God’s Love for America

 Friends, here's tomorrow's sermon, "God's Love for America". Blessings!

Matthew 6:19-24 

Concerning Treasures 

19 “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust[a] consume and where thieves break in and steal, 20 but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust[b] consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. 21 For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. 

The Eye 

22 “The eye is the lamp of the body. So if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light, 23 but if your eye is unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness. If, then, the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness! 

Serving Two Masters 

24 “No one can serve two masters, for a slave will either hate the one and love the other or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.[c] 

 

 

Sermon God’s Love for America 

Friends, we’re now at week 6/7 of Stump the Preacher 2022, sermons requested by you and then researched by me. 

We have our friend Richie to thank for today’s sermon. He posed this question: some of our Christian friends like to proclaim that America is the best country in the world, and that God loves America. But Jesus teaches us in the Gospels that he takes solidarity with the poorest among us, and America is a very wealthy country. By that logic, wouldn’t that mean God loves America the least, and that God’s favorite country is somewhere far from here? 

An excellent question! When I made the Stump the Preacher schedule, I looked at the calendar and realized the anniversary of the September 11 Terrorist Attacks was a Sunday this year, and I would be preaching today. The message that the Spirit put on my heart is exactly what I’m delivering now, and what we all need to hear and receive: God loves America. Not more or less than any other country, the same way that a mother doesn’t pick favorites among her children. It’s a deep, steadfast, unconditional love. And just as a mother doesn’t approve of all of her children’s choices, lovingly corrects, even criticizes, and sets her children on a better path, so to does God smile on what is good and beautiful of America, but frown on our wrongs and injustices, and urge us to be a country birthed by Divine promise and righteousness. 

This is a difficult anniversary. Now that we are twenty-one years removed from that horrible day, we can take a very long, retrospective glance at what that day meant, and means, and how it changed our country’s fabric. We also bear the dynamic that people of different ages will have varying perspectives on 9/11. 

This became very clear to me the first time in my professional ministry that 9/11 fell on a Sunday. The year was 2016, and a child who was born in 2005 asked if we were going to have a special prayer or dedication for the day. I asked her to help me lead one. I was really struck that the only person in the congregation who wanted to do something to remember 9/11 was also the only member of the congregation who wasn’t born yet in 2001, and had no personal memories of that day. It’s a day we all own as American citizens, whether you had a job in a cubicle right in the World Trade Center, whether you lived very far away and saw the events unfold on your TV, whether you didn’t consider America your home until more recently, or whether you weren’t even born until years later. We now have an entire generation of voting-eligible American adults who have never known a pre-9/11 America, and nonetheless live with the aftermath of that day, and shape what America will become. 

We’ve had a turbulent past in this country. Good and evil, but never boring. We’ve averaged one war every twenty years since our founding, and if we think about it, most of us can name a war our country was involved in that defined our youth—WW2 if you’re as old as my grandparents, or Vietnam is you’re closer to my parents’ age, or Iraq or Afghanistan if you’re closer to my age. We’ve been complicit in the destruction of Native populations since the days of Columbus, and we’ve been part of the Transatlantic Slave Trade since 1619. We had to go to war to decide that people shouldn’t own other people, and once we set those enslaved people free we still subjected them to the pay, housing, healthcare, and violent life of a different kind of slavery. We have more firearms, more firearm deaths, and more prisoners per capita than any other developed country, and yet fear for our safety in rates that vastly exceed our neighbors. We spend huge amounts of money on our healthcare system, yet make medical services inaccessible to the uninsured and underinsured. We overpollute, undereducate, and didn’t give women the right to vote until 100 years ago. We pride ourselves on the safe harbour we create for the huddled masses yearning to break free at the Statue of Liberty, but we’re building a wall at the Southern Border and we’re caging children.  

I could keep going, and going. But you get the idea. If God is our Mom, she sends us to our room so often that these days she just makes her Mom face and points to the stairs every time we mess up. And we mess up a lot. But we are so capable of glory, and in this country’s 246 year history we have truly shone lights that have caught the attention of the world. We are the home of Sacagawea, of Harriet Tubman, of Sojourner Truth, of Frederick Douglass, of Susan B. Anthony, of Dr. King. We are the birthplace of the spiritual revival that spawned the church we’re in right now. We launched the #MeToo movement, the #BlackLivesMatter movement, the #OccupyWallStreet movement, and we provided serious heat to the causes of abolition, women’s suffrage, women’s rights, disability rights, and lgbt rights. On its best day, America is as I saw it last summer, from 103 stories in the air in a glass observation deck from the Sears Tower: breath taking, industrious, beautiful, expansive, aspirational, and a home to every type of person that God has created. 

