{"id":2360,"date":"2010-07-04T06:32:57","date_gmt":"2010-07-04T13:32:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thegatheringcincinnati.org\/?p=226"},"modified":"2010-07-04T06:32:57","modified_gmt":"2010-07-04T13:32:57","slug":"july-4-2010-american-pride","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.gnhuu.org\/index.php\/2010\/07\/04\/july-4-2010-american-pride\/","title":{"rendered":"July 4, 2010, American Pride?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Message 25,\u201dAmerican Pride?\u201d, 7-4-10<\/p>\n

Download program: Service Program, 7-4-10<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a9 Pastor Doug Slagle, The Gathering UCC, All Rights Reserved<\/p>\n\n

If some of you recall my message to us on the Sunday just before Christmas last year, I focused on the unique aspects of the Jesus birth story which make it so compelling.\u00a0 Here was delivered into the world, according to the Bible, the savior of all mankind.\u00a0 He was to be the King of Kings, Son of God, Redeemer, God in flesh.\u00a0 And yet he was born in such lowly circumstances \u2013 in an unknown barn, surrounded by farm animals, to a mother of doubtful purity and celebrated by local sheep herders.\u00a0 The King of all the universe came into this world next to an ass and a few pigs.\u00a0 The humble circumstances of such a birth cry out from the very beginning that Jesus was to be a very different kind of prophet.\u00a0 Humility, simplicity, lack of pretension and modest means are hallmarks of his life and, even without all other stories about him, the Christmas story stands out as a radical proclamation that we are called to a similar mindset \u2013 humility in all that we do, say and live.<\/p>\n

And now, six months later, we celebrate a different kind of holiday \u2013 a secular one that recognizes the founding of our nation.\u00a0 In Cincinnati today, we also celebrate the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community as persons of dignity and worth.\u00a0 This July 4th<\/sup> stands for us as a day to mark dual forms of pride \u2013 pride in who and what we are as a nation and pride in the many persons of the GLBT community.\u00a0 We recognize and applaud the many principles upon which this nation was founded, how it has tried to live out many of those ideals and how, two-hundred and thirty-four years later, we remain a nation of laws protecting minorities like the GLBT community.\u00a0 This is a day to be proud.\u00a0 It is a day to engage in a just a bit of chest thumping \u2013 that we as a nation AND as a community of straight and gay people \u2013 we can claim and celebrate our unique identity.<\/p>\n

But that pride impulse, so natural in all of us, is what I want to explore with you today.\u00a0 And it is also the beginning of the theme for this month which I have entitled, as a question, \u201cAmerica the Beautiful?\u201d\u00a0 This will not be a political series or even a bash America series.\u00a0 It will be, I hope, a time to re-focus our thinking and our search for what is true and good about this nation and, more importantly, about us.\u00a0 As a spiritual value, we hold dear the notion of humility.\u00a0 But how does humility intersect with national pride and our July 4th<\/sup> celebration?\u00a0 The same can be asked of gay pride \u2013 how can we have pride and yet also be humble? \u00a0Next week, we\u2019ll explore the spiritual value of sisterhood and brotherhood.\u00a0 We all believe it and we all proclaim it but how does it really get carried out in our daily lives especially in this time of polarized politics and deep divisions in how so many see our government and our world?\u00a0 Do people act as if they are one humanity or do many often assume they are right, they are superior in thinking and all others are not only wrong but they cannot be sisters and brothers?\u00a0 How do we, therefore, truly live out the ideal of one humanity, no matter politics, religion or other differences?\u00a0 Finally, on the third Sunday, we\u2019ll examine the notion that God is somehow also a nationalist and she or he has uniquely chosen and blessed America.\u00a0 Is the Divine force for good in this universe American or simply a champion of ALL people and ALL creation?<\/p>\n

