Deuteronomy 10:17-21
Hebrews 11:8-16
Matthew 5:43-48
Psalm 145:1-9
Lord God Almighty, in whose Name the founders of this country won liberty for themselves and for us, and lit the torch of freedom for nations then unborn: Grant that we and all the people of this land may have grace to maintain our liberties in righteousness and peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
The fourth of July is our national
holiday, a day of celebration, a day to be proud of our heritage, to get
goose-bumps from looking at our flag, to rejoice boisterously over our many
blessings with fireworks and friends. So
the lessons assigned to us today by the lectionary might have seemed strangely
out of place as you heard them read. Their demands are certainly enough to turn
any celebration to gloomy and critical introspection! In Deuteronomy, we hear the command to care
for the stranger and to provide justice for the poor and marginalized. In
Hebrews, we hear the cry that our true country is a heavenly country, not an
earthly one. And in Matthew, we are given Jesus’ weighty injunction to love our
enemies! Given this biblical witness, what, I wondered, do we mean when we rejoice
in loving our country on this national holiday?
We just sang in our hymn that we love
our country’s “name.” And that we love our country’s “rocks and rills, [its]
woods and templed hills.” While I consider myself blessed to have been born in
a country where freedoms are guaranteed, and I do get goose bumps when I look
out over the Grand Canyon or the Blue Ridge Mountains, I’m not so sure that
loving an abstract name or beautiful scenery is really what loving a country is
all about. As a matter of fact, when I lived in Europe, the time that I would
most long for my home in Houston was when I would drive through the Ruhr Valley
in Germany, and I would smell the noxious fumes of the oil refineries. I surely
wasn’t thinking of my country’s beauty then! It was rather the ties of love
established in my childhood for which I longed. The oil refinery smell just
brought that love to mind. It’s how objects and words recall for us our
relationships with the people who are close to our hearts that make the smells
and views and ideals-- and our country-- beloved. The soldiers who risk death
for love of country, after all, don’t generally put their lives on the line for
a landscape. They risk their own lives somehow to protect the lives and rights
and freedoms of the people whom they
love. That’s why they put soldiers into companies, after all, so that they will
forge bonds with their fellow soldiers—bonds for which they are willing to kill
and die.
Back in the 18th century, the
Rev. Richard Price, a British non-Conformist minister who was a close friend of
Benjamin Franklin, wrote: “By our
country is meant … not the soil or the spot of earth on which we happen to have
been born; not the forests and fields, but that community of which we are
members; or that body of companions and friends and kindred who are associated
with us under the same constitution of government, protected by the same laws,
and bound together by the same civil polity.”[1] Price goes on to point out that it is
natural for us to love our own family and friends best of all, but that love of
country should not imply “conviction of the superior value [of my country] to
other countries,” nor should it include “rivalship and ambition” between
nations. Just as we called by God to extend the love we have for our friends
and family to all of humanity, we should, as Price writes, “love [our country]
ardently, but not exclusively. We ought to seek its good, by all the means that
our different circumstances and abilities will allow; but at the same time we
ought to consider ourselves as citizens of the world, and take care to maintain
a just regard to the rights of other countries.”[2]
Indeed, no matter where we turn in the
Law and the Prophets of the Hebrew Bible, we seem to come across the divine
command to love the stranger. The “stranger,” the “foreigner,” is the person
from outside the community, one who is not part of the Covenant between God and
Israel, the one who is dependent upon the community for any economic and
political rights.[3] A
society that sees itself as the chosen people of God, a society that has been
attacked by a series of major powers and drug into exile in Babylon, where
their own very identity as a people is threatened, that society could easily
close in upon itself, rejecting those at the margins, ignoring or harming those
who do not belong. But God will not let Israel shower all of her love and
justice upon her own kind. God will not let them turn inward.
Jesus, too, takes this Old Testament command
and even intensifies it. Not only should we love the stranger, says Jesus, but
we should love our enemies. Writes Dietrich Bonhoeffer on today’s Gospel: “It
is the great mistake of a false Protestant ethic to assume that loving Christ
can be the same as loving one’s native country … What is Christian depends on
the ‘extraordinary,’” the strangeness of God that is seen in the Cross. What is
the “extraordinary?” It is, writes Bonhoeffer, “a deed that the disciples do. [This deed of self-giving love] has to
be done … and done visibly! Not in ethical rigor, not in the eccentricity of
Christian ways of life, but in the simplicity of Christian obedience to the
will of Jesus.”[4] If
we are to listen to Bonhoeffer--a man who took action, practicing what he
preached, following Jesus even to his own death in a Nazi concentration camp--then
Christians are indeed called to love friends, neighbors, and even enemies with
the active, engaged, and concrete Love of Christ.
As Christians on this Independence Day,
then, we must be sure that our love of country includes loving relationships
not just with our family and friends, but with the poor, the marginalized, and
the foreigner. The most patriotic feelings that I had felt in years welled up
in my breast one afternoon as I sat at a Kentucky Refugee Ministries luncheon,
listening as men and women from far-away places from Iraq to Burma stood up and
testified to us about their difficult lives in wars and in refugee camps. They then
told of their joy to be welcomed to Louisville and to be here, safe in this
country. Hearing their stories, I was proud of my country for welcoming the
stranger and anxious to do my part to join in that effort. On the other hand, when
I see the pictures on the news these days of my fellow Americans waving flags,
wearing scowls, and holding protest signs marked “Return to Sender,” as Federal
officials try to process the busloads of children who have risked their lives
alone to find a better life in our country, I am far from proud.[5]
When I read about children crying behind chain-link fences topped with razor
wire in mass detention centers, I cringe.[6]
I know that the solution to the present deluge of immigrant children crossing
our borders is complex, and there are no easy political answers. Yet, I don’t
feel as if it is a problem that we Christians can shout away. It is an
expensive problem that must be dealt with. As followers of Christ, we must remember
these children, and all of those Americans hanging on by the skin of their
teeth to the edges of our society, as we profess our love of country this day.
God loves us all—the outcast, the
disenfranchised, the rich, the powerful, the people whom we love and the people
whom we dislike and those whom we ignore. God loves the people in my country
and the people in countries where I have never set foot. Today, on this
Independence Day, our liturgy is symbolic. We walk into church solemnly and
respectfully carrying our country’s flag, the flag that symbolizes our love for
our people and for the political ideals that are meant to assure justice and
freedom for all. And after the Eucharist, where we become one with the whole community
of saints, with those in our earthly parish home and with those in that greater
heavenly homeland referred to in our epistle, we then walk out behind the
Cross, following Jesus into a world that waits for extraordinary action from this
body of Christian disciples--who just happen to be Americans.
[1] Richard
Price, “The Discourse on the Love of Country, 1789,” Modern History Sourcebook.
Found at http://fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1789price-patriotism.html.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Johanna
Van Wijk-Bos, Making Wise the Simple (Eerdman’s,
2005), 28.
[4] Dietrich
Bonhoeffer, The Sermon on the Mount, 144-45.
[5] http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/California-protests-steer-immigrant-children-to-5598276.php
[6] http://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-texas-immigrant-children-20140618-story.html#page=1
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