How do we have more good days? 

Revisiting the heart of Richie’s original question, our potential for good days in this country is strongly tied to our love affair with wealth and greed. I put it that way because that’s how it really is to God. We can’t worship God if we worship money, too, and we don’t need Jesus to tell us that, it’s obvious. Yet we burn our poor on the altar of capitalism with a piousness that frequently betrays that we’ve given our hearts away, again. I could come up with some striking visuals of this for you: the people that line up at the Apple Store for the newest iPhone release when the phone they have works just fine, the people who storm their nearest mall on Black Friday 12 hours after giving thanks for what they have. But as much as Jesus wagged his finger at our materialism, the fragile state of America’s soul is as it is because of more than this. Jesus teaches us “where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” Where is America’s treasure? That’s where you’ll find our heart. 

Admittedly, a decade in the ministry and a lifetime of living in this world have not turned me into an optimist. I’m a glass half empty gal at best. As worst I want to know which of my kids drank half my water. And on my more pessimistic, cynical days, I could point to a few places where I’m sure America’s heart dwells: in MAGA hats, on Wall Street, in celebrity tabloid magazines, at McDonald’s. Undeniably, we erect golden calves to those gods in our lowest moments, and we spend a lot of time in the valley. But then God taps me on the shoulder to remind me why I’ve stayed in love with this country, and why God knows we still have brilliant potential. We may hide our hearts in all things excess, but we hold them up for all to see in what actually makes America great: our communities, our charity, our friendships, our families, our churches and houses of worship working for a better world, and in the eyes of children like mine that have only known a USA gripped by terrorism and school shootings, but will absorb all the good they can to make the light outshine the dark. 

How do we remember to shine? How do we remember not to hide our hearts in the darkness of materialism and capitalism? How do we lift our lamps beside the golden door so the world can see us as our Founding Fathers wanted us to be seen? 

We follow the life and teachings of Jesus, and center our priorities around his flawless ones. We embrace the margins, reject imperialism, side with the poor, heal the sick, befriend the lonely, believe the women, give clean water to children in Flint, Michigan, welcome the migrants, give amnesty to the prisoners, bring down the rich and mighty from their thrones, and do everything, EVERYTHING, we can to embrace and lift up love, wherever we find it. 

I wanted to close this with an interesting and unlikely quote I discovered while listening to a podcast. It comes from our friends in the Baha’i faith, and I affirm that America is its greatest and loveliest when we learn from people different from us. Baha'u'llah, a patriarch of the Baha’i faith, wrote, 

“A touch of moisture sufficeth to dissolve the hardened clay out of which this perverse generation is molded.” Baha’u’llah wrote that over a hundred years ago, and in Iran, but this only underscores that people’s struggles have been the same everywhere, always, and that God’s children in Iran have struggled to take their hearts out of hiding as much as God’s children in every nation. God does not lift up any one country above another. God loves America like God loves Iran, Canada, Zimbabwe, France, Australia, Brazil, Mexico, Lichtenstein, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Jamaica, China...and every other nation you could name. The Divine hands created each of us from the dust, and molded us like clay in the Creator’s Image. And each of us, when exposed to enough time and temptation, wandered to close to the sun and hardened. Some of us became so brittle we cracked, and fell apart. But even on the days we look upon our country and think we’re so far gone that we’re nothing but dust blowing in the wind, God pours down a monsoon of water to restore us in love. Love Jesus and make him your treasure. Trust that God will take care of all the things you love so that your anxiety never takes your heart from Jesus—not a political party, not your bank account, not fame and adoration, not your fear of the other and the unknown, and not even our flag, or another symbol of American identity. God loves America, and will never stop. Our job is to accept that love and grow it to its greatest potential. Selfless, community-building, justice-bringing, world-changing love is our treasure. And if America’s treasure is there, then we have bright future our children can be proud of. 

Amen.