“Let everyone submit to the governing authorities, since there is no authority except from God, and the authorities that exist are instituted by God.” (CSB – Read the chapter)
Many of the things we find in the Scriptures are fairly light and easy. The teachings in the New Testament are mostly straightforward and encouraging. But occasionally you find something that is both hard and controversial. You find something that, depending on the season, some people will support and others will hate, only to find them switching sides when the season changes. As we get into Romans 13 today, we find just such a passage. Paul starts talking politics…in a book about religion. How much worse could it get? Let’s put on our thinking caps and steel-toed boots and find out.
We are in the midst of another intensely partisan election season where one side regularly derides the other as hating America while the other side accuses the one of being a threat to our democracy. Both sides claim to love the country while insisting the other obviously does not. This raises an interesting question for us to consider as followers of Jesus: What does it look like to properly love our country? What does it look like for a follower of Jesus to properly love whatever country he happens to call home? As we continue in our series, Who Do You Want to Be, this week, examining what it looks like for believers to live like Jesus is coming back someday, let’s take a look at this question through the lens of the Gospel.
A Proper Patriotism
What does it look like to properly love your country? That’s a trickier question to answer than it might appear at first glance. I suspect most of you immediately called to mind all kinds of patriotic images. We’re not quite a month past the Fourth of July. Gathering as families and communities while we eat good food and watch other people blow stuff up seems to be a pretty good way to love our country. But can you love your country too much? Is that a thing? Can you make an idol out of it? What if you love it to the point that you are willing to overlook or otherwise justify obvious and real faults? No country has a history that is totally spotless from any sort of failing of morality. Does a proper love of country allow for honest conversations about those? At the same time, though, can you give those kinds of things too much attention? I mean, no country is perfect, sure, but none of them are all bad either. Every country has noble and redeeming qualities if you are willing to search for them. Yeah, maybe you have to search a little harder in some places than others, but they’re there. It seems that a proper love of country is going to avoid both of these extremes and fall in this messy middle ground of loving without idolizing, and being honest without becoming cynical. What has me thinking about all of this today is that as we continue in our teaching series, Who Do You Want to Be, we are going to be taking a look at our duty to be good citizens wherever we happen to live.
The Nexus 