Pride is Biblically seen as the original sin.\u00a0 In the Biblical myth, as an angel, Satan was certain that he was at least equal with God if not superior.\u00a0 He was banished from the heavenly realm for his pride and he then sought revenge on God by encouraging his own flaw in human beings.\u00a0 And so, as the Bible says, man has struggled against unwarranted pride ever since Adam and Eve succumbed to the temptations of Satan.\u00a0 And this flaw has found unique expression in nationalism.\u00a0 Likely originating with the earliest tribes or clans, humans have expressed arrogance and pride in not only their individual identity but also in their identity as a group and nation.\u00a0 We find it in the ancient rivalries between the Greek city states of Sparta and Athens, in the Roman empire, in the British colonial empire and, currently in our own nation.<\/p>\n

American nationalism was given force and a beginning, many believe, by a foreigner \u2013 Alexis de Toqueville, a French writer and aristocrat who toured the U.S. during the early years of the nineteenth century.\u00a0 In his famous work, Democracy in America<\/span><\/strong>, de Toqueville claimed that America\u2019s unique place in history, as the first true representative democracy, makes it great and a force with which to be reckoned.\u00a0 His book, along with Frederick Jackson Turner\u2019s monumental work The Significance of the Frontier in American History<\/span><\/strong>, put forth the notion that combined with America\u2019s ideals, its geographic location in the new world and its predominant European ancestry, the United States is destined to be a great power and a world leader.\u00a0 These views \u2013 as they became embedded in our national psyche \u2013 gave rise to principles in this country of manifest destiny, the Monroe Doctrine and American exceptionalism.\u00a0\u00a0 The U.S. is destined \u2013because of our innate goodness – to dominate not just our continent but the entire Western Hemisphere.\u00a0 Because of our innate values promoting freedom and the dignity of the individual, the U.S. also need not obey universal standards and laws.\u00a0 We are excepted from the means to being good because our ends \u2013 our goals \u2013 are good.<\/p>\n

Please watch a brief video which vividly portrays run-away nationalism of the pre-war German people.\u00a0 I am not showing this to in any way compare such hyper nationalism \u2013 such championing of Nazi ideology \u2013 to our own form of American pride or even American exceptionalism.\u00a0 We must all be very, very careful in calling anyone a fascist or Nazi.\u00a0 This clip, however, shows the degree to which national pride can become dangerous to the nation itself and to the world at large. \u00a0 View Clip.<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

My goal today is not to attack or diminish our nation \u2013 especially on this day of all days, July 4th<\/sup>.\u00a0 Nor is it my goal to diminish pride in our country.\u00a0 I believe, however, that just as humility was a spiritual value for Jesus and many of the other great prophets, so too should it be an ethic for us and for this nation.\u00a0 Reconciling pride in one\u2019s country and national humility are not competing ideals.\u00a0 Indeed, Jesus did not run away from his calling as a skilled teacher and as one who discouraged hypocrisy and injustice.\u00a0 He has gone down in history as the perhaps the greatest moral thinker of all time \u2013 he was not god but he was a truly historic man.\u00a0 He was aware of his great abilities and, I think, he was also aware of his several flaws.\u00a0 He experienced fear and doubt.\u00a0 He attacked the judgment of god.\u00a0 He got angry and he was not above calling others \u2013 particularly his enemies \u2013 names that were not gentle or kind.<\/p>\n

