I’ve been a fan of Flag Day for quite a while, although probably not for any reason you’d expect.

Flag Day, in case you haven’t thought about if for a while, is June 14. On June 14, 1777, the Second Continental Congress, meeting in Philadelphia, passed a resolution stating that “the flag of the United States be 13 stripes, alternate red and white,” and that “the union be 13 stars, white in a blue field, representing a new constellation.” The flag was quickly designed and produced. It took a bit longer for Flag Day to become a holiday.

That process began with Bernard J. Cigrand, a Wisconsin schoolteacher. In 1885, he encouraged his students to celebrate June 14 as “Flag Birthday.” He then wrote an article for a Chicago newspaper in which he urged all Americans to set aside this date to celebrate the flag. Three years later, William T. Kerr joined Cigrand’s cause and founded the American Flag Day Association of Western Pennsylvania. In 1916 President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed June 14 as the official date for Flag Day. Finally, in 1949, almost 200 years after the flag was authorized, the U.S. Congress officially established the date as National Flag Day, although it never has made Flag Day an official federal holiday.

So, what’s the big deal about picking a day to celebrate the flag? Well, my personal appreciation has more to do with family than with country. June 14 is Marge’s birthday (a day she shares with a current U.S. president). So when I see U.S. flags flying in more places than I do most other days, I’m reminded that I’ve once again forgotten about her birthday. Conveniently, the flags also remind me that exactly two weeks later, I will have forgotten our anniversary. (I told you probably wouldn’t expect the reason I appreciate the holiday!)

But, truth be told, there are other, more widely shared reasons for my appreciation. Among these, the most important is that our nation’s flag isn’t just a piece of colored cloth. It’s also a sign or a symbol. A sign, says Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) “can be said to be anything … by means of which some other thing is known.” Much more recently, Paul Tillich (1886-1965) wrote, “symbols participate in the reality which they represent.”

Although widely separated by time and theological perspective, both Aquinas and Tillich recognize that a sign points beyond itself; that a symbol is more than just a tangible object. In that sense, seeing a flag on a building or a battlefield can be compared to seeing a cross atop a church. The flag brings to mind ideals and events that characterize our country. The cross reminds us of God’s eternal plan for our redemption.

This summer, as we approach the 250th birthday of our nation, it may be time for our country’s flag to be shown more respect than it’s received in recent decades. Honoring the flag doesn’t mean America is perfect any more than seeing a cross on the steeple of a church means that all the church’s members are perfect. Like the cross, the flag reminds us who we are, how we got here, and what we’re striving to become.

I think that’s worth a day of celebration.

Even if your eyesight is worse than mine, for the next couple weeks you’ll be seeing hearts everywhere you look. You’ll see candy boxes shaped like hearts. You’ll see candy shaped like hearts. You’ll see a seemingly unceasing flow of ads adorned with hearts flowing across whatever screen has your focus at the moment.

Why? Because Valentine’s Day is coming. The attendant advertising reinforces the cliched notions that our emotions are centered in our hearts and that love instinctively and effortlessly flows from every human heart. So, if we just see enough hearts (and buy enough candy and greeting cards), love will fill the earth and we’ll live happily after.

Okay …

There’s a reason Valentine’s Day isn’t found on the liturgical calendar of the Christian Church: The Bible sees the human heart as representing something far beyond Hallmark and Whitmans sentimentality. Scripture speaks of the heart as the core of a person’s being. The Bible describes the heart as the seat of human thinking, willing, and feeling. (Yes, the Bible recognizes the value and validity of rightly ordered affections.) Even more important, the Bible speaks about the heart as the place where our character is shaped and where our response to God is formed. As we’ll see below, our heart is the source of our speech.

But first, it’s been 33 years since Daniel Patrick Moynihan published an article titled Defining Deviancy Down.[1] Moynihan, a Democrat and devout Catholic, taught at Harvard, served four U.S. presidents, and served four terms as a senator from New York. In this seminal essay, he observed that “deviancy – measured as increases in crime, broken homes, and mental illness – reached levels unimagined by earlier generations. … Actions once considered deviant from acceptable standards became, almost immaculately, within bounds.”2 His article was incisive and prophetic.

Given his chosen topics, Moynihan didn’t discuss an area where cultural decline is especially evident today – our speech. Last year, Virginia elected an Attorney General who insisted he was serious about killing a political opponent and his children.3 This year, a candidate for Ohio Attorney General is telling everyone who will listen how he plans to kill President Trump.4 

When did causing children to die in their mother’s arms, just to change the opinion of a political opponent, become “within bounds?” How long have we been sliding down a slippery slope to have reached a place where planning the execution of a sitting president becomes an acceptable plank in a political platform? Is there anything anyone can do to reverse the trend?

