Idolatry of flags and other symbols

There’s a question that lingers in the holy space of every sanctuary around the world, not only in the United States. It is an often unspoken tension that touches our stained glass, our pulpits, and yes, even our flag stands: Who does this space belong to? It’s a question that we must ask honestly. 

This sermon series, and this sermon in general, is not written to offend or dishonor our national symbols, but to faithfully examine whether what we say we believe about God is matched by the signs, symbols, and assumptions we carry into the house of the Lord, specifically the sanctuary. The sanctuary is a space meant to center us in the presence of God without compromise but over generations, and especially after ever war this nation forces upon its people, the church sanctuaries have been compromised by nationalistic symbols that has, unfortunately, become par with the gospel message of Jesus Christ. 

So, I believe we must focus on what is theologically proper to proclaim, hang, present, and lift up within the most sacred space of a church, the sanctuary. I do not see this conversation applying beyond the sanctuaries walls unless the worship of our God follows us beyond the sanctuary walls. So we need to theologically speak and think about what is worship and what we carry with us into a worshipful setting.

Last week, we began with the question: Which gospel are we living? We contrasted the gospel of Jesus, a gospel of peace, justice, humility, and mercy, with the gospel of the nation, baptized in patriotic fervor and cloaked in divine destiny. We named that these are not the same, and they cannot be reconciled.

Today, we press deeper. The gospel we live shapes the space we inhabit. The sanctuary, God’s dwelling among us, is not a neutral zone. It tells a story. It communicates a theology. Too often, it has been co-opted into a temple of nationalism, where flags wave higher than crosses, and the name of a country is whispered louder than the name of Christ.

The Jealousy (Passion) of God

Let’s begin with Exodus 20:1–6. The opening words of the Decalogue or what we know as the Ten Commandments. The Decalogue is understood as divine declarations of covenant life between Israel specifically and humanity in general and God. God speaks clearly: “You must have no other gods before me. Do not make an idol for yourself... Do not bow down to them or worship them, for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God.”

We hear “jealous” and recoil, as if God is insecure. But divine jealousy is not insecurity, it is passion. That’s why the translators of the Common English Bible used the word passionate in our scripture reading today. It is the fierce love of a covenant partner who longs for fidelity, not flirtation. When God says, “No other gods,” it’s not about divine ego; it’s about protecting the integrity of the relationship.

This is not a puritanical rule about keeping God first on your spiritual to-do list. This is a command, an unending request for singular devotion. God is not interested in being one voice among many, one allegiance among others, one banner among many. God refuses to share covenant space with idols, visible or invisible.

God says: I rescued you from Egypt. I heard your cries. I delivered you, not to enslave you again to new idols, whether carved, cast, or sewn, but to free you into love, peace, and righteousness.

This is God’s way of showing that divine love is not passive. Divine passion means God will not quietly watch as sacred space is filled with symbols of national might or civic pride. Why? Because God knows what we forget: that what we revere shapes who we become. The sanctuary, of all places, must be the one place where that shaping belongs to God alone.

Idolatry is more than statues. It is giving ultimate loyalty, trust, or reverence to anything besides God. Idolatry is about what we trust. When those loyalties creep into the sanctuary, disguised as patriotic pride, or simply national identity, we must name the danger. We must name how a good intention can become a god. 

Here’s the deeper truth: When we trust and honor the flag more than the cross, when we believe a government protects us more than grace sustains us, when we teach our children to pledge allegiance to a republic but forget to form them in the language of Christ’s nonviolence, we have bowed. We may not physically kneel but our hearts have bent.

In ancient times, people did not simply worship statues, they worshipped what those statues represented: wealth, war, fertility, rain, & empire. Today, we’ve swapped the stone idols for symbolic ones: ideologies, parties, militarism, markets, and yes, nationalism. We may not bow physically, but we give our hearts, our attention, and our defense to these false gods. We let them shape how we pray, vote, worship, and even interpret Scripture. This, my friends, is the easiest way evil repackages itself to slowly creep into every part of a person’s life, including the life of worship.

The Flag as a Symbol: When Patriotism Becomes Worship

First, let’s be clear. Gaining theological understanding and acting upon proper worship is not about dishonoring those who’ve served a nation. We acknowledge the courage, pain, and sacrifice of those who have served or been forced to fight under national flags through requirements of selective service or voluntary service. But acknowledging service and offering worship are not the same. The sanctuary, intentionally, is not a museum to honor our national memory, even if there is only one piece displayed, it can cause a break in concentration and the allegiance can so easily slip away from God to nation. The sanctuary is a holy place of God’s presence and must always remain intact.

