BUSTED. I'M HURT.

My father was in Vietnam on two tours of duty with the First Cavalry Division of the U.S. Army, served for a while in Bremerhaven Germany and taught at Fort Sill near Lawton, Oklahoma when I was born. I would sneak into his closet as a boy and try on the jacket of his uniform. I'd prowl through his dresser drawers and open the square silk cases containing his medals. We looked through shoe boxes of black and white memories together: a younger more muscular dad with a snake around his neck in thick jungle, my father with a smiling vietnam boy wearing around his neck the Converse sneakers my mother sent him as a gift, a grouping of tents and shirtless men wearing dog tags and baggy pants and carrying beers, a firing mammoth cannon dwarfing my father and his men.

My father gave me three miniature cannons when I was probably ten. Made of wood and iron, they were built in Hong Kong and sold in military PXs - replicas of America's fiercest fire power on land at various points in her history: Civil War, WW1, WW2, and the modern age. They were three of my favorite things because they were his. And behind them, folded properly in a triangle, Old Glory.

In those days I saluted the flag and pledged allegiance to her. My favorite part of a high school football game was the presenting of the colors, the military personnel turning sharply, snapping to attention, marching in perfect sync with each other. I wanted to be them. I wanted to be like my father.

Today my evolving understanding of historic Christianity and scripture has me talking from time to time - more often here than anywhere else - about the Church's relation to Nation. I view myself as a citizen of God's kingdom first and America second. I don't pledge allegiance to a flag or cross my heart and repeat a pledge to a nation mostly as a symbolic refusal on my part to vow my life and death to anything but the Christ. I think most of what the governments of earth do to care for people in need is the job of the Church, a job the government does because we no longer see it as our own. I don't think the government does anything benevolent better than Christians working together can. We the Church are the institution charged by God to show mercy and set things right. The government also defines peace differently from the Church and secures it with violence I believe to be a temporary surface solution inherently opposed to the character, example and teaching of Jesus. We the Church are the institution charged with peace making.

I'm not against government but indifferent to it. Working to supplant it almost entirely with a loving active Church. I'm thankful for the benevolence of my government and the many pleasures and freedoms that are mine because I live in America. But her freedom is not thee ultimate freedom. Her pleasures are not the greatest I can know. And I'd like to think I'd go against my country and my flag and my father to pursue the greater freedom and pleasure of following my real King whose nation has no borders.

How'd a good Republican boy from a military family get so screwed up? Somehow I went from patriotism to indifference. From future to soldier to pacifist. How?

Ask me that yesterday and I would have gone on and on about how I began studying the example and teachings of Jesus more diligently through the lense of non-American theologians. I would have talked about Dietrich Bonhoeffer and John Howard Yoder and various Anabaptists and how they helped me see what Christianity was before America was even a dream and what it should still be - what it was when it started with twelve disciples and a revolutionary named Jesus. I'd quote early church fathers and their policies against patriotism and military service and I'd recite the passages of scripture it was all based on. I'd talk about the Church in Jerusalem and their nearly socialist practices of sharing all things with each other.

That was yesterday.

Today I have to confess that while all of this is true, well, there's more to it than that. There was more at work transforming my thinking than I've admitted.

This morning as I mowed the yard I stewed over a piece of "fan mail" I received last night and had an epiphany. The "fan" asked what my beef was with America. He accused me of a being a Democrat (hardly), a communist (huh?) and a heretic (maybe). But then he asked an accidentally great question: What did the government ever do to you?

Funny how the right question can force us into honest introspection isn't it?

See, I'd heard about the early church's pacifism and about Christians rejecting patriotism a lot in college and rejected it. It wasn't until my late twenties that I began warming to these ideas enough to study them and eventually accept them - about the time my father was diagnosed with cancer. His government, the one he served diligently for many years, the one he pledged his allegiance to and saluted every morning, doused him in Agent Orange and other chemicals while in the jungles of Vietnam. The American government, some say, knew the danger of Agent Orange but loved winning the war more than loving the people who loved her most. This caused my Dad's cancer, his doctor says and his government admits. The cancer is gone for now but he's slowly losing sensation in his body due to exposure to these harsh chemicals. The doctors say that eventually the numbness in his feet and hands will spread throughout his body and bind him to a wheelchair.

What did the government ever do to me? Is there a wound there that influences my theology of nation? Apparently, I think today, Yes.

I realize this morning that my theology of nation wasn't crafted in a vacuum. No theology is. Doesn't mean it's wrong. Just means maybe - I'm thinking now - I was made ready for forming that theology by hurt. I hurt when I see the man who's always been my hero, who taught me to love my country and love my government, tossed aside and incapacitated slowly by the object of his allegiance and affection. And the hurt weaned me off of blind patriotism so I could learn a new way of thinking about my country and my faith - a way I couldn't stand to listen to, let along accept, before.

Now, I'm trying to be honest with you and with myself and trying to figure out how much of the hurt is in the foundation of my theology on war, nation and Church. I want to dig it out, forgive, and base my beliefs and life on something stronger than past pain. I want to base it on truth - the best I can know it.

How about you? How much of what you believe about God or anything else is under the influence of your past? If the past was stripped away would you still have a basis for your beliefs?

So you don't believe in my God. Why? Because people who do have hurt you? Because people you know who do are nuts or just annoying? Is that a basis for life-long disbelief?

So you do believe in this God of mine. Why? Because you associate this belief with happy memories and kind people? Is that a basis for life-long belief? Strip everyone else away. Try to look around the past and not through it. Stare God in the face the best you can...now what do you believe?

Is that possible?