Daily Prayer, 14 June

Happy Flag Day! This is another celebration that might get overlooked while deployed, and in any event isn’t given nearly the attention it deserves. If it were up to me, the effort put into other observances that seems so important these days—especially this month—would be redirected into remembering these parts of our shared history. There are enough things fighting for our attention these days, so many forces atomizing our collective identity, that it is almost counter-cultural to promote unity. We should spend at least as much time on what unites us as what separates us, and what unites us—or should unite us—is that we are all Americans, one nation, Under God, and venerate that symbol of our unity that is the Stars and Stripes. Happy Flag Day!

Francis Hopkinson was born in Philadelphia on October 2, 1737. Raised and educated in that same city, he became a lawyer in private practice before taking on a number of public roles in the customs office of the city’s port, one of the busiest in the colonies.  Hopkins later moved across the Delaware River to New Jersey, taking on even larger government roles in that colony until he was chosen to represent it at the Second Continental Congress, where he became one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.

At a subsequent session of the Congress a year later, Hopkinson was honored by another distinction for which he is better known. By an act of the Second Continental Congress his design for a national flag was adopted. The resolution, passed on June 14, 1777, “resolved, that the flag of the United States be thirteen stripes, alternate red and white; that the union be thirteen stars, white in a blue field representing a new constellation.” This is why in 1949 President Harry Truman officially declared June 14^th to be Flag Day.

The new flag flew for the first time over the troops of the new nation’s army at the Middlebrook encampment in New Jersey. Of his new national flag, George Washington had this to say: “We take the stars from heaven, the red from our mother country, separating it by white stripes, thus showing that we have separated from her, and the white stripes shall go down to posterity representing liberty.”

Symbols can be powerful things. They evoke an emotional, even spiritual, response in us not because of what they are, but because of what they represent. Our flag represents liberty and freedom, not only to Americans, but to other people around the world who wave it to demonstrate their desire for the things that we sometimes take for granted. On this anniversary of the resolution creating our flag, let us resolve to honor that flag by upholding the ideals it was created to represent.

LET US PRAY

Almighty God, we thank You for the flag of our country and for all that our flag represents. We thank You for giving victory to the brave and valiant men and women who have given their last measure of strength in order that it might wave over the land of the free and the home of the brave. We thank You for giving us the ideals of faith and liberty, for preserving the sanctity of our homes, and religious freedom. Conscious of our limitations and our deep unworthiness, we pray that our flag may bind together the many elements in our own dear country, and foster in our ranks a unified love for America. Make us who have served our country in time of war willing at all times to uphold and defend the Constitution and our government. Grant that our country may remain forever an indissoluble Union flying the same flag.

AMEN