[Monday's Devotional] - Sentimental Britannia??

Ok, I’ll admit it; I love the Last Night of the Proms.  I may only tune in to a concert or two during the Proms season, but I will always have the last night on. It is the only night of the year when I plug my digital radio into my aged amplifier and turn the volume up high. So I sing along to Rule Britannia and the other patriotic songs and enjoy all the pomp and spectacle. It is great.

Now, this admission might make you wonder if I’m a raving nationalist. I’m not, and nor am I  particularly proud to be British. I’m also happy to agree that many of the lyrics of songs like Rule Britannia are sentimental or jingoistic.  However, I still like them and here is why: whatever the failings of our traditional patriotic songs, they speak of us a nation under God and I find that wonderful.  In the church today we talk, pray and long for revival in our nation. However, we don’t normally go beyond that. We don’t think about our purpose as a nation under God or what Britain’s destiny as a people under God is. Patriotic songs do dare, in a ham-fisted way, to imagine us as a people under God with a purpose and a destiny as a nation.

In Jesus’ time the people of Israel had a very definite understanding of themselves as a nation under God and what that meant (John 8: 37-58).  However, they had become conceited and regarded their position as descendants of Abraham as being an automatic guarantee of their position as being a nation under God.  Of course, their conceit and arrogance meant that they were missing out on their vocation as a nation. We, on the other hand, have gone to the other extreme.  Ask anyone British what thoughts and feelings spring to mind when they think about the fact that they are British and they might talk about longing for another World Cup win or our role in the last war, or the decline that the end of manufacturing brought to many of our cities. They might also think of happier things like the 2012 Olympics in London, or the way that different cultures have enriched our national life in the last sixty years. However, they probably won’t think about us as having a special role or destiny as a nation.

So, this week I want to look use some of the lyrics of Rule Britannia as a backdrop to do some reflecting about us as a nation under God and what that means.

For prayer:

Visualise a union flag and pray for Britain today.  
Talk to God about the nation that he wants us to be.

John Martin-Jones