To be sure, some have tried. But coarse discourse can’t be smoothed over by increasing the ranks and authority of the Speech Police. Throughout history, coordinated efforts to eliminate free speech have failed everywhere they’ve been tried. And they always will. That’s because speech doesn’t start with our tongues. Rather, it begins in our hearts. Jesus said, “For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks” (Matt. 12:34).

The way to change speech is to change hearts. So, perhaps the Church might want to take another look at all the hearts that will circulating in the run-up to Valentine’s Day.

Valentine’s Day is indeed a cultural custom. But I wonder: Could the Church co-opt the date but change the custom? What would happen if, in the coming years, God’s people were to use Valentine’s Days intentionally to examine the words we’ve spoken or written – edifying and unedifying – in the past 12 months. What might change if we gathered together, or sat silently alone, examined our hearts, and thought about all the words we might use in the year ahead?

What differences might such explorations of our own hearts make in each of our lives, in the life of this church, this community, this country?

[1] The American Scholar, vol. 62, 1993, pp. 17-30.

2 Kevin Warsh, Defining Deviancy,  https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/warsh20090616a.htm.

3 https://jayjonestexts.com/.

4 https://www.foxnews.com/politics/backlash-erupts-after-ohio-democratic-ag-candidate-posts-about-killing-trump.

Were there angels in heaven who kept records of such things, I suspect most of us one day would be amazed to learn how often we thought, yet how little we knew, about time.

Please don’t take that as a criticism. The concept of time has long perplexed poets, painters, philosophers, physicists, and those of us who persistently look up at a wall or down at our wrist (or our phone) to learn what time it is. It might seem that attempts to learn what time it is presuppose that someone, somewhere, has determined what time is. But that presupposition is optimistic.

Most of us have a deeply intuitive sense not only that time exists, but that it matters. Even if we can’t precisely define it, we continually experience it. And many individuals, coming from many different starting points, have tried to express their perceptions about time.

Poets, going at least as far back as William Shakespeare, eloquently survey the effects of time on human beings. Often, but certainly not always, poets portray time as an enemy. The best-known painting of the Surrealist Salvador Dali, formally titled The Persistence of Memory, is more popularly known as Melting Clocks. Years after finishing the painting, Dali addressed the wide range of meanings ascribed to the work by saying even he didn’t know what it meant.

Then there are physicists and philosophers who don’t believe there’s any such thing as time. Some modern physicists use Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity to argue that in space-time, concepts such as past, present, and future are meaningless. A century earlier, the philosopher Immanuel Kant had argued that temporal order is found only in an individual’s mind and that time does not objectively exist.

The Bible takes a different approach. Although both Hebrew and Greek have several words properly translated “time,” Scripture doesn’t speculate about time’s nature. Instead of arguing for its existence or listing its qualities, the Bible simply assumes that time exists. My broad summary of the biblical view of time is that it’s something like a cosmic canvas across which God’s specific acts in the redemption of his people are sequentially unfurled.

Time is God’s creation and it remains under his direction. As such, not only is time real (contra some philosophers and physicists), time is also very good (contra some poets and painters). According to the Bible, human history, and our individual histories, are moving toward a God-established goal. Time is a gift of God that helps us track our progress. We can look back at the places where we’ve wandered off the path. We can also look ahead to get at least a glimpse of the glory God already has prepared for us.        

The advent of a new calendar year is often used by individuals and organizations as an opportunity to look back and to look ahead. Both can be rewarding exercises. As Christians, we can look back and see specific points where we’ve grown in our faith. We can also gain clarity about opportunities for future growth. But, as Christians, I think our greatest joy comes from looking ahead. For there we see a God “with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change” (James 1:17). And there we see our Savior, Jesus Christ, who “is the same yesterday and today and forever” (Heb. 13:8).

Happy New Year.

For as long as I can remember, I have loved the music of the Christmas season. From Linus and Lucy Can Rock to You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch and from Frosty the Snowman to Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer, music from the animated specials of my childhood still brings a smile to my face.

Through the years, I have added an appreciation of more substantial works, including Antonio Vivaldi’s Gloria and George Friedrich Handel’s Messiah. Although they were written about 300 years ago, both are still widely performed when Christmas time is here, eloquent evidence of music’s ability to convey profound truths to human souls.

And I never tire of playing or singing Christmas carols. My favorite is Angels We Have Heard on High. The melody comes from a traditional French piece, “The Angels in Our Countryside.” “Traditional” is one way musicians say, “We have no idea who wrote this tune.”

