I suppose it could be that at the time the hymnal was published such songs were considered so outside the liberal canon as to be completely without redemption even by the most awkward of re-tuning and the clumsiest degenderizing. But I think also that our liberal religious movement has maintained an unhealthy suspicion of patriotism, equating it with nationalism, lumping patriotism and love of country together and wanting no part of any of it.

Many of us, of course, had our first experience of the passion of liberal religion in what some consider to have been its finest hours—the eras of the civil rights movement and the war in Vietnam. Our congregations came alive in those days, roused from their lethargy and white middle class stagnation. Even the pain of conflict and division among us was soon blessed as the pain of growth and emerging moral maturity.

When the civil rights movement finally fizzled and the war in Vietnam ignominiously ended, our congregations rested back into their collective neuroses, gathered their communal dysfunctions back around them, and so lost sight of any empowering identity that they adopted the hopeless logo, “To question is the answer.” Those who had come to our congregations to fight the good fight—those whose experience had been long on rebellion and short on anything of real religious substance—drifted away when the once-energizing struggles were over.

One mark of those times does remain—that enduring suspicion of patriotism and a lingering moral misgiving that to love one’s country would be tantamount to cheating on one’s religion. Now, it goes without saying that much has been done to justify our citizen skepticism, if not our outright loathing of the trappings of nation and government.

Vietnam was not all of it, by any means. Perhaps it began, for our era, with Watergate, mother of all the gates yet to come. And few of us would want to endure so lengthy a parade of all the politicians who have disgraced the nation since and betrayed its history and its promise.

Worst of all another war and now another.

Let me read you a statement by a war protester:

This war is wrong. Its prosecution would be a crime. There is not a question raised, an issue involved, a cause at stake, which is worth the life of one bluejacket on the sea or one khaki coat in the trenches. I say to you that when, years hence, the whole of this story has been told, it will be found that we have been tragically deceived, and all our sacrifices have been made in vain.

It might have come from Neil Sheehan’s “A Bright, Shining Lie,” a history of the Vietnam War or from the heroic Senator Richard Byrd, but the passage comes from a sermon by John Haynes Holmes, the pacifist minister of the Unitarian Community Church in New York City. It was the momentous and nationally notorious sermon in which he declared his opposition to the First World War, to what came to be called, “The war to end all wars.”

Holmes quarreled with his country and much of his country came to revile him in return. But Holmes’s quarrel was a lover’s quarrel. He went on to say,

In time of war, as in time of peace in the hour of sin as in the hour of glory, I shall love my country and serve her to the end. Nothing she can do will end my affection or sever my allegiance. There are [those] who cast off their [spouses] if they be guilty of infidelity but [I would not]. There are [those] who would turn their [children] into the streets if they go wrong—but I would not do so with my children. There are those would refuse ever again to see sons, or friends, or comrades if they are guilty of dishonest or crime—but I would not act so in such a case.

Nothing that any man or woman can do, least of all the ones to whom I am bound by ties of kinship or affection, shall remove them from my love, or deny them my forgiveness, or exile them from my devotion. I will condone no fault, excuse no offence, exact the uttermost farthing of just punishment. But the one I love shall always be to me as my own soul. So with my relation to my country!

And so with our relation to our country? By no means “My country, right or wrong, my country (someone has said that to say ‘My country, right or wrong is the same as to say, ‘my mother, drunk or sober’).” Holmes made it clear that he condoned nothing, excused nothing...but he loved America.

Mired in the muck of another war, we may despair of our nation and of its capacity for peace and justice. We had such hope. Many here remember the ending of the “Cold War,” the calming of mutual paranoia, the easing of the terror of nuclear annihilation. A “new breeze” was blowing through Europe; the tearing down of the Berlin Wall; the fall of so many tyrants.

We had allowed ourselves to hope that we were indeed beginning to inhabit a new age of peace and common understanding, perhaps the dawning of that biblical promise of a time when the lion would lay down with the lamb, nation would not rise up against nation, and justice would roll down like waters. We had allowed ourselves to hope that we were indeed moving beyond war.

