Oh Say Can You See

Here's the thing.

Most of the time, the property committee at my church is a bit on the slow side. This is a pain when it comes to things like clogged toilets and simple repair jobs. It's a handy way of assisting me in my procrastination to deal with things that I just don't want to deal with. No excuses there. Just the truth.

So we have this flagpole outside our sanctuary doors. It's been leaning for the past seven years I've been here, and no one ever really talked seriously about fixing it. It only came up every so often, when someone would ask why we didn't have a flag, and I'd say, "well, the flagpole is leaning and there's no light on the flag, so we can't have it up all night, and we don't have someone to raise it up and down every day." We do have a giant American flag (right next to a giant "Christian flag," which, to be honest, I had never heard of until I came here...) in our coffee-hour area. But we have no flag in the sanctuary, which is my personal line-in-the-sand. Beyond here lie monsters, that sort of thing. I figured, as long as the flagpole is broken, and we have the gigantoid flag inside, we're good. No worries.

But then the property committee started speeding things up. Things are getting fixed, which is nice. Including the flagpole. Hmmm.

I'm happy to be American. I'm not overly happy with the direction of America. I realize this country is much more than the sum of its current leaders. And my father-in-law, a career military, Air Force, Base Commander guy, has some criticism of the current administration - so I feel okay about having similar criticisms myself. (Not that he and I should be talking about politics on a regular basis. We still have less in common than that which divides.)

But the whole flag/church thing troubles me. For now, I've decided that as long as no one tries to get any kind of flag anywhere near the sanctuary, I'm going to leave it alone. This is not the hill I'm going to die on, as one of my parishoners would say.

You know what bothers me the most? Two things. One, that flying the flag makes me sad. I should be proud to fly it in all my liberal glory, and claim that symbol for my left-wing voting, gay-rights supporting, women-preacher loving, pro-choice, anti-war, despise-this-president, place-way-too-much-hope-on-Barack-Obama self.

The second thing is that so many people equate faithfulness and patriotism. And that these are generally the folks who also equate no-badmouthing-the-president with patriotism. It's a sort of twisted problem you find on the SAT's: all patriots should support the war. All Christians should be patriots. Therefore, all Christians should support the war.

Flags are powerful symbols. It occurs to me that, when you stand on the corner and look at my church building, you see two powerful symbols: a huge cross, and a pretty big flag. All I can do is remember which one points me in the right direction, no matter who the president is. And hope that the worship, preaching, teaching, and fellowship of this place will help us all remember where our hope really lies.

But I still wish the property committee was a little slower.