Independence Day is always a powerful, happy yet tricky day for Christians in America.
Our rightful gratitude for this nation can sometimes lead us to forget that, in Christ, we have dual citizenship and only one ultimate allegiance.
To the Kingdom of God.
Seamus Heaney, one of my favorite poets, is an Irish Catholic and expresses here what I’d call the distinctiveness of the Kingdom hope:
Human beings suffer,
They torture one another,
They get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.
The innocent in gaols
Beat on their bars together.
A hunger-striker’s father
Stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
Faints at the funeral home.
History says, don’t hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.
So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
And cures and healing wells.
– from ‘The Cure at Troy’ (1990)
