I Pledge Allegiance . . . .

Well, yesterday was another Fourth of July celebration here in the U.S. And tomorrow there will also be lots of patriotic talk in many churches across the land.

By the end of the day on Sunday, many people in the country will have pledged allegiance to the U.S. flag over the three-day weekend.

But that will not be the case for the people at Rainbow Mennonite Church (RMC), at least on Sunday —or for the people in most Mennonite churches across the nation, I assume.

Like the Quakers and other smaller Anabaptists groups, such as the Church of the Brethren, Mennonites are not big on pledges of allegiance.

The sermon at RMC will not be a particularly patriotic one either. I should know, for I am the one who will be preaching.

Our pastor and several others from the congregation will be in Waxahachie, Texas, for the Mennonite USA Western District Conference Annual Assembly. So I will be preaching in place of Pastor Ruth.

The Anabaptists from their beginning in the sixteenth century have generally been opposed to taking oaths. And a pledge of allegiance has often been considered a type of oath.

It was/is different among Southern Baptists. I know because I was an SB church member for twenty years, and also a (part-time) SB pastor for eight years, before going to Japan in 1966.

During those years I was involved, in one way or another, in Vacation Bible School activities almost every summer.

It may have been different in other denominations, but in SB churches the daily VBS program started with a procession. All the children and teachers marched into the church auditorium following three older children bearing the American flag, the Christian flag, and the Bible.

And then the pledge of allegiance was said—to the American flag, to the Christian flag, and to the Bible, always in that order. Following that, the American flag was placed in front of the church—always on its right, the place of honor, as stipulated by the flag code.

Perhaps there was little problem with pledging the Christian flag—other than it taking second place to the American flag. Of course, there is a problem when the pledge to one flag conflicts with the pledge to the other.

Back in 2004, two Mennonite college professors penned a “Christian Pledge of Allegiance.” From the beginning of the Iraq War the year before, there were reports of children and youth in public schools being pressured to participate in saying the pledge of allegiance to the American flag.

June Alliman Yoder and Nelson Kraybill thought it was important for Christians of all ages to have an alternative statement that expressed allegiance to Jesus Christ. Here is what they came up with:

I pledge allegiance to Jesus Christ,

and to God’s kingdom for which he died—

one Spirit-led people the world over,

indivisible, with love and justice for all.

I had not seen this pledge until a couple of weeks ago, but I like it.

Personally, I haven’t said the pledge of allegiance to the American flag for years. As a Christian, I give my allegiance to Jesus, who said that no one can serve two masters (see Matthew 6:24).

But I am convinced that such a stance is not anti-patriotic. In fact, pledging allegiance to Jesus and following his teaching should do more to help the people of the country, and the world, than repeating the words of a pledge.

That’s how I see it. What about you?

Civil Rights—Then (1964) and Now

One of the most important pieces of legislation of the twentieth century was signed fifty years ago this week, on July 2, 1964. That was the day President Johnson, just a few hours after House approval, signed the Civil Rights Act into law.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed segregation in businesses such as theaters, restaurants, and hotels. It banned discriminatory practices in employment and ended segregation in public places such as swimming pools, libraries, and public schools.

That 1964 piece of legislation was highly significant. An article in the Huffington Post asserted that it “affected the nation profoundly” and “changed American history.” While it did not solve all the problems of discrimination against African-Americans immediately, it did lead quickly to great improvements.

To give but one example, in Mississippi voter registration of the eligible black population increased from under 7 percent in 1965 to more than 70 percent in 1967.

Back in 1964, the term “civil rights” was used almost exclusively for the rights of African-Americans. In recent years that same term has increasingly been applied to the rights of LGBT persons.

Last semester one of my African-American students, who was considerably older that most of the other students in the class, objected to my use of “civil rights” to refer to what are also called gay/lesbian rights.

But civil rights should be enjoyed by all Americans, and gays/lesbians are the main segment of society today whose rights are often unprotected.

In recent years, the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) bill proposed in the U.S. Congress would prohibit discrimination in hiring and employment on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity by employers with at least 15 employees.

On November 7, 2013, such a bill passed by the Senate with bipartisan support by a vote of 64-32. President Obama supports the bill’s passage, but opposition in the Republican-dominated House of Representatives has kept the bill from becoming law.

Consequently, on June 16 it was announced that the President plans to sign an executive order banning discrimination against gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender employees by companies that do business with the federal government.

The President’s order will implement on a limited scale what the White House would like to see Congress pass into law for the entire nation.

A June 23 article in Bloomberg Businessweek is titled, “Most Americans Think It's Illegal to Fire Someone for Being Gay. They're Wrong.” That article goes on to point out,

Most U.S. states lack explicit legislation barring discrimination against LGBT employees; current U.S. law is uneven, limited, and ambiguous. Only 21 states and the District of Columbia bar firing employees for their sexual orientation. Of those, 18 (and again, Washington) also ban firing transgender employees.

The President’s upcoming executive order is surely a step in the right direction. It’s a real shame, though, that there cannot be bipartisan support for the Employment Non-Discrimination Act of 2014 as there was for the Civil Rights Act fifty years ago.

I remain baffled that the Republican Party wants to be known as the party that is for discrimination against a sizeable segment of the U.S. population.

Going to Nineveh, Leaving Nineveh

In the early 1960s, the sermon I preached in homiletics class at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary was about Jonah. While there are a lot of sermons I preached in the 1960s that I would not, or could not conscientiously, preach now, I probably could preach that one again—if I could find it. (Somehow I can’t seem to locate it on my HD!)

