My church is having a pre-evening service opportunity to come sing patriotic hymns (as tomorrow is Independence Day here in the U.S.), and I am going to go. I think it's appropriate to have this outside the service. We don't want to confuse the Kingdom of Heaven with any nation now existing on earth but, on the other hand, there's nothing wrong with loving the country you live in at this time.
It's supposed to be embarrassing to be patriotic--that it means you are blindly nationalistic and jingoistic--but it doesn't have to mean that. God made a good world and we can love it. In the good world is the good country I live in, and I can love it. In the spirit of Jeremiah 29:5-7, I can seek the peace and prosperity of the place where I live, and with the more reason as it's a country that has been a good home to me.
Anyway, I like to sing songs like "God Bless America" and "America the Beautiful," and I don't get the chance to very often because, as I say, it is gone out of style. I like to, and I find it moving.
In the words of Sir Walter Scott:
Breathes there the man with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
"This is my own, my native land!"?
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