In about seven weeks, the United States of America turns 250 years old. That is old enough to have lived through some major changes, both good and bad, and old enough to have seen campaigns to make America great again at least twice in recent memory. But imagine your nation was four times as old as that. Imagine belonging to a thousand-year-old people whose golden age lay a thousand years in the past. That was the world of the disciples on the day this story from the book of Acts unfolds, when they stood before the resurrected Christ and asked the question that had been on their minds for centuries: “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?”
You can almost feel the air leave the room in the verses that follow. Because Jesus said no. Jesus did not stumble out of the tomb, put on armor, and gather an army. Jesus did not make himself king. The book of Acts is not the book in which those disciples thought they were the main characters. And here we have to draw a careful distinction. Patriotism is the love of your country and your people. It is the feeling of wanting your nation to be better, even when you know it has not always done good things.
Nationalism is something else entirely. Nationalism takes that noble seed and curdles it into supremacy, insisting that one people deserve flourishing at the expense of every other. White nationalism, Christian nationalism, white Christian nationalism, all of it surging in this moment, all of it seeking to claim divine sanction for cruelty. Jesus felt the pull of his own belonging that day. He could have gathered an army. He could have made his bid to be the savior of one nation. He did not.
“In that pivotal moment, Jesus rejected the narrowness of nationalism and he chose to embrace all people.”
We are living in our own pivotal moment, when powerful voices call to us with the seductive appeal of national or racial or religious greatness. Just like Jesus, we are faced with a moment of decision. And just like Jesus, we must say no. The Holy Spirit does not send us inward to guard our own supremacy. The Holy Spirit sends us outward to the ends of the earth, to witness to God’s love for the whole world. This is the work First Plymouth has always tried to do. Not to claim more than our share, but to remember, with the late Denver theologian and civil rights activist Vincent Harding, that we are citizens of a country that does not yet exist, and that the country we need to be is still coming into being.
