The Little Friar

Saturday is October 18th, the Feast of St Luke the Physician.  It is the Feast Day on which members of my religious order (the Order of St Luke) annually reaffirm our vows.  Among those vows, is one I'm constantly challenged into which I might live -- namely, that "I will live for the Church of Jesus Christ". That's a difficult vow to live into.   It's difficult because I live in America.   America , of course, names that historical nation-state of practices born in blood.  Human  life was sacrificed -- blood was spilt -- for it.  The blood of the solider consecrates and baptizes the flag and the nation.  And because blood trumps everything, because there is no holier and more sacred thing than human life, the flag and the nation is the most sacred thing in the world to an American.  I experience this viscerally whenever I'm asked to stand at an athletic event for the national anthem.  All around me there are grey haired men, many w...

Any illusion that America is a Christian nation should have been dispelled by now.  But some illusions are psychotic -- they hang on well past any evidence to the contrary.  This illusion is one of those.  Nowadays, our culture rarely takes notice of anything Christian , unless it's in  the context of controversy.   As Christians in the US,  we are increasingly back where our forebears have been in many different contexts -- from slavery in Egypt, to exile in Babylon -- that latter word even becoming a shorthand way of describing a worldview antithetical to Christ.  Think 2 Peter or Revelation.  That's why, for some time, I've insisted that America isn't Christian.  It's Babylonian.  It's Roman.  It's pluralistic, multicultural, urban, profane, political, and immoral.   So how, then, should we Christians handle our situation? The New Testament has lots of hints.  And none of them find us wrapping the Bible in the flag...

It's no secret to readers here that I have a hard time being patriotic  in the ways patriotism is practiced in modern America.  I haven't said the Pledge of Allegiance is decades.  I stand out of respect, but in honest protest, I stay silent.  July 4th, and all its related celebrations, are particularly rough.  The social pressure to confirm is nearly too much.  Nearly.  And every year, I end up having to explain why, yet again, there's a wide gulf of difference between being Christian and being American.  In so many ways, those are mutually exclusive.  The problem started for me back in 1994.  There comes a time in every Bible reader's life when the queasy-making parts of the Bible just can't be ignored.  When it's time to admit that following Jesus, confessing him as Lord and God, means you recognize the Bible won't fit into modern categories.  It's almost like instead of reading the Bible, the Bible is reading us.  Narr...