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First Sunday after Independence Day

This year, as it happens, America's Independence Day fell in mid week. This, the following Sunday, is a good time, if I judge rightly, to contemplate the grave danger in confusing religious piety with political/patriotic feelings. I'm not making a constitutional point -- let's not argue about what the phrase "establishment of religion" meant to Madison, Mason, and that old powdered-wig-wearing crowd. (If I die a martyr to the US, will I be greeted in paradise by a crowd of Virginians?)

My point, rather, is theological. I believe whole-heartedly that the universe isn't just a bunch of material/mechanical coming and going. Life is more than matter and mind is more than life and the whole of the cosmos is more than its parts -- that More is what we revere as God. Precisely because I believe this, I find it baffling and disheartening when people try to hijack spirituality for nationalism.

On this first Sunday after Independence Day, let us recall the first book of Samuel, chapter 8, with its stern warning against any earthly claims to sovereignty.

So Samuel told all the words of the Lord to the people who asked him for a king. And he said, “This will be the behavior of the king who will reign over you: He will take your sons and appoint them for his own chariots and to be his horsemen, and some will run before his chariots. He will appoint captains over his thousands and captains over his fifties, will set some to plow his ground and reap his harvest, and some to make his weapons of war and equipment for his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers, cooks, and bakers. And he will take the best of your fields, your vineyards, and your olive groves, and give them to his servants. He will take a tenth of your grain and your vintage, and give it to his officers and servants. And he will take your male servants, your female servants, your finest young men, and your donkeys, and put them to his work. He will take a tenth of your sheep. And you will be his servants. And you will cry out in that day because of your king whom you have chosen for yourselves, and the Lord will not hear you in that day.”

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  1. RDAugust 19, 2012 at 4:14 PM

    Curiously, the vicar of my congregation has been preaching on Samuel since early July!!

    Samuel's message has been overlooked during the headlong rush to bureaucracy that began with WWI and that shows no sign of ending.

    One day we will, with much gnashing of teeth, resign ourselves to the fact that the public sector can do little to ameliorate our lives other than mitigate the cruelty of abject poverty (via a universal minimum income), and resist private violence, i.e., attempts to take the law into our own hands. In all other respects, we will have to come to terms with the fact that we are and ought to be, whether we like it or not, the masters of our destinies.

    Excepting slavery and the giant business "trusts," 19th century America, had it more or less right: private property diffusely held, marriage and procreation, representative democracy, and personal faith (which I am willing to extend so as to encompass Robert Ingersoll's passionate agnosticism).

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