Seeing a confederate flag in a picture, and reading of how “it’s not racist, but a symbol of ‘States Rights'”, I wonder what the symbol for “ecological destruction” rebranded as “Free market rights” would be. Capitalism? What’s the “flag”? Some might argue the stars and stripes itself.

Then we’d be into the heart of the matter, I suppose. Where do we “hold up” values (such as today, in the resistance) and as MLK did, to call America to account; to “be true to what you said on paper”, and where do we recognize the many. many compromises that , to many, are crucial elements to the “functioning of America as a free and prosperous nation”, such as the denial of the growing evidence that much of this “prosperity”, brought to us by the advent of fossil fuel driven “advances”, has been mixing for us a deadly cocktail of “technological prowess” on the one hand, and ecological disaster on the other?

Naomi Klein’s book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs The Climate, a watershed and heart opening book for me when I read it upon its release in September 2014, put its finger right there, and that eye/heart opening realization is what I want to bring to the church. I have an uphill battle there, trying to dispel the deeply ingrained notions that we are in a country that stands as a light to the world (a rather blasphemous notion, I might say, since that symbol is given as a descriptor of the Kingdom of God, not America).

Our loyalty is to a Kingdom that stands completely independent of national loyalty. It has become even more so now, now that we know just a little of the effects of our complicity in this project called America that encourages us to approve of the “means” for the sake of an “ends” that ignores the long term effects of those means. We are starting to see, writ large, what the actual “ends” may be.