There is a white marble statue near Trafalgar Square in London. It is the statue of Nurse Edith Cavell. She was tied to a stake in German-occupied Belgium in 1915 and shot as a traitor. The daughter of a
pastor, she had for many years headed a nursing home in Belgium, and she remained there even after the war had begun. Along with her staff, she cared for injured soldiers regardless of nationality, whether German, French, or English. She had been arrested by the Germans for the crime of assisting soldiers in their flight to neutral Holland. Determined to make an example of her, the Germans tried her under a military tribunal. She was pronounced guilty, sentenced to death, and executed within ten hours of sentencing. Her last moments are described by an eyewitness: After receiving the sacrament, and within minutes of being led out to her death, she said, “Standing as I do in view of God and eternity, I realize that patriotism is not enough. I must not have hatred or bitterness toward anyone.” Those words are inscribed at the base of her statue in London: “Patriotism is not enough.”
Nurse Cavell was executed 25 years after an anonymous preacher in Baltimore preached a sermon that was recorded, in part, in the New York Times in 1895 where he proclaimed that it was amazing, given our nation’s pre-occupation with expansion and bringing civilization to the natives, that we had the creative energy to write some great hymns, the literature of which is on par with Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Tennyson.
And while this preacher has every right to tout American hymnody as great, he also ignored (as was the privilege of the Anglo- Saxon American male at the time) the plight of women, who still did not have the right to vote, or even to take part in the leadership of the very service of worship in which that sermon was given, to say nothing of the mass executions and deportations to reservations of Native Americans that was ongoing at the time.
Patriotism is not enough. It is easily becomes a one-sided coin — with Ceasar’s head dictating against impartial regard for people of other countries, other races, other religions. To the question of whose coin, and thus whose loyalty, Jesus refuses the dualist trap — either country or God — and commends a way of love through community giving that serves the divine purpose through the political order. Continue reading “July 3 — Musical Manifest”