An End to Flags--November 18, 2021

An End to Flags--November 18, 2021

"I saw one like a human being, coming with the clouds of heaven. And he came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him. To him was given dominion and glory and kingship, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that shall not pass away, and his kingship is one that shall never be destroyed." [Daniel 7:13-14]

It's for everybody.  That great and promised Reign of God where all things are put right--it is, in the end, for everybody: for people from every nation, every tribe, every ethnicity, every language, and every people-group.  In the end, all those lines we have been drawing between one another to keep each other out or keep ourselves divided will be erased, and all will be drawn into the encompassing claim of God's Reign over the whole creation.  For whatever else that means, it sure as heaven tells me that our present-moment experience of being sorted into different squabbling nations, states, and parties with their own allegiances and loyalties will not be the end of the story.  There will come an end to our divided humanity.  There will come an end to our various flags.

The biblical writers, like the visionary speaking here in the book of Daniel, aren't upset or outraged by that claim--they are hopeful about it.  They see it as a sign of God's ultimately victory, and of the promise that God will gather all peoples together in the coming of Messiah--the promised "anointed one" who would reign, not merely as king of Israel or Judah, but would gather in all nations, in all their variety and diversity, into a new dominion that would last forever.  Christians have for two thousand years now pinned our hopes on the conviction that Jesus is that Messiah, and that his way of bringing about this universal Reign of God doesn't have anything to do with imperial armies conquering their foes but with a cross and empty borrowed tomb.  Our deepest hope, one sustained for countless generations before us, is of a coming day when our old divisions are set aside, even if we remain different in appearance, language, and culture, and where we no longer need to rally around competing banners, teams, parties, sides, or nationalities.

To be sure, there's a certain kind of limited unity you can have when you've got a flag in common--but it's always dependent on having somebody else to see as an outsider.  "To be on the Blue Team means you're not on the Red Team!"  To belong to one nation means you have to see others as enemies, opponents, and competition--their success means your failure, and your victory means their defeat.  We've been dividing ourselves under different banners and along different lines forever, we humans. Sometimes the threat to outsiders (those with different flags) is subtle and implicit--sometimes it's outright nasty.  In the days of the American Civil War, for example, you not only had Union armies marching under the Union flag (what we would call the American flag today) and the Confederate flag marching under their colors, but you had a number of instances of Confederate-sympathizing families who would fly a "black flag" from their poles as a sign to strangers that they were not only not welcome, but would be given "no quarter" and would be killed on sight if you came to their door.  It wasn't merely a symbol of one team or side rather than another--it was a outright declaration that if you weren't of "their kind" they would take no prisoners but only ruthlessly kill those who came near.  It is a sobering thing to see the return of such black flags in yards once again, I confess.  Heaven help us.

All of this is to say that our hope as Christians has to be that at some point, somehow, God will be able to overcome the divisions that have set us drawing lines between each other and seeing our siblings as enemies to be defeated since Cain first rose up against Abel.  Our hope is not that one day there will be an American section of heaven, kept separate from Kenyan heaven or Indonesian heaven or Colombian heaven.  Neither is our hope that only people from one nation will be there (we Americans tend to assume it will only be Americans, of course).  Our hope has to be big enough to dare to imagine that at the last, God's Reign gathers in all those disparate groups and makes us one in serving God's good purposes sharing in the common humanity we have as people made in the image of God in the beginning.  

In Dr. King's words, "God is interested in the freedom of the whole human race and in the creation of a society where all [people] can live together as [siblings], where every [one] will respect the dignity and the worth of human personality."  For King, of course, that vision of a future Beloved Community shaped actions now--the goal of combatting racism and segregation, for example, was not only to free Black Americans held down by Jim Crow, but also to free White Americans who were trapped in the soul-distorting role of looking down on their neighbors.  The goal of the Beloved Community isn't to have one group prospering in wholeness at the expense of the other, but for each to be freed from the various ways we are disfigured by enmity and hostility.  In other words, we are called to work for the good of all, even those who have cast themselves as your enemy, because we dare to believe that at the last those lines between us will not hold, and our various banners will be set aside.

If our lives as Christians are aimed toward a future with that kind of hope--where Christ is Lord of all and draws all peoples, nations, and languages together in a renewed creation--then it will change our priorities and cut away our pettiness between one another.  It will mean we begin to picture a life without having to see "the other" as "the enemy." It will mean we dare to believe that even the folks we have the hardest time getting along with are still beloved of God and will be included in the reach of God's Reign.  Ultimately, to hope for Jesus' kingdom will mean we will lower whatever black flags we have been flying from our hearts and burn them to ash, and instead to see the people God sends across our paths today, not as "enemy" or "threat," but as people whom Christ, the "one like a human being," is gathering alongside us in the infinitely wide Reign of God.

There will come an end to flags in the end--thank God.

Lord Jesus, gather us together in your love for all peoples, and help us to live now in ways that anticipate your Reign that includes all nations and languages.