Do you believe in coincidences? At the root, that question is really asking what you believe about the sovereignty of God, man’s free will, and how they interact, and that is NOT a topic I’ll be tackling today. But whether you would consider it to be divine timing or merely coincidental, as we approached July 4th and the celebration of our nation, we also reached the patriotic section of our hymnal in our bedtime rotation.
I won’t really be working through this theme either tonight, but it did make me question what definition of “hymn” the editors of this particular edition were using. We’ve encountered quite a range in that hymnal, from the classics that (almost) everyone knows, to the somewhat-obscure that only those who were raised on a steady diet of hymns would know, to the truly obscure that I’m not sure anyone knows, to ones I would consider to be more choruses. And then there’s the patriotic section. Again, not tonight’s topic, but why are “America the Beautiful” and “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee” included in a hymnal?
The real topic I’ve been considering for the last several days is where our true allegiance lies. Just a few pages past the ones already mentioned are “I’m Just a Poor, Wayfaring Stranger” and “On Jordan’s Stormy Banks”, and the sentiment expressed in those is so very different from a love of and fealty to country. I’m not knocking patriotism by any means, but let’s make sure our priorities of allegiance are in order. Abraham isn’t lauded for his affection for the Promised Land, but for living in that land as a foreigner, for seeing the promise from afar and living on earth as a stranger and a pilgrim.
At the end of the day, at the end of celebrating another year of this country’s existence, warts and all, it’s a matter of where our affections, our hopes, and our treasures are rooted. Either they’re rooted here on earth, perhaps in this relatively young upstart of a nation and all its temporal promises, and those roots stunt the growth of our affections towards higher and holier things. Or they’re rooted in heaven, and those roots direct and reorder our affections – and limit them as well – in their “secondary” growth here.
For further reading, consider Hebrews 11.
Most of the older hymnals that I came across have such a variety of songs in them. Most can be read instead of sung and used as devotionals. But sometimes I do find myself just saying the words and not really thinking, with my heart, what they mean. In the USA today, with all of the real and media induced crisis going on, we need a reminder where our true allegiance lies. Isaiah 41:10