Got The Fourth of July

Comes on Sunday

Patriotic Preachin'Blues

The Fourth of July comes on a Sunday this year.  I've had a couple of opportunities to deal with this holiday coming on Sunday over the past fifteen years, but it always presents a problem.  I am the last one to advocate acts of national pride and patriotism in the church.  I removed the flags years ago.  I believe strongly that the church should not be the chaplain to the state, even though with the legalisation of Christianity by Constantine nearly 1700 years ago, the state has so successfully absorbed the Christian church into its own ethos, that it's hard to distinguish the two.  I have been in churches where the colors were paraded into the church during the processional and the national anthem was sung at the offertory.  I experience these additions to the liturgy as anathema.  The church, as it is called to be, should stand as other, a community apart from the state, not walled off from the state or as an exclusive enclave of anti-government activists, but as the living, breathing, Gospel in the community, standing for peace and justice, against repaying violence for violence.  Instead of joining the state by condoning vengeance upon Afghanistan (sort of) and Iraq, the church should have been stressing exhausting all other avenues of resolution before visiting violence on others.  But that's all water under the bridge.  My problem is the Fourth of July this Sunday.

I love this country.  It is my home.  I love what it used to stand for and the ideals it once held, and may still, save for the ravings of a strident and grossly misguided few and a majority of manipulated folk who can't or won't think for themselves.  I am a bleeding-heart, lily-livered, cheese-eating, wine-tasting liberal in a community of red-neck, gun totin' conservatives, and my congregations are a microcosm of that mindset.  They will expect me to say something patriotic which I refuse to do and I want to get across to them that they are part of a community which does not believe in violence, without getting into an us/them dichotomy.  Perhaps God sensed my dilemma, because yesterday, on West Virginia Public Radio's Mountain Stage, I heard Joan Baez sing a beautiful, a capella version of Sibelius' Finlandia with lyrics by the Indigo Girls.  I may sing it, or at least read it, on Sunday.  It's a complete Fourth of July sermon for the Real America:

this is my song
oh god of all the nations
a song of peace
for lands afar and mine

this is my home
the country where my heart is
here are my hopes
my dreams my holy shrine

but other hearts
in other lands are beating
with hopes and dreams
as true and high as mine

my countries skies
are bluer than the ocean
and sunlight beams
on clover leaf and pine

but other lands
have sunlight too and clover
and skies are everywhere
as blue as mine

oh hear my song
oh god of all the nations
a song of peace
for their land and for mine

Amen.

10:43:34 AM   Lay some on me []