A Thought For The Week Of July 3, 2017

“No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and ..." (Matthew 6:24) Every Sunday when I step into the pulpit I'm aware that just a few feet away from me on the chancel is a Canadian flag. I've been reflecting on that this week as we've just finished a few days in North America in which both Canada and the United States have celebrated "birthdays" - their national holidays; Canada Day in Canada and Independence Day in the U.S. I'm very happy to live in Canada. To have the opportunity to live in this country and this part of the world does make me feel blessed, indeed. And on July 1 I took part in some of the local festivities around our national holiday. I think that's appropriate. Paul does teach in Romans that we should honour the state, and in the Book of Acts we discover that Paul was aware of and willing to claim his rights as a Roman citizen. I see no reason that Christians today should be reluctant to do the same. But patriotism does cause me some concerns. When I think about it, many forms of patriotism seem to turn our nation into a sort of quasi-God. Consider that. We sing hymns to or about our nation (except we call them national anthems.) We look to our nation to care for us (through welfare and social assistance networks.) We petition our nation just as we petition our God. There's even a tendency for us to think of our nation as the ultimate force for good (whether American exceptionalism, or the Canadian "good guys of the world" image.) For some, the nation becomes almost an object of worship. Which reminds me of the words of Jesus. Jesus said that "you cannot serve both God and money." But I suspect that the principle is far wider than that. Jesus likely would have said that you cannot serve both God and anything else. You certainly cannot serve both God and country. That doesn't mean not accepting our responsibilities as citizens; nor does it mean not being thankful for the rights and freedoms that we have and for exercising them. But it does mean that we always have to remember that as Christians we are a "holy nation" - and that our citizenship first and foremost is "in heaven" and not in an earthly nation. Sometimes (tragically - because it rarely happens without tragic results) we allow God and country to become almost interchangeable; we co-opt the name of God to justify the actions of our country. But God and country are not interchangeable. God is God - and God always claims our first allegiance, over and above any earthly allegiance we may have to any country. Our faith should become the lens by which we evaluate and critique the actions of our nations and their governments and through which we call for change in the form of justice and righteousness; instead it almost seems at times at least as if faith itself has been co-opted to the service of the state. We're not unique in that in North America of course. We see it happening with virtually all faiths all over the world and throughout history. For Christians it began when the church and Rome began to work together to extend the Empire. A valid question to ask is whether Christianity converted the Roman Empire or whether the Roman Empire tamed the church. And while Rome fell, the church didn't. Other nation-states arose in Rome's place, and we've been left with this awkward fit between church and state ever since - no matter how many of our countries talk about the so-called "separation of church and state." Is there a solution to the problem? There's no easy one. The call to loyalty to the nation is always going to be in competition with the call to commitment to God. Sometimes we'll be called upon to make a choice. When those times come, I just hope we remember the words of Jesus: you cannot serve both God and ... anything - money or country; partisanship or ideology. Our faith in God must always come first.