Although it wasn’t particularly original, my main point was that the Old Testament book of Jonah was not primarily the story of a man being swallowed by a “great fish” and then miraculously regurgitated alive three days later.

No, I said, the book of Jonah is a missionary story. It is about a reluctant missionary, Jonah, epitomizing God’s “chosen people.”

God told Jonah, “Get up and go to Nineveh” (1:2, CEB). And Jonah got up all right, but he “went down to Joppa and found a ship headed for Tarshish” (1:3)—a distant place on the Mediterranean Sea far from Nineveh.

It was only after his “down in the mouth” experience that Jonah finally went to Nineveh, which according to the biblical text was “an enormous city, a three days’ walk across” (3:3).

Jonah proclaimed God’s message in Nineveh—and here is the real miracle: “the people of Nineveh believed God” (3:5). So God spared them, rather than destroying them as Jonah had warned them about.

But Jonah wasn’t happy with God sparing Nineveh rather than destroying that great city. He complained about God being “a merciful and compassionate God, very patient, full of faithful love, and willing not to destroy” (4:2).

What a strange complaint!

In the seventh century B.C., Nineveh was the largest city in the world—until it was replaced by Babylon (details here). But where is Nineveh?

Ruins of the old city of Nineveh are just across the Tigris River from the modern city of Mosul, the second-largest city in Iraq with a population of around 1,800,000—when everybody’s home. But that’s the problem: this month hordes of Mosul’s citizens have left their homes.

On June 10, Mosul was taken over by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) militants linked to Al Qaeda. It has been widely reported that as many as 500,000 people have fled the city.

Many of those who left their home in Mosul are Christians. Mosul, the capital of Nineveh Governorate (so called since 1976), is the region in Iraq with the most Christians. They are mostly Assyrians, descendants from the old Assyrian Empire that ended in 612 B.C.

(Information about Assyrian Christians can be found at www.AssyrianChristians.com. I found it quite interesting that this website is run by Ken Joseph, Jr., who was born in Tokyo and is a Christian pastor in Tokyo now. I met his father, a Christian missionary who was an ethnic Assyrian, several times during my years in Japan.)

Certainly, the Christians in Iraq have suffered greatly ever since 2003. In an article that seems to have been written in 2007, Joseph writes, “An estimated 1 million Christians lived in Iraq before the 2003 U.S. invasion. Less than half of that number still remain.”

Of course, there are far fewer now.

But it is not just Christians who have left Nineveh, fleeing for their lives. The main targets of the Sunni Muslims of ISIS are Shiite Muslims.

Unlike Jonah, though, we who believe in God rejoice that God is “a merciful and compassionate God, very patient, full of faithful love, and willing not to destroy.” Shouldn’t those words be descriptive of believers in God also?

The Life of Brian

"Monty Python’s Life of Brian” is a 1979 British comedy film starring and written by the comedy group known as Monty Python. The film contains themes of religious satire that were controversial at the time of its release, and onward, drawing accusations of blasphemy and protests from some religious groups.

Some of you, no doubt, have seen the movie, and I don’t particularly recommend it to those of you who haven’t. But I do remember it as being quite interesting—and quite funny in places.

This article, though, is about the life of a different Brian, one much closer to (my) home than Great Britain. In fact, the man about whom I am writing lives only 15 miles from my home town in northwest Missouri.

Brian Terrell and his wife Betsy Keenan live and work at Strangers and Guests Catholic Worker Farm in Maloy, Iowa. They raise most of what they need from their gardens, chickens and small herd of goats.

From this little farm, Brian travels around Iowa and across the U.S.—and even overseas—speaking and acting with various communities as a peace activist and a co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence.

This month Brian, who will turn 58 next month, has been on another lengthy protest march. This one was called “On the Road to Ground the Drones.”

Brian and those with him walked about 165 miles from the Boeing corporate headquarters in Chicago (where the manufacture of drones and conventional war planes is managed and designed) to the Michigan Air National Guard Facility at the Battle Creek Airport, planned site of a new drone command center. They arrived there on June 14.

My Nov. 25, 2012, blog article was about drones. It was not long after that that I heard about Brian for the first time. At that very time he was serving a six month sentence at the federal prison camp in Yankton, South Dakota.

Brian had been arrested and sentenced for protesting remote control murder by drones, specifically from Whiteman Air Force Base in Johnson Co., Mo. It was not long after his release that I met him for the first time.

Every year Brian and Betsy host a Summer Solstice and Feast of St. John the Baptist celebration, and I attended part of that festive time last year and met Brian there. People from various parts of the country, and even England, had come to Maloy to be with Brian and Betsy and the others who had gathered at their place.

With few exceptions, those who had come were peace activists. This year’s gathering, their 20^th, will begin around 4 p.m. on June 21, tomorrow afternoon, and I plan to be there again.

Yes, the life of Brian Terrell is quite different from that of the Brian in the Monty Python movie—and it is quite different from the way most of us live.

Most of us are not willing or able to live the Catholic worker type of lifestyle, and even fewer are willing to involve ourselves in public protests that lead to arrest and even incarceration.

But Brian keeps walking, keeps protesting, and keeps advocating for cessation of the use of drones.

Last month he wrote, “Our civilian and military authorities, proliferating drone attacks around the globe from more and more American bases, are acting recklessly and in defiance of domestic and international law.”

The main objection, of course, is to the killing of civilians as “collateral damage” of the drones.

Yes, the life Brian Terrell is living now is worth our consideration—and appreciation.