Happy belated Independence Day to everyone. I hope you all had a fun and joyous Fourth yesterday. July 4th always feels like a celebration of how much Americans love America. Or at least how much we love our flag, hot dogs, and fireworks! This year is the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, and I found myself asking; “what does it mean, to love our nation?” It’s fair to say many people identify different elements about America that they love, and that is possibly the most American thing you could do. When the founding fathers declared independence, they were not able to form a single nation, but rather a confederation of 13 separate states, each their own country. State flags continue to be flown and co-opted for the interests of different groups. I’ve seen lone pine flags, the original flag of Maine, with a rainbow banner showing the LGBTQ community's pride in Maine. I’ve also seen lone pine flags with the words “pray for Maine” underneath; an adaptation used at white nationalist rallies. My brother-in-law even reported that he saw one in Utah, which made him incredibly angry because he does not believe white nationalism represents us, his home state. The first and foremost way to love America is to love the bit of America that you live in, and I love Maine.
For 250 years, our struggle as a nation has always been to find ways for our nation's claim to represent “we the people”, to truly represent the diversity of places and people that make up America. The first Constitution, a confederacy, failed, and so in 1787 our current federal Constitution, which acknowledged both the love for the local place and the need to join in one nation, was signed. This diversity and unity were captured by our first national motto: E pluribus unum, Latin for “out of many one”. But the Constitution was not enough to create a nation that ALL people were able to love. For those who were black, native American, women, LGBTQ, didn’t speak English, or were just poor, America was a place of oppression, not Freedom. Our original sin of slavery led to the Civil War. And its redress the 14th Amendment, granted all persons born or naturalized in the United States, regardless of race, citizenship. It said formally enslaved persons deserve to be given reasons to love this nation. But reconstruction failed, and the struggle to bring liberty and justice for all has never ceased. It continued through the workers' movement and trade unions of the late 1800s, into the progressive era of the early 1900s, the New Deal of the 1930s, through the G.I. Bill of the post-war era, right through the civil rights movement of the 1960s, into the unfinished fight against poverty and the continuing struggle for gender equality today. Making America a lovable country for all, regardless of our skin color, our religion, our gender, our mother tongue, or any other division between us, is really hard.
These struggles are embodied in the American flag. It is a symbol of our hope, aspiration, and love. American flags are everywhere, particularly around the Fourth of July. This is not typical of other countries. Our flag is the sign of our unity through diversity, with a star for every state; and the stripes represent our origins as 13 made into one. In America, we follow the flag. We pledge allegiance to it. We hang it out outside our houses and give it a place in our hearts. We use it as the symbol of greatest honor for our fallen soldiers. Our flag is the sign of American Patriotism. Charles du Gaul, the ultimate French patriot, described patriotism as “when love of your own people comes first; ”. He went on to say Nationalism is “when hate for people other than your own comes first.” If you want to capture what being anti-fascists means, this is it. It is to love one's country without hatred of those who are different. That is what the American flag meant to Europe after the Second World War. Americans loved America, and did not hate the world.Unfortunately, we have lost patriotism and have fallen into nationalism. We no longer seek to make one nation out of many, but rather to exclude differences. It is the ongoing out working of the old sin of slavery.
But white nationalism is not the story of our 250 years of patriotic struggle. To pursue the America our founders dreamed of has and will come with costs. We need to be ready to serve the least in this nation, before the greatest so all can be one. In the church, we are familiar with what this looks like; it involves giving up something of what we are entitled to, so that those who have less can join us with joy. It's about sacrificially giving ourselves for all. And this is captured by the fact that we don’t follow a flag into church, but rather a cross, a symbol of nationalism's willingness to kill goodness, even killing the loving incarnation of God in the person of Jesus, so that elites could horde power.
Serving others in the church is not as hard as we might imagine, for we are yoked with Christ. A yoke is used to join together a team of oxen, one who leads and one who follows, both together, pulling the plow. Through shared labor, the field is made ready for crops that will feed the cattle and the whole community alike. Jesus' yoke is light not because yokes are light; they are really, really heavy, but because Jesus is the strong lead and pulls with us. We as a country have been yoked together for 250 years and still struggle to trust each other, all pulling in different directions but we as a church are 2000 years into trusting Jesus’ lead. Yoked to Jesus, we can love more deeply and, as our reading makes clear, party harder without fear of suffering at the hands of our leader.
Only in the strength of Jesus will we be able to open our hearts to the vulnerability of being present to one another, across the divides in our nation. Only in the power of Jesus' love do we stand a chance of bringing America back from the nationalists who flirt with fascism. Our ability to love this country has been stolen by rich, powerful, old white men who say they are this nation. But in the church, we know that our country is yoked together; it is all of us, women and men, young and old, those of color and white people, immigrants and natives, widows, orphans, blended households and, even white men, everyone.
Our faith, the faith of our founding fathers, tells us to follow Jesus, a king who would divest himself of glory and power and honor and respect and go into the place of suffering. We need to follow into the hardest and deepest places of suffering. True patriotism in our nation is going to look like loving all as Christ would love them. Anything short is a lie and slander on our flag and our God. A return to that patriotism is going to take finding the oppressed and raising them up until they too can love this country. It is going to involve standing against racism and xenophobia, against hatred and against greed. It’s going to involve standing up for the women and the children, the orphans and the oppressed. It is going to involve our return to the struggles of the Civil Rights movement, the Civil War, and the Declaration of Independence. It is going to make the flag of this United States a symbol of liberty and freedom for all, as it was to Charles du Gaul when we fought alongside him to destroy fascism.
Let us once more stand in opposition to injustice, stand against the white nationalism that dampens our patriotic love of country. This year for America’s 250th birthday, let us once more commit ourselves to taking up the cross of working for an ever more perfect union for all humanity. One based in empowering every nation, every state, every person, to more closely become the image of Jesus’s love. So shall we continue to be justified in following our flag, because we are yoked to Christ by his cross of love. Amen.