You may ask, well what is the being deal? Here is the big deal. Symbols carry weight. We all know that when we see a wedding ring, it means more than metal. When we look at a cross, we see more than wood. A symbol carries weight, memory, and formation. A flag is not neutral because it becomes theological when placed beside an altar, next to the cross, or even processed in and out of worship. It silently tells a story: that God and nation are intertwined and then gives permission to believe that is ok. It can offer a message that divine blessing rides on national success, that military victory mirrors God’s will and that message is very dangerous.

Let me say this gently but clearly: patriotism is not christian discipleship. It may be a form of gratitude for your homeland and there’s nothing wrong with that. But when patriotism is practiced inside the sanctuary, when it is sung, pledged, and revered in the same breath as the gospel, it begins to morph into something else entirely. It becomes liturgy, and liturgy forms us. Every repeated act within a sacred space shapes our affections. It tells our children what matters. It teaches our communities what we are about. When the flag stands beside the cross, it doesn’t submit to it, it competes with it.

When we blend the story of nation with the story of Christ we assume Jesus speaks the language of empire and forget he died at the hands of one. The flag becomes more than fabric; it becomes a filter. We end up reading Scripture through it. We sing hymns through it. We decide who belongs and who doesn’t through it. This reason alone is why I do not permit nationalistic songs sung or played during a worship service because it takes our concentration and spirit off of God. God alone is the One we should have been concentrating on and preparing to worship the moment we opened our eyes from sleep. 

Let me ask: when a visitor enters our sanctuary, what do they see first? What story do our symbols tell them? Do they know they are entering a house of peace, or do they wonder if they’re intruding on a possible political rally held on holy ground? Now, let me say this, our church, thankfully, does not prominently display flag after flag through the sanctuary and I applaud you for that. Yet, when entering the sanctuary, the flag is directly beneath the cross and takes precedence behind the altar table that holds the elements of Christ’s body and blood. It can appear that the cross alone is not enough to wrap itself around the elements as the flags behind the altar are also wrapping up the Eucharistic sacrament along with the written word of God and the processional light that symbolizes the light of Christ for the world. 

Let’s be honest: too often, we have brought the world’s flags into God’s house and forgotten that the only banner we are called to lift high is the light of God’s love in the cross of Christ Jesus. Our allegiance must not be divided, no matter how small or muted it may be. Our citizenship is first and foremost in the kingdom of heaven. The sanctuary must represent sacred space that only contains symbols that points us to that which is most holy, our all-loving God.

God’s Vision: Weapons to Tools, War Rooms to Sanctuaries

Isaiah 2:2–4 gives us a beautiful picture of God’s dream for the world. In the days to come, Isaiah writes, “The mountain of the Lord’s house will be the highest of the mountains... All nations will stream to it.” It is a vision of shared worship, of transformation, of beating swords into iron plows and spears into pruning tools.

Isaiah imagines a world where we turn from war to work, from destruction to cultivation. Tools of death become instruments of life. No more boot camps, only community gardens. No more missile silos, only silos full of grain. No more training for war, only learning to walk in the ways of the Lord.

Where does this vision begin? In the sanctuary. In God’s house. In the place where worship forms us and reminds us who we are. We can’t preach peace while bowing before the emblems of war, even if those emblems claim to be one of freedom. We can’t proclaim God’s love for all people while raising banners that have historically excluded, marginalized, or conquered.

God’s sanctuary vision is not one of tribal triumph but of global peace. It is a vision gathering all peoples, not under one flag, but under one God. The mountain isn’t American. It’s not Roman. It’s not Israeli. It’s the mountain of the Lord and it is here that nationalism dies. The sanctuary is not a bunker. It’s a training ground for grace. We are not soldiers of empire heading into war; we are peacemakers of Christ Jesus. We are ambassadors for the ministry of reconciliation. 

Now this doesn’t mean we have no country. It means we hold our nation accountable to a higher law, the law of love, mercy, acceptance, and tolerance, while advocating for equity and equality for all because the sanctuary of God is a place of re-creation. A place of peace, safety, healing, forgiveness, and retooling life for mutual flourishing. The presence of national symbols, especially those born out of revolution, conquest, and colonialism, must be questioned in the place where the Gospel is read and proclaimed, because the Word of Jesus always points to peace, never to domination.

