Its not at all that I hate our country, or any country for that matter (I may strongly disagree with some of the things a or our country does or may do, or how they do somethings, but that is a different story all together), nor do I disagree with the concept of country allegiance, or loyalty. However, I am finding more and more that some of us are getting our allegiance a little crossed. 

For those of us that call ourselves Christian, or really anyone who claims to fallow the teachings of Jesus Christ is called to have no other gods over God LORD, Adonai. Now this is where I find the problem. I feel as though most people who claim such a title or faith would consider their allegiance to be with God first. But is that how we think? is that how we talk? or how we live?

I think one of the most common places that I see this, and where this all first came to my attention, is when people talk politics. Take anything from the safety of our nation, or the topic of immigration, to the issue of healthcare or welfare, you will find a great deal of people (and notice I’m not one to make large generalizations, and I don’t want it to seem as though I think everyone, or even most people, but there are these people out there) that will discuss these issues in a manner, and hold solutions or sides to these issues, that favor our country. Now I’m not saying this is always wrong, not at all, but we find a lot of situations where people are more concerned with what is best for our country, and not what is best for the Kingdom of God and and so many people that God cares so much about (these people usually being the poor, the disenfranchised, the marginalized or those merely forgotten by society). 

The biggest problem about this, is that no one really admits it, because everyone is still busy believing they’re fine on this issue, that there’s no problem, that there isn’t any conflict. But it just seems to me like we are putting to much time effort and thought into issues that have to do with our country, our economic stability, or our national language, or so many other things, and we spend so little time thinking about the people who our not only dying in other countries (because they don’t have enough food, or because they’re different from their neighbor who is more powerful and not afraid to kill them, or because horrible people are taking advantage of women and children for their own gain and the government isn’t doing anything or choosing to look the other way) but in our own country as well. We don’t spend nearly enough time talking about the poor, we leave that for the red cross, soup kitchens, and the bleeding hearts of the world to worry about, we’ve got bigger problems, like the decreasing value of our bloody dollar. 

In this case I think about my church, and how I even see this allegiance confusion happening there, and I think about how often we pray for our troops. Now when I say this you have to understand I am not saying anything like I don’t support our troops, or I think we care to much about them, because that is about as far from the truth as possible, in fact those men and women are very close to my heart, and I am so sad that they all have to be there, and I strongly believe in praying for them. However, think about all the times you’ve heard prayers, or been encouraged to pray for the war, or our president and so on, in church? Then I think about how many times our pastor will ask us:
          ”now pray for the countless people in the world that just don’t have enough food right now, for the child who is watching they’re parents die from aids knowing that when they die no one in their world will love them, pray for the little girl that has been sold into prostitution and is being taught that sex is all she’ll ever be good for. Pray for the child who has been disowned by his parents because he told them he was gay, pray for the families who have to run for their lives from their neighbors because they’re from the wrong tribe.”
This kind of prayer doesn’t come up quite as often in our church.

What am I saying? I’m saying we need to take some serious time to sit down and look at what a lot of our views about the world stem from. Do they mirror what Jesus taught or what God seems to fairly clearly care about? (and not just the parts about “women submit to your husband” we need to take a real look at ALL of what Jesus taught, and ALL of what God seems to care about, and then evaluate ourselves) Or does a lot of it stem from what we’ve been taught to think because we live in America “the greatest country on God’s green earth”? (and really, its not all only our own fault, a lot of it has just been force fed down the generational ladder, and we really don’t see much of an alternative view on things, those are all “radical” or “extreme” or “don’t look at the crazy man sweet,” but we can’t throw all the blame on others, we need to step up and take credit for our patriotism)

So what does it take? admitting, I think is the first step. Then its a process of reevaluating the way we think about, well… everything. This doesn’t mean we have to change the way we think about EVERYTHING, but we need to realize that some of us have been looking at a lot of things through an american lens for a long time, and we need to try and look at it through our lens of fallowing Jesus and the God of Abraham Isaac and Jacob lens, because that is where our allegiance should truly lie. 

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