And it is in his holistic recognition of his strengths AND his weaknesses that lies a lesson for our nation and for us.\u00a0 As Americans, we have much to celebrate in our ideas and our ethics.\u00a0 We believe freedom and personal choice are human rights and we have codified such beliefs in our constitution.\u00a0 We allow individuals the rights that billions of people in other nations do not have \u2013 the right of free speech, of freedom to worship, of property rights, of free assembly, of due process, of fair trials, of habeas corpus and many others.\u00a0 Our system allows those who wish to work hard and dream big, to succeed in life.\u00a0 The Horatio Alger story of one who rises from rags to riches is not a myth and we see it lived out daily.\u00a0 My own partner \u2013 not to embarrass him, was the first of his farming and blue collar family to attend and graduate from college, let alone achieve a master\u2019s and law degree.\u00a0 He has lived on his own and supported himself since the age of 16 and his hard work has paid off in the modest material success he has achieved.\u00a0 Others in this room and in this church can tell similar stories about their lives \u2013 like one who was orphaned at an early age, raised by struggling grandparents, nurtured by the larger community, joined the army and later succeeded in the business world.\u00a0 There are few places in the world where one can rise out of one\u2019s station of birth and yet achieve great things.\u00a0 We have never been a rigid class based culture in which the circumstances of one\u2019s heritage determines one\u2019s place in life.\u00a0 The American ideals of individual liberty and hard work are still alive and we are right to celebrate and encourage them.<\/p>\n

My appeal is for a balanced and reasoned national pride. As much as we can justly be proud, an ethical form of nationalism is willing to acknowledge past mistakes and remaining flaws.\u00a0 And, balanced nationalism understands that one\u2019s nation is not the only one in the world to practice great ideals.\u00a0 Indeed, American national pride can celebrate our own achievements without believing that we are unique or better.\u00a0 Just as the rags to riches ability to rise in the U.S. still remains, many parts of Europe currently have rates of upward mobility greater than that of the U.S.\u00a0 Statistics show that men and women born within the lowest quintile economic class in our nation are presently more likely to remain in that status into adulthood then similar people in the Nordic countries and Great Britain.\u00a0 As much as we celebrate individual rights, there are still some to whom we do not grant such rights of due process and habeas corpus.\u00a0 As a matter of principle and not politics, I believe that holding men and women in detention at Guantanamo Bay for nearly ten years without a trial and without legal representation is against the ideals of our constitution.\u00a0 Yes, these persons are not U.S. citizens nor are they recognized soldiers for another army \u2013 and thus subject to prisoner of war protections.\u00a0 They hide in civilian clothing and they cowardly kill innocent people.\u00a0 And they could turn their criminal trials into a public relations platform for their murderous and fundamentalist ideology.\u00a0 But American ideals mean nothing if they only apply to us.\u00a0 If we champion the rights of all persons, we must champion and protect their rights too.\u00a0 Even as they try to use our ethics and ideals against us, we must not shrink, I believe, from our civic moral beliefs.\u00a0 Indeed, I believe our constitution and Bill of Rights were motivated by a Divine moral imagination to extend individual liberties and rights to ALL<\/span><\/strong> persons.\u00a0 If that is so, such ideals do not stop at our nation\u2019s borders.\u00a0 They are universal in their intent.<\/p>\n

Our history is littered with national mistakes that, I believe can enhance our national pride if we openly confess them and work to not repeat them.\u00a0 \u00a0Indeed, it was Jesus who called people to confess their sins, to go and do them no longer and, as a result, have truth set them free.\u00a0 Native Americans were killed on a whole-scale manner while land on which they had lived for centuries was taken from them, African-Americans were held in slavery even as Thomas Jefferson wrote that all people have the right to life and liberty, Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War even as he fought to uphold our national ideals, Woodrow Wilson signed into law the alien and sedition act which caused widespread discrimination against foreign born, Franklin Roosevelt authorized the detention of Japanese Americans during World War Two while we fought against just such racist ideologies, the McCarthy hysteria of the 1950\u2019s ruined thousands of reputations solely through innuendo and rumor \u2013 without due process – and, most recently, the Patriot Act and the anti-immigrant law in Arizona have come to pass even while we have just elected the first man of color as our President.<\/p>\n

