Like many of you, I sometimes become disappointed and disillusioned with the things I see in our country. I’m sad and frustrated by the way we often demonize each other as people and tribes when our real enemies are truly demonic (When we do that, we give the devil what he wants, creating discord among our fellow human beings and taking our eyes off of him as our enemy so he can continue to torment us). I’m frustrated that many of the ideals we claim as American, or patriotic, such as compassion, empathy, and human dignity, are often trampled upon by the very government that is supposed to protect us and promote them.
I’m disheartened by a culture that is vile and depraved, so far from the heart of God. Most of all, I’m saddened by my own weakness as a citizen of this culture: Paul, in Romans 7, tells me to “hate what is evil,” but do I really “hate” it and find it intolerable, or do I in many, many ways welcome it, excuse it, dance with it, and justify it in my own life, through pride and self-righteousness, even now as I compare myself to all the “other” people who are doing these things that sadden and dishearten me?
I know how deadly pride is, the cardinal sin. I know what a prideful person I am, and I recognize that humility and repentance are the greatest weapons in the arsenal against pride. One of the primary ways to cultivate humility is by practicing gratitude. There are so many days and ways that I can criticize and lament the country I live in, its government, and its people. But this year, as we celebrate our country’s 250th anniversary, we can also be grateful for the privilege of being born here. This land is the best place to be in the “now, not yet,” at least in this generation, even if it’s not our permanent home. Therefore, I thank God for it.
I am grateful that we were founded by really fallible people who either knew God or understood life through a lens informed by Scripture. More than any nation ever created, they recognized that human nature was depraved, understood their own hearts, and established a government and a nation that would have the most significant safeguards against oppression and injustice ever devised. We have had tyrants, but it’s harder to be a tyrant and to oppress in this nation than in any other.
This nation was born under the premise that all people were created equal, even though that concept was filled with terrible flaws as it was lived out in the days of its creation and remains flawed. Those who built this nation recognized that oppressing people born into slavery during their generation was wrong, and many acknowledged their own sin. Although they lacked the courage to end it in their time, they incorporated a blueprint for its eventual abolition into the government they established. And later, we paid the tragic cost of more of our lives than ever before or since in the righteous cause to end it.
I’m grateful that the central premise of this nation, unlike any before it, is that the rights we have are given to us by God, not by the State, and that we have them as a matter of being born as humans in God’s image. Our Constitution is a limitation on the State’s power to remove those rights from us. That was an earth-shattering, game-changing concept in its day, and any other nation that has successfully created a free republic since then has used our constitution as its model.
I’m grateful that we can worship our God without fear of government reprisal, that this is the freest place in the world to worship, or not to worship, because the gospel calls us to make disciples by God’s word and the Holy Spirit, not by the sword. I love that every time we’ve tried to do otherwise in this nation, our system is set up so that those attempts would ultimately fail. While my self-righteousness wants everyone to believe like I do by any means necessary, I serve a God who lovingly creates and allows free will, and I’m grateful for a nation where free will and independence have been displayed throughout its history, even to tragic harm, pain, and sin.
I’m grateful that, overall, the American people are more free, aware, and protective of the human dignity we possess as image-bearers of God than at any other time in our history; we now strongly condemn human rights violations occurring within our society, even when committed by our government, far more than we did in the past against enslaved peoples, Native Americans, and immigrants from previous generations. We are people with the human life-view of God ingrained into our hearts and self-concept, even when we don’t recognize God as God. That concept of human dignity doesn’t exist everywhere—it has been fostered in this place and continues to grow and flourish. It’s why, even now, in the midst of every terrible message contrary to our ethos we’ve given throughout the ages that “we don’t want you,” people still dream of coming here and give all they have to make that dream a reality.
America is not perfect; far from it. It is not God’s people, not the Church Universal, not the Kingdom of God on earth. These are important distinctions that need to be made because of the syncretism that is a frightening feature of the American Christian church today. Syncretism is the blending of two beliefs, religious or otherwise, to form a new belief that is not the other two. We’ve seen this throughout Christian history in every “Jesus plus” religious or other movement that’s arisen, and we see it today in the mixing of Christianity and politics. We have to be really careful about this, and well on our guard. Because Jesus plus anything isn’t the gospel- it’s actually heresy.
As followers of Jesus, we have distinct identities and things to be grateful for that are far greater than these. However, when I travel overseas and other people see the problems we face as a nation now, their first response is, “We’re waiting for you all to do something about it.” That response assumes several tremendous blessings from the Lord for which we should all be grateful: that we live in a country in which its people have the ability and agency to do something about injustice or wrongdoing, and that we are a fundamentally-decent people who have arced mostly toward what is good, true, and just over the past 250 years.
Tomorrow, I’ll probably be complaining again about what’s wrong here, and there is plenty of fodder for that. But today, I’m going to cultivate gratitude that God has put me here. Like we lawyers say about the American jury system: it feels like the worst system in the world until you compare it to all the other ones.
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