The author of the 10 original verses is equally unknown. We do know that in 1860, these verses were translated into English by James Chadwick, a Roman Catholic bishop from England. I was surprised when I learned that it was not until 1966, when the American composer Austin Lovelace was preparing to include it in a new United Methodist hymnal, that this centuries-old carol was first given the title “Angels We Have Heard on High.”

One of my earliest musical memories is learning to sing this carol for my home church’s Christmas pageant. This annual event was the standard small church bathrobe drama, complete with shepherds and angels, wise men and a plastic baby Jesus. But with each tableau, the Junior Choir sang a verse or two from an appropriate carol. When we got to Angels We Have Heard on High, I was asked to sing the alto line for the refrain.

That was a revelation.

As the carol’s refrain began, the sopranos held their note for several beats while the altos sang shorter notes below them. Then we held a long tone while the sopranos kept changing notes above us. I was hooked. It would be years before I learned that the technical term for that musical procedure is “polyphony,” literally, “many voices.” It took me even longer to recognize that this compositional technique provides an ideal way to set the text of the carol’s refrain, which is taken from Luke 2:13-14:

          And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying,

                  “Glory to God in the highest,

and on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased!”

By definition, a multitude of angels would include many voices. Using what a former pastor called my “sanctified imagination,” I can imagine that the voices of the heavenly host ranged from low to high, each with its own distinctive timbre. And while I can’t imagine what that heavenly choir sounded like when they praised God from the sky, I’m sure that what the shepherds heard was glorious and that it glorified God in the highest.

As together we begin this new Christian year, journeying through Advent to Christmas with the music of the season ringing in our years, let me encourage you to listen a bit more carefully to the carols you’ll hear and sing. For even though we know them all by heart, if we pay a little more attention to both the words and the music, we just may find our souls refreshed in unexpected ways.

Gloria in excelsis Deo.

This year the Nicene Creed celebrates its 1,700^th birthday. Accommodating that many candles would require a birthday cake far larger than any I’ve ever seen. And if you’re wondering about this article’s title, you may want to rewatch Jaws, which turns 50 this year. (Anybody else feeling old?)

The Nicene Creed seems less well known to Presbyterians and other Reformed Christians than either the Apostles’ Creed or the Westminster Confession of Faith. For reasons I won’t explore here, I don’t find that surprising. But I do believe that as the Church enters its third millennium, all Christians would be well served by learning more about the background and importance of this creed as it reaches the ripe old age of 1,700.

In the year 325, the Church was still adjusting to its new status in the Roman Empire. Barely a decade earlier, the new Roman Emperor, Constantine, had converted to Christianity and issued his Edict of Toleration, which legalized the faith in the empire. The Edict would prove a mixed blessing. Official persecution of Christians ended and Church membership grew rapidly. Unfortunately, with growth came controversy.

As early as 318, a pastor named Arius began teaching that Jesus was not fully God; that Jesus was not eternal, but instead was the first creature made by God. This new doctrine contradicted Scripture and three centuries of Church teaching. To resolve the conflict in the Church, and not coincidentally to help keep peace in his empire, Constantine called for a council of church leaders to meet in city of Nicaea in 325.

There, Arius was given the opportunity to explain his beliefs to the bishops. He and his supporters were sure his views would prevail. However, his  novel teaching, summarized by the slogan “There was when the Son was not,” was opposed by one of the most able and influential theologians of the Early Church, Athanasius. Athanasius insisted that if Jesus wasn’t fully God, he couldn’t fully accomplish human salvation. “That which has not been assumed has not been healed,” was his succinct response.

Rejecting as heretical Arius’ insistence that Jesus was not God, the Council of Nicaea produced the Nicene Creed, which declared that Jesus is “of one substance” (homoousia) with the Father. Homoousia combines homo, meaning same, with ousia, meaning substance, or essence. The Greek word isn’t found in the Bible, which troubled some members of the council. But as the Church worked to articulate the Bible’s unchanging revelation in the language of its day, homoousia seemed the best word to express the eternal relationship between God the Father and God the Son.

The importance of the Nicene Creed in Christian history is summarized by the late Presbyterian theologian John Leith who writes, “The first Christian doctrine that the church settled in an ecumenical council and that has subsequently received approval in the life of the church through the centuries had to do with the deity of Jesus Christ. The church made clear at Nicaea what it was convinced had always been the faith of Christian people. In Jesus Christ human beings are confronted by God.”

For nearly two millennia, the Nicene Creed has remained the most widely quoted creed in Christendom. It’s accepted by Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Anglicans, and most Protestant denominations. Each time we recite this historic affirmation of our faith, we remind ourselves of a fundamental Christian truth: God’s nature is Triune. We also remind ourselves of our unbreakable connection to Christians around the world and throughout time.

 So, on the 1,700^th birthday of the Nicene Creed, a cake may be in order. Especially if we fudge the candles.