Challenge: Cleanse the Sanctuary

So, what do we do? First, we repent of aligning our faith and worship of God with nationalistic symbols no matter how large or small. We make space again for the Spirit of God to move unhindered by nationalism’s grip by exorcising the spirit of the nationalism. 

Second, and here is the challenge: cleanse the sanctuary of anything that can take our allegiance away from God, not because we hate our nation or well intentioned symbols but because we love God more. We cleanse the sanctuary not just of flags and desires for patriotic pageantry but of anything that distorts our worship. We learn to honor without idolizing. Yes, we can honor veterans. We can pray for our leaders. We give thanks for freedoms that have enabled all to worship as they see fit but we do not confuse those acts with worship itself. Do not confuse gratitude with glory. We do not allow the language of “God and country” to become a substitute for gospel and kingdom. Let’s not make the sanctuary a shrine to civil religion.

We also need to cleanse it of spiritual flags, those internal banners we carry with pride, things we may not see but it still effects us. Pride in our theology, pride in our denominational identity, pride in being the “right” kind of Christian, pride in our politics, our status, our self-made religion.

Friends we bring these with us every Sunday. We wave them invisibly. We hang them in our hearts and they do distract us from God. They divide us from each other.

The sanctuary must be a space of radical humility. A space where the only throne is God’s. A space where we lay down every crown, every medal, every flag, every banner, every self-justifying theology, and say: You alone are holy. You alone are worthy. You alone are God.

This is not about shame. It’s about alignment. It's about giving God what belongs to God, and refusing to give it to Caesar. Let’s make the sanctuary, and wherever we worship, a house of peace. Let’s make it a house where Isaiah’s vision grows roots. Let’s make it a house where the weapons of our words are turned into testimonies of grace. Let’s make it a house where every tribe, nation, and language feels at home, not because they fit into our flag, but because they are embraced by God’s love. Let’s do the hard, holy work of disentangling our faith from our flag, our worship from our nation, and our sanctuary from the empire’s grasp.

Reflections on Reclaiming Sacred Space

You may hear this and feel uneasy and that’s understandable. We’ve been formed by this syncretism for generations. Flags in sanctuaries have been standard practice in many places for over a century. But tradition, it is not the same as truth.

And to be crystal clear: this is not a rejection of those who served in wartime or wore a uniform in a time of perceived peace. Many did so believing they were protecting what was good. This is not about assigning blame. This is about God’s sanctuary vision. About truth-telling and disentangling our faith from our flags, and other symbols, so that Christ might be revealed more clearly.

To the veteran who hears my voice: thank you for your courage. But I also ask, can we make this space intentionally holy again and solely dedicated to the God who loves even our enemies? To the family who believes in America’s ideals, hear this: ideals must be held accountable to God’s justice and God’s justice has no national allegiance. To the one who feels this is all too radical, too much, remember that Jesus was crucified not for being safe, but for being faithful. He challenged the empire. He refused to kneel. He calls us to take up the cross, not a symbol of nationalism or even religion; the cross is enough to bear.

In fact, the prophetic tradition of Scripture calls us to challenge the traditions that no longer serve the gospel. Jesus overturned tables. He quoted Isaiah. He re-centered the temple around mercy. That is the same Spirit we are called to embody now.

Imagine a sanctuary where the only banner is the cross. The symbols we hang on the walls, insert in stands, items we process in and out of worship, songs that we sing, prayers that we pray, and words that we proclaim should always point the worshippers to the one God to be worshipped. The sanctuary should be the one place, within our lives, that creates space for God alone, without competition, to be lifted up and praised.  

Let us understand the sanctuary does not belong to The United States of America. It does not belong to any nation, to any church member, or anyone who walks off the street. It alone belongs to the God who sets captives free, who lifts the lowly, who silences war, and who calls us into the foolish, beautiful way of peace. We have a choice: to preserve national and religious symbols out of habit, or to purify our worship out of holy conviction. May we choose the latter, not out of contempt, but out of deep, courageous love for the One who calls us into peace. May it be so in Jesus’ name.

Let’s pray: God of all encompassing love for every person under every banner. Forgive us for elevating civic or religious events above or placing them on equal footing with worshipping you. We may not have realized this is what we have been doing for generations, and because of this, we ask for your forgiveness. We pray for a redirection of complete and total allegiance to be directed to you, and you alone, within this sanctuary. We pray for a spiritual revival within our hearts, our minds, and our emotions so that no idol will ever take your place again. With all of our heart, mind, soul, and spirit we dedicate our lives to you, we remember whom we are baptized into, and we declare no other god deserves our worship or allegiance. We pray and ask this all in the name of Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.