Dear members and friends of Redeemer,
I have been thinking a lot about a story that Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, shares at the beginning of her seminal journalistic work – The 1619 Project. She recounts how her father flew an American flag in their front yard for as far back as she could remember. It stood mounted high on an aluminum pole at the edge of a corner lot that had been redlined by the federal government, the kind of lot that told you exactly where the color line ran through their Iowa town. Her father had grown up the son of Mississippi sharecroppers, in a state that had offered his family little besides cruelty. As a young man, he went off to serve his country, where he faced many of the same systemic race-based obstacles, until his military career stalled out. And yet, that flag flew. In fact, the moment it showed the slightest wear he replaced it, so that it always stood pristine against a house and yard that carried their own signs of wear.
As a child, Hannah-Jones says she did not understand this. It embarrassed her, if I read her rightly. How could a man who had seen so clearly what his country was capable of doing to people who looked like him return to that country such visible devotion?
But I found myself relating to her father. My own father served in the Coast Guard, and my grandfathers served as well, one in the Marine Corps and the other in the Army. They are all Black men with no illusions about this country’s record with its Black citizens. What I see in her father’s choice – and what Hannah-Jones also came to see – was not evidence that the country had earned his loyalty. It was closer to something the writer of Hebrews describes among the faithful who came before us, people who confessed themselves strangers and exiles on the earth, who never received what had been promised them but kept looking for a better country anyway, a homeland not yet fully theirs. Faith, that same letter tells us, is “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Her father was not responding to what his country had shown him. He was responding to what he had decided, contrary to the available record, to believe about it.
That is a harder thing than optimism. Optimism bets that things will probably turn out fine. What I see in that image of the flag is something closer to a fight against despair, a hope and belief that the world as it should be will not lose to the world as it is. Let go of the fight and hope dissipates into sentiment. Let go of the hope and the fight curdles into despair. Her father, somehow, let go of neither.
I find in him something of a mirror and something of a guide. A mirror, because I recognize in myself that same stubborn conviction that this nation remains worth fighting for and worth hoping for, even when the evidence is thin. And a guide, because his example demonstrates what it looks like to hold that conviction without pretending the wounds are not real. That, I think, is also what our Resurrection faith asks of us.
Adam Russell Taylor, president of Sojourners, wrote something recently that lands in this same place. He said that liberty and justice for all is still an ideal worth celebrating. Still. Not yet fully honored, not yet made true for everyone it was promised to, but still worth celebrating, the way a promise not yet kept can still be worth waiting on and working toward.
This week we mark 250 years since this nation’s founding. I do not think the truest way to honor that anniversary is with either uncritical celebration or flat despair. I think it looks more like Hannah-Jones’s father, tending something worn and imperfect so that it could keep standing in the light, because he had decided the thing it pointed to was still worth fighting for.
Blessings,