Fr Robert Hendrickson

Dear Friends,

Having celebrated with thanks the recent Fourth of July holiday, I confronted what has become an annual ritual, the sifting through of my Facebook feed’s many conflicting statuses about the day. They range from the thankful, to the incensed, to the proudly patriotic, to the hurt or doubtful. There are many who take issue with this celebration of our nation and her history and promise. Yet, I often find myself reading with a certain discomfort both those that seem too chest-thumpingly proud and those that seem too knee-jerkingly critical.

I am often asked, as a priest, to account for the many failures of the Church and her people. How can I belong to – not only belong to but preach on behalf of – a Church that fails her people in so many ways. I think the indictment would be too long for any one column and yet here I am, becollared and beholden as part of this Body which too often reveals the flaws of human nature rather than showing more deeply the self-giving love of Christ.

Yet, I serve not the Church alone but that deeper reality which is at her heart, the risen Christ whose love is revealed in glimpses and by degrees in the life and labor of his Church.

Like a nation, many of us have not chosen the Church, we have been born into it. We are heirs to the promises offered and receive them without earning or even necessarily being aware of them at a deep and abiding level.

Both as a citizen of this Republic and the Kingdom to come I commit myself to the promise of both. This necessarily means knowing where our faults are so that we can continue to grow into the ideal that each offers to us and our fellow-citizens. The promises of each can seem beyond our reach and yet we struggle with all the freedom and power given us as citizens of the City of God.

Those of us who live as members of the Body are called with our whole self to reflect back to our nation where it is failing to live up to its own promises to its own people and to the world around it.

Citizens of the Kingdom are called to know the fullness of the promises of God and to make them known. When we live as citizens of this state we are called to reveal, to work for, to proclaim the nature of justice, the fullness of equality, the essence of freedom. These terms have their essential promise in the nature of God’s call to his people – in how we care for and sustain one another. So we live knowing that we fall short of their fullness and yet we can celebrate that these notions are at the core of our national identity as we strive to make them realized, lived, and embodied.

The terms too often do not describe things as they are – they describe things as they might be – they are promises and potential. That is something we can truly celebrate even as we get back to the hard, hard work of making those promises known.

Yours in Christ,

Fr Robert