear. I love my country, the United States of America.
I have no trouble displaying the flag on appropriate occasions (though my wife, with her Mennonite background, is not enthusiastic about the idea).
I appreciate our nation’s heritage of liberty and opportunity, and am proud that we have been able to change our Constitution and laws over the years to deal with our blind spots and make that more available to everyone.
I love the land in which we live, in all its breathtaking beauty and variety.
I enjoy the diversity of cultures that find a home in the U.S.
I love our history of entrepreneurism, our “can do” spirit, the generosity of our people, and the idealism with which we approach life.
On the other hand, I am often critical of our country and its leaders, policies, and actions, as well as the prejudices and parochialism many of us display, both here and abroad. There are aspects of our past and present which deeply disturb, embarrass, and grieve me, but the freedom to voice my critiques openly is another reason I’m glad to be a citizen of the U.S.
I don’t find it incompatible to be a follower of Jesus Christ and one who loves his country. One’s national heritage is a gift of God’s common grace. Those of us who have enjoyed life in places that are beautiful, free, and abounding with prosperity have received more than a common share of God’s blessings in this regard. I find it incumbent to thank God for this. I pray my children and children’s children will likewise enjoy these gifts.
We emphasize this regularly in church, too. Most worship services in our congregation include prayers of thanksgiving and intercession that relate to our daily lives where we live, our leaders, crisis situations our nation or community faces, and so on. We pray for justice and peace, for wisdom and the common good. We remember our dead, including those who have died as members of the military. We petition God to protect those currently serving in harm’s way. It is my opinion that church leaders should encourage their parishioners to be good citizens who are involved in their communities, working to strengthen its institutions, contributing to the well being of their neighbors through good works of love.
But I abhor civil religion. I cannot tolerate the mingling of God and country that is represented in so many churches in the U.S. on holidays like Independence Day. The sanctuary is not the place for patriotic display, singing hymns to America, and venerating the red, white, and blue.
In his excellent article, Why Younger Evangelicals May Feel Uneasy in a Patriotic Church Service, Trevin Wax tells of the following encounter:
The first time I ever questioned the appropriateness of patriotism in worship was when I was doing mission work in Romania.
After I had learned the language and settled into ministry in a village church, I remember asking a pastor friend why we didn’t do a special service in December that celebrated Unification Day (Romania’s national holiday). I also wondered why the Romanian flag wasn’t in the sanctuary.
The pastor looked at me funny and then said: “The only way we’d bring a Romanian flag into our sanctuary is if we brought in flags from all over the world.”
“To show you do missions?” I said, trying to find a reference point from my own culture.
“No, to show we are the church.”
Exactly.
“Make disciples of all nations” is our mandate. If churches were to honor our citizenship in Heaven and the membership of the one, holy, and apostolic church by use of flags, we would include them all. No nation’s flag would find a higher place than any other. Yet I recently saw an ad for a patriotic church service celebrating Independence Day with the title, “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” What’s wrong with this picture?
Such programs betray a fundamental lack of clear theological thinking among many Christians in the U.S.
What is the Church, in relation to our identities as members of nations?
In 2 Corinthians 5:20, Paul identifies Christians as “ambassadors for Christ.” Let’s explore this one metaphor for a moment. A church sanctuary where Christians gather to worship is like an embassy, a consulate, a diplomatic mission, a foreign space marked out in the territory of whatever nation and community it finds itself.
Here’s how our government describes the relationship of an embassy to its host country:
While diplomatic spaces remain the territory of the host state, an embassy or consulate represents a sovereign state. International rules do not allow representatives of the host country to enter an embassy without permission –even to put out a fire — and designate an attack on an embassy as an attack on the country it represents.
That is a description akin to what Jesus said: “In the world but not of the world.”
As a diplomatic mission of the Kingdom of God, our churches represent the homeland to our host countries and work to foster bilateral relations. The U.S. diplomatic website linked above describes the U.S.A.’s consulates as: “the public face of the United States of America in the host country.” In the same way, the Church is the public face of the Kingdom of Heaven to our nation, the United States of America, and it is not fitting for us to act as though our ultimate loyalty is to our host country or to mingle loyalties to such an extent that they are indistinguishable.
When we go to worship, we enter holy space, space set apart to represent and honor our King and our true homeland. The symbols we use and activities that we participate in there should reflect that. We in the U.S. certainly give thanks that we have received a welcome and that we are free to conduct Heaven’s business herein, and we do our level best to maintain good, strong relations with our host country. We pray for that. But we do not imagine that we are here to be absorbed into our host and to become its representatives, to celebrate its patriotic customs in our sanctuaries as though that is part and parcel of why we exist as the Church.
Indeed, patriotic holidays provide one of those opportunities for Christian people to move out of the sanctuary and into our communities, to stand side by side with our neighbors, acknowledging blessings we share in common as Americans. Patriotism is not a specifically Christian duty. However, as fellow human beings, members of a common society and culture, we can honor our heritage and our freedom, have fun with our neighbors, sing patriotic songs and wave the flag, watch fireworks, and eat hot dogs and drink lemonade together. We celebrate common grace in common spaces with everyone who enjoys these gifts.
Then those of us who want to can go to church, focus our attention on Jesus, breathe the air of God’s Kingdom, and pray “Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done in this nation and in all nations as in heaven.”
Tom Perotta, in his novel 
The Internet Monk Archives 
Last week I was watching my grandson play baseball and, being the old-timer that I am, I entered one of the those philosophical discussions with one of the dads about the state of youth baseball that seems to happen regularly at the park. He thought the kids were being over-coached, and I agreed.
Mea culpa — I used to do that too when I coached, but now that I’m a spectator, I conveniently forget that and reserve the right as an American and former baseball guy to become a “pundit” and to pass judgment on the way my grandson is being trained up. A “pundit,” by the way, is someone who couldn’t do what the person he is critiquing is doing, even if his life depended on it. In sports, pundits are usually older, washed-up guys like me.
Anyway, our conversation followed the usual path until we reached what I think is the golden explanation for most of the madness I complain about with regard to kid’s sports: Children don’t play unorganized sports anymore. When I was a boy, the driveways, backyards, streets and open lots in our neighborhood were our stadiums. And it seems to me, at least in my memory, that we played a full schedule of games in those humble settings.
The friends I had were all sports fans. We watched our favorite teams and players on TV or at local games, then we went out and tried to imitate them in our pick-up games. At any given moment, I might be Sandy Koufax breaking off a sharp curveball or Mickey Mantle sending a shot out of the park. We mimicked their batting stances, their pitching motions, and the way the fielders we liked caught, threw, and ran. I imitated Ron Santo, rubbing dirt all over my hands, wrists and forearms before I stepped in to swing the bat. We even copied the play-by-play broadcasters’ voices and phrases, announcing it to the whole neighborhood when we did something in the game. So it was with every sport we played.
And that’s how we learned.
Continue reading “Learning to Walk in the Liturgy”