The following....America....Free....Free Fallin'....was first posted nine years ago....in January of 2012! It would be a little more than three years later that Donald Trump came down that escalator....right smack dab into the heart of evangelicalism....instead of coming through the wicket gate. He has in his four years ripped apart that evangelicalism....as his magnetism drew our eyes off of Christ and onto him....turning pastor against pastor and Christian against Christian. There were times when he would phrase a sentence using the word God....and it was so odd....so strangely constructed....that one might think that a computer AI system came out with it....his famous...."We want God"....being just one. He used the curse word...g*d d*m often....but we just shrugged it off. Evangelicals who were known for at least one thing....valuing the sanctity of human life....completely abandoned that with the coronavirus. Pastors who were known for warning of false prophets....fell for the biggest false prophet of all. The two-paragraph preface just below is more recent but describes a warning that I tried to give two decades ago:
Folks it was in the year 2000 I believe. I was part of a cohort of people going through the curriculum of a degree program on Higher Education. Most of the cohort had just completed their bachelors....some were a little bit older.....maybe seeking a new vocation....and a couple were older even still. I think that I was the oldest at fifty years old....in school once again....for a very odd reason.....simply to learn about our higher education system in an age when the nation was collapsing....as our son would soon be going to college.
Class participation through conversation was paramount in this particular degree program....and I wasn't a wallflower. I don't remember the exact topic that day....other than it must have been related to the society that we were part of....and I stood up....a little bit odd I guess.....because I wanted to emphasize what I was going to say.....and I told these mostly younger people in so many words that there was trouble ahead....that the division we were seeing at the time was nothing compared to what it was going to be. It was a great atmosphere in these classes.....which helped.....because everyone was able to listen....but I'm sure none of them actually believed that I knew what I was talking about....just as today when I warn so often on the condition of the church....and the winnowing that must be ahead....with division within families....and certainly churches....over the gospel of Jesus Christ.
America.....Free.....Free Fallin'
Dawn breaks and pull by pull the flag rises until its stars and stripes blend into the red sky. The 21st century America cold front collides with the warm heritage of American liberty. Dark clouds form above the eagle perched atop the pole and the flag snaps as the winds begin another day of adding to the tatters and waiting for the rain that month by month fades the blue and red hues that Americans have savored as the taste of freedom for so long.
An icy chill settles in the bones of the one raising the flag for he knows that its stars and stripes will be indiscernible before long. He looks down to see if the cracks in the foundation supporting the pole have widened from the tremors that increasingly shake America...they have. He steps back, standing as erect as he can under the burden of seeing his nation collapse, and salutes; a tear forming as he knows that he may be the last to perform this duty. His mind wanders from, first... the drum and piper escorting the newly created flag, to the inspiration for Francis Scott Key's poem, to the charging Union soldier picking up the banner dropped by a fallen comrade in arms, to the lifting of the flagpole on Mt. Suribachi, to the camo flag on the fatigues of the grunt in Vietnam, to the brilliant contrast of red, white and blue with the gray mountain of fallen steel, brick and mortar of the World Trade Center, to the first responders rushing up those flights of stairs. to the lone flag now raised in the Green Zone of Baghdad.
In only a few hours cheers and shouts will be heard off in the distance, not for returning heroes, not as a President passes by, not as a war ends in victory but for the beginning of a football game. The Star Spangled Banner will play and be sung by the latest celebrity seeking a national spotlight but not a word of its lyrics will resonate with the power it had since Fort McHenry. We are not as the Roman Empire falling, we are as the Roman Empire beginning whose gods are numerous, whose Caesars consolidate powers given by a populace that only wants another day at the Coliseum. God's hand is being lifted and the exhilaration of choosing our own destiny emboldens us to stare into the eyes of Caesar and say not, "Give me liberty or give me death" but "Give me liberty to choose my own death." All the while the remaining Christians gather in their catacombs wondering if God's mercies on America are over; imploring of Him one more time for America to be a beacon to the nations, a people that not only openly proclaim Jesus Christ as the Savior of mankind but evidence the beneficence, mercy, majesty, power and glory of Him who created the universe and without whom not one molecule would continue to exist.
It was a marvel and a wonder while it existed in its original form....these United States of America, but now they are afflicted for lack of a shepherd. They are a people once different as night and day in their habits and their speech that bonded together as a new entity...Americans, freed from the tyranny of kings, freed from serfdom and most importantly freed from the lie that man is the master of his fate, the captain of his soul, but that freedom, once defended, is now merely petted in the lap of luxury, "Free" as the famous rocker penned..."Free Fallin'." The American Creed, never spoken but always evident, is now but a liberal screed against God, against tradition, and against history itself.
The sun, obscured throughout the day by clouds, sets in the West. The rain that would normally give life to the fields, runs off of the frozen, barren and lifeless ground. The flag is lowered and gently folded into the shape of a tri-cornered hat, one of the last vestiges that remain of the fight for independence. No Taps is heard, only the music of the night coming from wherever the revelers gather after the game. The winds die down, no longer needed, for the flag has been taken down, while angels sent by God prepare to blow their trumpets.
