Devotional:

Psalm 25.5

Lead me in your truth, and teach me, for you are the God of my salvation; for you I wait all day long.

On Friday, at a campaign rally in Alabama, President Trump suggested that any “son of a b!@#$” who kneels during the national anthem should be fired. His comment was made in reference to the growing controversy initiated by the (former) NFL player Colin Kaepernick who last year knelt during the national anthem to protest police shootings of black people. And as more and more players began to join Kaepernick in demonstrating, responses from political figures have garnered a lot of attention including the recent comments from the president.

At both a wedding reception on Saturday evening and in church yesterday I overheard a number of conversations between people about the controversy and battle lines were quickly drawn. On one side there are people who believe those who kneel represent anti-patriotic sentiments and that they are ungrateful for the military. On another side there are people who believe that kneeling in protest is part of the 1^st Amendment and therefore is absolutely an American thing to do and that it should be protected.

Witnessing conversations about the American Flag and the responses of professional football players to it reminded me of Stanley Hauerwas concern that most Christians today are moved more by the American Flag than by the cross of Jesus Christ. This is not to say that there is anything wrong with the flag (though it is certainly a more complicated symbol than we often think it is), but the fact that the flag itself generates more response and appears to be more powerful than the cross is something that should give Christians pause.

It’s one thing for talking heads to ramble about the pros and cons of kneeling during the anthem but it’s another thing entirely when it comes to the realm of the church. These days the church seems to revolve around tweets from the White House more than the revealed Word of God. These days the church appears to spend more of it’s time debating the values of our country’s democracy than our Savior’s teachings and ethics. These days the church seems to believe that our salvation will come from Congress more than from Jesus Christ.

The psalmist wrote, “Lead me in your truth, and teach me, for you are the God of my salvation; for you I wait all day long.” As Christians, our God is the God of salvation, God is the first and the last, and God is the one for whom we wait all day long. Our creeds and our prayers, our hymns and our scriptures, all point to the definitive claim that God is the source of our being and that the cross of Christ is, and forever shall be, the most determinative symbol in our lives.

But sometimes, it doesn’t feel like it.

Instead, in the realm of the church we label one another as liberal or conservative when we’re supposed to see one another as brothers and sisters in Christ. When we have culture wars over things like NFL players kneeling during the national anthem we classify entire groups of people as pro or anti American, we neglect to remember that all of us are children of God. When we are more concerned about how someone responds to the flag than we are about how someone responds to the grace of God, we neglect to be a church that can faithfully say: “Lead me in your truth, and teach me, for you are the God of my salvation.”