Pledging Allegiance (when kingdoms collide): an essay on dual citizenship.

What does it mean to follow Jesus in America?

What does it mean to pledge allegiance to the Prince of Peace who instructed you to love your enemies when nearly half of the federal budget of your country - the biggest budget in the world - is spent on bombs and missiles and guns (delivered, all too often, in God’s name)? What does it mean to pledge allegiance to the One who spoke all life into being, who formed you fearfully and wonderfully in the innermost parts, in a society in which one million babies are murdered every year? What does it mean to pledge allegiance to the God of Jubilee when the economy of your country is dependent on human greed, and the chasm between the rich and the poor grows wider and wider with each passing moment? What does it mean to pledge allegiance to our homeless Middle Eastern king, who came preaching good news to the poor, when you live in one of the wealthiest, most church-saturated parts of the world and there are at any given moment 400 homeless people in your nice little city? When a full 25% of the homeless population of your nation is comprised of those who have sacrificed for your country in the armed forces? When few seem to consider these spiritual issues at the core?

It comes as a shock to some folks that America isn’t mentioned in the Bible (not even in Revelation!). And seeing as empires have risen and fallen throughout history, there’s little reason to expect our fate as a nation to be much different. Oh, but we’re a Christian nation, you say. No, we’re not. We were not a Christian nation when we stole this land from the Native Americans nor when we got rich off the blood, sweat and tears of African slaves. We were not a Christian nation when we forced the descendants of those slaves to sit at the backs of busses and when we herded all the remaining native peoples onto reservations out west. And while we’ve certainly come a long way in leaving our days of genocide, rampant injustice and segregation behind, we’re not a Christian nation today. Nor should that be our primary aim. The total merging of religion and government has never tended to go very well for us humans - unless you consider the abuses of the Roman empire, the Crusades, the Inquisition, and Jihad to be steps in the right direction.

What then? America, while a remarkable experiment, uniquely founded on extraordinary ideas, too often fails to live up to its prolific claims. America is not the world’s last best hope or a city on a hill or the twenty-first century version of first-century Israel or anything of the sort that some of our politicians and outspoken TV preachers would have us believe.

And I know all of this may make me sound ungrateful and unpatriotic. So I should clarify. I am very thankful for the freedom and opportunity we possess as citizens of the United States of America. I am thankful for baseball, Johnny Cash, Dr. Pepper, and all the myriad blessings of being American. I am thankful for the freedom of speech (which I am exercising right now), for the freedom to worship, for the right to vote, for access to education and employment and for the belief that anyone can do anything he or she sets their mind to (assuming, of course, they aren’t a minority or anything… oh snap!).

Of course, it is not lost on me that through the years, people from around the world have flocked here to pursue the American Dream, and they’re still flocking. I meet them every day in my work with newly arrived refugees. I grew up among poor, indigenous folks in the mountains of Guatemala who would have given anything to move to California or New York (the two places in the USA they’d heard of) at the drop of a hat. But as so much of the current anti-immigrant sentiment reveals, many of us in the land of the free are rethinking our long-standing policy of welcoming the world’s poor, tired, huddled masses who are yearning to breathe free. We forget that in two inescapable ways, we are bound up with the very people we reject. All white Americans, if not immigrants themselves, are children of immigrants. And as Christians, as followers of the Way, we acknowledge that this world (not to mention this nation) is not our home. Our true citizenship lies elsewhere. We’re just passing through.

I am thankful that I’m an American, rather than to belong to any other country on the face of the earth. Really. I mean it. But I am not just thankful. I am thankful to God, because as a Christian I believe that every good and perfect gift comes from God, our Father in heaven. I don’t thank my lucky stars, I don’t thank my own hard work, I don’t thank Uncle Sam. I thank God. But I have a hard time thanking God for giving us this land of freedom and liberty and opportunity at the Native Americans’ expense or for giving us this wealth at the expense of African slaves. (Wouldn’t that kind of be like thanking Mom for the cookies she told us we couldn’t eat but we stole from the cookie jar anyway?) I have a hard time singing “God bless America� when the America that God has so richly blessed is asking him to bless us as we bomb them (as they, incidentally, pray their own eerily similar prayers).

It breaks my heart. It especially breaks my heart that people around the world now equate Jesus with American militarism and greed and MTV and Paris Hilton and Rambo and arrogance and individualism and 50 brands of toilet paper. Maybe the United States of America has to declare war on terrorists who threaten and/or succeed in attacking us. Maybe that’s just how things have to be. But when our government is making life a living hell for the few remaining Christians in war-torn regions of the Middle East, you have to at least wonder at it all. Whose side am I on, anyway? To whom or what do I pledge my highest allegiance? By baptizing our nation - by effectively equating Christianity with the United States of America - we have cheapened the cross. Cheapened is too tame of a word. Desecrated? Bad enough that people would respond with hatred of America. Worse still that some would mistake the white, middle-class American Jesus for the real one.

So what does it look like to be faithful to our Lord Jesus as American citizens, particularly now, an election year with our nation at war and the nations raging (as they tend to do)? I can’t say I have the answer. But as in any time and place, to follow Jesus is to love God with every last ounce in you and to love your neighbor as yourself. Those are the non-negotiables. That love for God and for others is to influence every last thing we do, even as we disagree over what to do with war and abortion and gay marriage and the economy and our borders and our schools and environmental degradation and on and on and on. But we know what God requires of us - to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with him - though if we’re honest, most of the time we haven’t a clue what that actually looks like in daily practice. So we move forward, with trepidation, in prayer. We pledge allegiance, first and foremost, not to a flag or a party or a mortal man, but to the King of Kings, and to his kingdom.

And we hear, faintly perhaps, those hope-filled words: “Behold, I am making all things new!� We cling to those words. And we hope in Jesus. Not in Obama. Not in McCain. Not in America, nor its power, nor its vibrant, entrepreneurial spirit. Not in elephants or asses or any other silly animal. We hope in Jesus.

Before (and long, long after) we pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, we pledge allegiance to the Kingdom of God, joining all the saints down through the ages, from tribes and tongues and peoples and nations all around the world, together declaring, “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.�

Just don’t be surprised if in heaven, Jesus chooses to lead us in Aramaic rather than English.