Pledging Allegiance
Reflections on the Reign of Christ
RCL Reign of Christ C
24 November 2019
Holy Trinity Anglican Cathedral
New Westminster BC
In September of 1958 I walked through the doors of Bristol Elementary School in Colorado Springs to begin kindergarten and my educational journey that would eventually led to a Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame in 1993, some thirty-five years later. On that first day I was introduced to a public ritual that had been repeated in countless American classrooms since 1892. We faced the wall, put our right hands over our hearts and recited the Pledge of Allegiance. It took me a while to realize that we weren’t speaking these words to the wall but to the flag that hung over the blackboard at the front of the room.
The American Pledge of Allegiance is quite simple and short: “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” Over the years my teachers helped me to understand that my allegiance wasn’t to the Flag per se but to the Republic, an experiment in representative democracy that was only one hundred and eighty-two years old the year I entered kindergarten.
As I grew older I learned that the unity the pledge spoke of was fragile and that religious faith was no longer a unifying force in American life --- especially if you were an Anglican in the western part of the Bible Belt. More importantly I learned that the ‘liberty and justice for all’ that the Pledge implied had already been achieved was in reality an aspiration yet to be fulfilled --- something I experienced first-hand during the court-ordered desegregation of my high school in 1970. I realized that patriotism was the last refuge of scoundrels and that true patriotism required the courage to voice criticism and to work for lasting change.
Many years later I joined my wife and older son along with a hundred or more new Canadians from all over the world to pledge my allegiance to ‘Her Majesty the Queen and all her successors according to the law’. While my English family thought this quite reasonable, I’m sure that some of my kinfolk who fought in the War of Independence were rolling their proverbial eyes in heaven as they looked down upon the scene at the Italian Cultural Centre in Vancouver.
Since I was born in England of an English mother and an American father, raised in the United States and a Canadian by choice for more than thirty years, there are times when I’m not quite sure where my earthly allegiance lies. The only valid passport I have is Canadian, although I do have expired British and US passports that could be renewed. Sometimes someone will say something that reminds me that I am not a Canadian by birth and sometimes, in conversations with friends in the United States, I am deeply aware of my Canadian perspective.
All of us who are here today live such lives of conflicting allegiances. At some point in time we choose family needs over personal aspirations or we try to reconcile the obligations of our work with the obligations of being a spouse, a parent or the primary caregiver for an aging family member. There are moments when, in a conversation with someone we know, something is said that we find offensive or ill-informed or just plain wrong-headed and we’re not sure if continued friendship and silence trumps our desire for honesty and plain-speaking. We don’t always have short clear statements about where our allegiance lie, whether to the Flag and the Republic or to the Queen and her successors.
In 1925 Pope Pius XI instituted the Feast of Christ the King in response to the class divisions and nationalism that arose after the end of the First World War. In establishing the feast Pope Pius hoped to remind Christians to whom their true allegiance was to be given. He noted that unlike worldly powers Christ did not reign through fear and violence but through courage and compassion. Soon other Christian communities began to adopt the feast into their own liturgical calendars. Some communions, such as ours, chose to call this Sunday ‘the Reign of Christ’, a title thought to lead us away from images of earthly rulers towards contemplation of how our allegiance to Christ takes shape in our daily lives.
By adopting the feast we were faced with yet another competing claim on our fidelity, another set of obligations. How shall we pledge our allegiance to our Servant Lord, the rabbi from Nazareth, the crucified Messiah?
We pledge our allegiance to Christ when we choose self-giving service of the voiceless and the powerless over self-interest. Such service takes many forms and is often behind the scenes of daily life. It can be as simple an act as looking in the eyes of someone who is asking for spare change and acknowledging that they are a real person. It can be as grand an act as devoting oneself to a cause that requires significant sacrifice.
We pledge our allegiance to Christ when we gather for worship in places such as this Cathedral or in homes or in simple buildings elsewhere in the world. In these gatherings strangers become friends, wisdom is shared rather than jingoistic slogans and all are fed with the same bread and the same cup. The Word is proclaimed, the needs and concerns of the world are lifted up to God and the Spirit sends us out empowered to “ . . . do more than we can ask or imagine”.
We pledge our allegiance to Christ when we proclaim in word and deed the Good News of God in Christ. This Good News confronts those who choose to use fear and coercion to maintain their power with the truth that
Goodness is stronger than evil;
love is stronger than hate;
light is stronger than darkness;
life is stronger than death;
vict’ry is ours, vict’ry is ours,
through God who loves us.
Vict’ry is ours, vict’ry is ours,
through God who loves us. [1]
We pledge our allegiance to Christ when we battle those forces that use ignorance as a means of keeping control and who believe that repeating a lie multiple times will make it a truth.
We pledge our allegiance to Christ when we “tend the sick, give rest to the weary, bless the dying, soothe the suffering, pity the afflicted [and] shield the joyous”. [2]
So here we are. Our liturgical year will shortly come to an end and we begin the annual journey of discipleship again. In our end is our beginning, an opportunity to renew our allegiance to Christ in whom we meet God, the Creator of all that is, seen and unseen. We will offer tangible signs of our fidelity in intercession, petition and thanksgiving, in offering and pledging our financial resources to God’s mission in this community and in bread broken and wine poured for us and for all humanity. No doubt in the year ahead we will find our allegiance, our primary allegiance, challenged by the ups and downs of our lives. But we need not worry. Every week we will have the opportunity to put our hands over our hearts and to renew our allegiance to the One who never breaks faith with us. Flags and republics may stumble and fall, monarchies and successors fail to meet expectations, but Christ lives, Christ reigns and Christ will find a home in the hearts of all.
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