14 Random Thoughts on America. . . . .

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14 Random Thoughts on America on the 239th Birthday of
the Founding of our Country
Friday, July 3, 2015

“So Christ has truly set us free”   Galatians 5:1
 

1.   I love the words on the Statue of Liberty, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teaming shore, send these, the homeless, tempest tossed to me”   They move me deeply.

2.   Yet to be moved by the above words and not to somehow act on them makes me think of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s brilliant warning in his book Life Together, “Those who love their dream of a Christian community more than they love the Christian community itself become destroyers of that Christian community”

3.   When I apply the above to the words on the Statue of Liberty I realize that when I love the idea of America’s melting pot more than the actual people in front of me, then my words are more than useless.  My actions are actually destroying what I profess to believe.

4.   I find it hard to jive a hard line stance against immigration reform with what I have learned about God and Jesus in the Bible, even though I am fully aware the challenges reform brings, and more than aware of my personal impulse (of which I am ashamed) to keep my little corner of the world undisturbed by the “them’s” who are different from me

5.   I think that Christians should be the ones who are the “killers” of racism by becoming friends with, living among, intermarrying, adopting, loving, working together with, people of color and races other than our own.   This requires intentionality and sacrifice and self-awareness of one’s own racism.   I’ve come to own my own (shameful as that is to admit) racism, but at least admitting it is a start.  Sunday morning church services are the most racially divided time and place of every week in America.

6.   I do think that America is exceptional, but what culture isn’t?   A democracy that works is exceptional, but we can’t export it as a fix for the world.  We’ve seen that it doesn’t work.   We do have an exceptionality that is worth exporting and that is the Christian heritage of valuing all people.   That comes directly from Jesus.

7.   I wonder what it would happen if our military adopted a strategy that allows for self-defense (based on some sort of Christian “Just War Theory”) but instead of intervening with weapons which kill, it majored in loving our enemies which would mean providing care for the sick and wounded and poor among those who are at war in other parts of the world.  What if the world saw doing world-wide intervention that way?

8.   GK Chesterton once brilliantly wrote, “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.”

9.   Have you ever tried to reconcile Romans 13:2 with the American Revolution?

10.  A 239^th birthday for a nation means it’s still an adolescent.

11. CLC (NLPC) was founded exactly 50 years before America was founded.  It was a church plant in an unchurched area of the new world.   That legacy must continue.

12. Have you ever, like I, found it difficult to reconcile the claim of American exceptionalism, in particular the claim that God ordained America as a Christian nation, with what our founders (we) did to the native Americans?

13. I like what Gregg Boyd wrote recently, “Ask yourself: Are many non-believers walking around wondering why we Christians sacrifice so much in service to them?”  Wow.  Would that kind of Christian witness challenge Americans’ growing sense of entitled self-interest or what?

14. The Eagle is America’s national Bird.   Eagles soar on the currents of the wind (Holy Spirit and wind are the same word in the biblical languages).   God is portrayed as a mother eagle in the Bible.   The Eagle dies with its feet on the solid rock of the mountain peak, while it gazes into the light of the sun (you can play out the biblical metaphor).  Pretty good images of how a nation could fulfill its destiny.  For America does have its God given role to play in God’s Divine and Dramatic Story, but it, like all other kingdoms will one day fall, hopefully having been a place that allowed for faithfulness of Jesus Christ to have been seen, embraced, and honored, until one day, the nation ceases to exist and it, too, will have been a means to usher in the New Creation, God’s coming New World.

  
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