Sunday is Pentecost Sunday (note: some churches will celebrate next week based on their calendar). It’s a day the Church has marked for as long as there has been a Church. 

It remembers the followers of Jesus spilling out into public, empowered by the Spirit of God, proclaiming “the wonders of God.” It remembers people from different nations hearing these proclamations in their own tongue. It remembers the long-given promise that God is for all people, everywhere, regardless of gender, age, culture, status, or any other category humans divide around.

Pentecost is a foundational day and story in the life of the Church. It will be celebrated in Haiti and Uganda and China and Australia and Iran and every space in between, in every language and possible worship expression, in large cathedrals, small living rooms, and cold jail houses.

And Sunday large swaths of the North American Church will instead order their gathering around the praise of a nation. Because it’s also Memorial Day weekend.

Hear me: my contention is not that we shouldn’t honor those who have died in service to a country, it’s that too many branches of the family tree have gotten the stories out of order.

They will gather and pledge allegiance to flags and declare “God Bless America” while forgetting our allegiance is to the borderless Kingdom of God and God’s dream is that “all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.”

Sunday is meant to be a celebration of what God did and does to draw all people together. Monday can be a day for honoring our fallen. Sunday should be the day we tell the story about a line-erasing God who empowers people to cross border and boundary and bias in order that all can belong. 

Maybe you’d argue we can do both at the same time, but from what I see in our current moment, we cannot. 

I watch as people who claim to follow Jesus cheer, champion, or dismiss cruelty and hardship against neighbors because they lack the right paperwork. As suspicion and disdain grows of anyone who doesn’t look, act, talk, vote, believe like they do. As people meant to spend their life in service to others grasp at every possible (and often vile) means to cling to privilege and power. And then fool themselves by baptizing it with prayer and a loud “Amen.”

I’m not anti-Memorial Day. Or anti-American. I’m anti-idolatry. I’m anti confusing the story of the nation with the story of our faith. I’m anti trading what is most true for a lesser truth.

I myself am often tempted to stay from the path. I need reminded what is most important. I need shaped into the person I’m meant to be rather than person I default to. I need religious formation and practice and expressions that stretch my attitudes and ethics to look more like Jesus. I need the Church to be the Church so I can be more faithful.

And by Church I absolutely mean the capital C, big and broad and messy and beautiful and ancient and new and too often getting it wrong people who have found life and meaning on the way of Jesus. I need us to remember who and Whose we are, long before any republic or president or treaty or bank statement or political platform or citizenship. 

This is the most true story. And we need to tell it. We need reminded. We need re-formed. We need the Spirit of God to once again push us out and beyond our comfort and complacency and culture to a world hungry for belonging and joy and peace and grace. 

We cannot settle for a patriotic Christianity when we’ve been called to a Pentecostal one.

There is a better way. And if we can be the Church we are called to be and be formed in the ways we are meant to, then it won’t matter what country we find ourselves in or what leaders have power: we will be better citizens and neighbors because we’ve been shaped by the God who calls people from “every tribe, tongue, and nation.”

So this weekend gather and remember the story of our untamable, shows-up-in-wind-and-fire God. Remember you belong to a story truer and richer than the one that started in 1776. Remember you belong to a people more real than even the ones you share DNA with and certainly more than those you share political views or legal status with. Remember that you are called to something wider and higher and deeper and more transformational and eternal.

May this weekend bring you into further alignment with the God who will not be possessed. May you find yourself stretched and pushed and reminded about the most true story. May your religious expressions form you into the image of Christ more than any other. And may you and all people everywhere know you are beloved, desired, and welcome at the local church, around the table, and in the world God dreams of.