Balanced pride in America compels us to be proud of our constitution, our traditions, the ideals of Washington, Jefferson, Adams and Lincoln and the Bill of Rights which protects each American.\u00a0 Those are great hallmarks in the history of humanity.\u00a0 There IS<\/span><\/strong> greatness in the American experience, culture and form of government.\u00a0 But we also have deep flaws and deep divisions and deep wounds both in our past and in our present.\u00a0 And, we do not possess all of the answers in terms of how to best address the problems of the world.\u00a0 Many other nations have greatness in them too and have worked to elevate the rights of humanity to standards in some cases that are greater than in the U.S.<\/p>\n

We argue here at the Gathering that we do not profess to know absolute answers to spiritual questions.\u00a0 Is there a God and does she or he offer us a divine afterlife?\u00a0 What is the source of universal truth and how do we find it?\u00a0 We have our ideas on these questions \u2013 some of us believe things in different ways \u2013 but we adamantly refuse to assert that our way is the right way and the only way.\u00a0 We profess a form of religious and spiritual humility that asserts that we have beliefs but we continue to explore them and we are open to new ideas and new ways of thinking.\u00a0 A religious fundamentalist of any stripe will, as long as I am Pastor, be welcome here, he or she will be listened to and treated with respect and some of their beliefs may even sound valid to us.\u00a0 Even as I say that, we will also not run away from pride in our own beliefs and our right to equally profess them.<\/p>\n

The same standard of ethical pride or humble confidence in who we are, also extends to other areas of our lives and our culture.\u00a0 Gays and lesbians must rightfully be proud of who we are.\u00a0 We are, quite simply, gifts from the Divine One just as any other person is too.\u00a0 But pride in ourselves as a community must also recognize our own limitations, our own frailties and our own similarities to all people.\u00a0 We are prone to division, arrogance, and prejudices.\u00a0 There are some gay men who devalue lesbians and the same is often true in reverse.\u00a0 Many homosexuals cannot understand and thus discriminate against those who are transgender.\u00a0 We frequently stereotype ourselves and belittle gays who are too feminine, too flamboyant, too masculine or simply too gay.\u00a0 Many of us prize the idea of being \u201cstraight acting\u201d, thus diminishing the very pride we say we have.\u00a0 Can we simply just celebrate the unique portion of humanity that we represent \u2013 without diminishing others?<\/p>\n

My appeal in this matter, as in our national pride, is that we check our egos and our motivations in all things we do and say.\u00a0 This is not false humility or meek self-denigration.\u00a0 It is confidence in who we are combined with a healthy recognition of our flaws and needs for personal or national growth.<\/p>\n

And that is exactly how we must, I believe, begin to celebrate national or gay pride.\u00a0 Yes, as the song goes, we can be proud to be Americans \u2013 where at least we know we are free \u2013 but, more importantly, we must be proud to be caring, generous, compassionate and just human beings.<\/p>\n

Let us have within ourselves \u2013 and then let us promote it to others \u2013 the balanced pride in our nation and ourselves that is humble, that recognizes our mistakes and that acknowledges we alone do not have all the answers to human government and ways of life.\u00a0 May we, later today, joyfully sing \u201cAmerica the Beautiful\u201d, may we thrill to the fireworks and the celebrations that mark our national birthday and may we \u2013 straight and gay alike – walk proudly and in unity through the streets of this town asserting our rights and our identity as people of God.\u00a0 May we also do so with full awareness that we are not perfect and that we have many, many miles to go before we live up to all of our ideals.\u00a0 I wish you all<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Message 25,\u201dAmerican Pride?\u201d, 7-4-10 Download program: Service Program, 7-4-10 \u00a9 Pastor Doug Slagle, The Gathering UCC, All Rights Reserved If some of you recall my message to us on the Sunday just before Christmas last year, I focused on the unique aspects of the Jesus birth story which make it so compelling.\u00a0 Here was delivered […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2360","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gnhuu.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2360","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gnhuu.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gnhuu.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gnhuu.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gnhuu.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2360"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.gnhuu.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2360\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gnhuu.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2360"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gnhuu.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2360"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gnhuu.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2360"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}