"Two Songs, One Home" - 07/08/2026

This past Sunday was our Independence Day weekend service, and I have to tell you, it was one of those Sundays that surprised me a little. Earlier in the week, I started receiving messages from several church friends, through different channels, asking if we could sing "America the Beautiful." I heard every one of those requests. I felt the love in them. So we closed our service with something different: the hymn "This Is My Song" set to the melody of Finlandia. If you weren't there, I want to bring the heart of that morning to you here.

This was not a simple weekend in the church calendar. Celebrating 250 years of a nation while holding the claims of faith is not always a neat or comfortable thing. But I think that tension is actually where something real and true can grow. So I want to sit with you in it for a few minutes this week.


Reflection
There is a word Paul uses in Philippians 3:20 that is worth pausing on. The Greek word is πολίτευμα (politeuma), and it means more than the papers filed in a government office. It points to the community that shapes you. The place whose values you carry in your bones. The allegiance that runs deepest when everything else is stripped away.

Paul is not dismissing earthly belonging. He is placing it inside something larger.
Jean Sibelius understood something like this. When he composed Finlandia in 1899, Finland was living under Russian imperial rule. Gatherings were restricted. Finnish identity was being quietly suppressed. Sibelius wrote that piece as an act of love for his people. The Russian government eventually moved to ban it in performance because they knew exactly what it was: hope, given a melody.

And then, decades later, an American poet named Lloyd Stone heard that same tune and wrote new words. The first verse sings warmly about home, about belonging, about the love that roots you to a particular piece of earth. And the second verse does something quietly remarkable. It opens its hands. It says, in effect: other skies are just as blue. Other people sing this song too. And God's love reaches every one of them.
That is not a retreat from patriotism. It is patriotism held inside something wide enough to hold it well.

Jeremiah told a displaced people in Babylon to pray for the city, to invest in it, to seek its flourishing. Not because Babylon was their final home. But because loving where you are is how God tends to work in the world.

You can love this country deeply. You can honor those who served. You can celebrate what has been built and grieve what has been broken, and still carry with you the knowledge that the cross does not belong to any flag. Every flag, including ours, exists beneath the authority of a God who loves every nation on earth.

Two homes. Both real. Both held by the same hands.


Prayer
Lord, thank you for the places that have made us who we are. Thank you for the people who gave so much so that we could live freely and gather together. Give us hearts that love well, not blindly but truly, not narrowly but generously. Remind us that our deepest citizenship is in you. And make us people who carry your peace into every room we enter, in this country and beyond it. Amen.