Even when this war threatened, we thought surely dialogue will replace saber rattling, that surely diplomacy and the will of the international community will prevail or that, at the very least, history would have taught its brutal lessons. We prayed; we silently walked arm in arm as in other days.  We lit our candles and sang our songs. And still the old terror returned, as if flicking away all our naive hope.

Are we, then, rotten and stupid to the core, wanting nothing at the end but the stink of battle and the mad, fleeting sense of power that comes with the illusion of victory? I was shaken and sickened when this war began.  I did despair of our nation. It seemed we had tasted the possibility of life and, having learned nothing after all, had chosen death.

But my still-enduring commitment is to transformation. Transformation is not the same as change. Change is from this to that. A becomes B.  Warlike becomes peace loving. Transformation, on the other hand, is process. Transformation is gradual becoming, the slow, sometimes agonizingly slow movement that is characterized by slipping and sliding, rising and falling, failing and moving again.

It is not that we are, suddenly, no longer racists, but that we have become aware, conscious and striving to overcome our racism and the racism embedded in our culture. It is not that we are, lo and behold, no longer sexist, but that we have become aware, conscious, trying and failing and trying again to know and overcome the injustice, inequity, and violence that has victimized our sisters since the dawn of history. And so it is not that we suddenly became a race of peace and sweet reason.  As with these other aspects of human transformation, we are in a process, moving toward fulfillment. My faith is in that process, that becoming.

There are those who beat the war drum and scream for blood in the same mad voice of their ancestors. I don’t doubt that those who love death more than life will be with us for some time. But, overall, I experience a global sense of sadness, a regret of this war, and a consciousness of shared humanity far greater than ever before. Therefore, I do not despair of our human family. In spite of the tragic failure of peace in these days, I believe that much of humankind has a deeper awareness of the anachronism of war than it has ever had before.

Let us not let this war diminish in our minds and spirits the achievements of the human will for peace. In seeking the light, we will, from time to time, fall. But I believe that we are becoming children of the light and that we will continue to pursue it. Now, in the midst of war, is the time for us to intensify our efforts to be makers of peace. For peace, like war, does not simply “break out.” Peace, like war, must be made.

It has been the liberal religious habit, to utter the name “America” and conjure the image of the top-hatted capitalist prancing over boardwalk and the railroad, or of the mean streets burning, the President’s men scheming their way into an uncertain history. But what a loss that is of so much national beauty of place and spirit

I urge us into a new patriotism, a renewed love of country that empowers us toward peace and justice. I urge us to return to the poem songs of Walt Whitman, and recover the spirit of celebrating this land and its people.

Come, I will make the continent indissoluble,

I will make the most splendid race the sun ever shone upon,

I will make divine magnetic lands,

With the love of comrades,

With the life-long love of comrades.

I will plant companionship thick as trees along all the rivers of America,

and along the shores of the great lakes, and all over the prairies,

I will make inseparable cities with their arms about each other’s necks,

For you these from me, O Democracy, to serve you ma femme!

For you, for you I am trilling these songs.

Where we can, let us link arms with others who love this land. Let us not commit the folly of supposing that only you and I are worthy citizens because of our liberal hue and righteous cry. You and I have met in our travels about this land, in some shop, cafe, gas station, park bench, campground—the loveliest of men and women of America who have warmed our hearts and we never knew their faith or their politics no more than they knew our follies or guessed at our sins or imagined for a moment that we did not hold their Jesus dear as they. They are American as the Fourth of July, as American as apple pie—the people come from ancestral patriots stepped off Plymouth Rock, dragged from mud villages in chains, fled from besieged lands in fear.

Where our passion for racial justice has grown cool let a renewed love of this land of possibility lift us to our feet again. The African American poet Langston Hughes wrote

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.

They send me to eat in the kitchen

When company comes,

But I laugh,

And eat well,

And grow strong.

Tomorrow,

I’ll be at the table

When company comes.