The originator of those lyrics was diplomat Cecil Spring-Rice who composed them in 1908, posted to the British Embassy in Stockholm. The titled Ubrs Dei or The Two Fatherlands, the poem describes how a Christian owes loyalty to both earthly homeland and heavenly kingdom. As Ambassador to the United States he later influenced Wilson and America to abandon neutrality and join the war against Germany and Fascists' imperialism. If you have never visited our very fine Liberty Memorial, you would do your character well to abandon the television, home preening, or any other occupations to go there and see the impressive memorial to 9 million dead from that WWI.

            The last verse, and there's another country, is meant to refer clearly to heaven. The final line is taken from Proverbs 3:17 (KJV): Her ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace. The proper interconnectedness of love of God and love of country is a wisdom we are responsible before God to appreciate and pass on to the next generation.

The best reason for patriotism is LOVE. We should not support our country because it is good or superior or in the right, much less because it entitles us to anything at all, but simply because it is ours - it is home; it is our native and nourishing soil; our Patria, our Fatherland. Notice today the listing of so many hymns associating fatherhood and patriotism. Despite either its faults OR its virtues and rightness, this is what God has given to us to love and care for, and by it He provides for us.

            This form of love as affection and loyalty was designated stroge by the Greeks, and if not the highest form of love, it is a valid and responsible virtue and a building block greater love. Such a patriotism applies to every person of their homeland, and from that perspective we can praise a foreign land for its unique virtues without thereby denigrating our own by comparison. Such a view loves home because it is a personal gift, a purposeful gift from God to you, and is thus familial //familiar; such love is not determined because our America is either always right, nor disowned as often corrupt.

            Many are the false associations of patriotism that have become engrained. There are sensibilities which find offensive singing patriotic songs in church or having flags there. Make no mistake about it: just as our sometimes-well-coined "filthy lucre" is brought into the sanctuary and consecrated to holy uses, so may our prayers and flag be in the holy place that they may, as well, be consecrated to God's purposes.  To treat the presence of the flag in Church as identifying everything American as per se sacred is just as silly as assuming that acceptance of American currency offering endorses capitalism or U.S. monetary policy per se. Such scrupulosity over misunderstood patriotism leaves one in the same boat as the Pharisee's, the money changers in the Temple, and those who repeatedly tested Jesus on the issue of paying taxes. Let us not share in their rebuke.

            We who know God as the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ and understand the human family as a reflection of the heavenly family are in a position to fare better. A love that conditions itself on the behavior and acceptable performance of others is a very poor sort of "love" indeed. For example, the child who does not love the parent unless those parents provide according to their childish desires is, at the very least, immature, perhaps more in jeopardy of learning love = transaction. The Fifth Commandment is not conditional, and so the resentment that many grown children have toward their parents for failing to provide as they determine deserved or necessary is also an immaturity. Of course, such children grow up to be parents, and some of the most to be pitied are those parents who withhold love until a certain threshold of accomplishment or behavior has been met. That is simply rank manipulation, mostly sinful, and certainly an unworthy excuse for "love."

So, LOVE your country without apology or qualification. Sing her praises as the good gift that our good God provides. What better place to thank God for His special provision than in congregational worship, always clearly acknowledging our primary allegiance is to Him as Lord of all! Support your country; forgive your country; work to redress her wrongs and make her better. Never set yourself up as self-righteously above another party of opinion because that way of pride lands you with the unwise. Never identify patriotism with any one exclusive set of right thinking or social/political agenda, or at least not without suitably humility and grace. Even when you see wrongs committed by the government or in America's name, be shy to denigrate the offenders and careful not to dehumanize them as the enemy, because that is Brave New World un-love and most terrible.

            Love this country as your obligation to freely embrace and appreciate for this is part of who God made you to be. Thank God for this country; its gifts and resources; pray for its justice and responsible treatment of all who would come into it and submit to the disciplines of citizenship. God has allowed to you, by the vehicle of this Patria, such freedom and giftedness as the world has never before known. Most of all the freedom God allows us is protected and honored by means of a godly patriotism, and so we sing:

Long may our land be bright,

With freedom's holy light;

Protect us, by Thy might, Great God our King.