HEALTH WARNING - This is a bit of grumpy old woman post!
This post is a vague attempt to draw together a few bits that have meandering around my brain for the last little while... stuff around Scottish independence (I'd like to knock together the heads of Cameron and Salmond), stuff around national identity over against religious identity, stuff around the nature of call, stuff around equality/egalitarianism. This mulling arises from bits of reading I've been doing to prepare Bible studies, stuff in the news and online and, inevitably from my own experience. I seem to find myself thinking/saying 'yes but....' or 'no but...' an awful lot...
"English people don't understand Scotland"... yes, but do Scots really understand England?
"I define myself as British not English"... yes, but you do so from the position of being English
"David Cameron has an agenda in wanting the referendum early"... yes, and Alex Salmond doesn't in wanting it late?
Etc. etc. etc.
As I say to people in both of these parts of the UK regularly, whichever one I'm in at the time, I end up defending the other one. Accepting that the 'status' of both Wales and Northern Ireland is different from either Scotland or England, you could readily be forgiven for thinking the UK consisted only of two equally opinionated parts. That in itself ought to give us pause for thought.
It always troubles me when someone says 'my country is better than your country' when what they actually mean is 'my experience of my country is better than my experience, or that of people I know, of yours.' It troubles me, because it is partial in every sense of the word. My experience as a white, English, female, Baptist minister in Scotland leads me appreciate some of how the two countries differ... but would I dare say one was better than the other? Fulfilling my call was marginally easier in England, but does that mean Scotland is therefore worse or England better? I like to think not.
This is just one hint as to why I have a very ambivalent attitude to the whole nationality thing, something which I have held since I began to take seriously some of the theology around the idea of Christians as 'resident aliens' (1 Peter 2:4 - 5). Yesterday my devotional Bible reading was from Ephesians 2, in which verse 14 says that Christ has broken down the dividing wall between Jews and Gentiles, and of course Galatians 3: 28 goes further to dismantle the whole divide of gender or status.
When I was a student I recall reading some theology that said our faith in Christ, our unity as Christians, should transcend our race or nationality. Although said in the context of international relations and specifically against armed conflict, I find myself keeping this in mind in the everyday, not in a pseudo-racial way that somehow Christians are a race over against everyone else, but that my Britishness or Englishness or Living-in-Scotland-ness must always be second to my Christian-ness. This doesn't means I cannot have views on nationality or nationhood, but it will colour the way I view it. Do I assert my 'rights' over against those of my sister Christians in Wales? Do I desire my will to be accomplished even at the expense of my brother Christians in Mozambique (to pluck a nation out of thin air)? If Christ has destroyed the divides, if theologically the boundaries of nations are irrelevant, what does that mean in practice?
All of which brings me to contemplate the stuff of 'call'. Now and then people ask me why I chose to move to Scotland. This always confuses me. It confuses me because I don't believe I did 'choose' to come here, I believe that God called me and sent me. Don't misunderstand me, I love living in Scotland and am learning (very slowly) what it means to be part of this proud people. But I didn't choose to come here. I came here because God does not recognise national boundaries in the way we do. I came here because God had a sneaky plan to change the situation regarding women Baptist ministers up here and (amazingly) decided I was part of that.
So, where is this rambling going? Probably nowhere! I just think that maybe those of us who have the audacity to title ourselves Christians need to think carefully and prayerfully just which Kingdom demands our allegiance - that of God or of the specific part of earth we inhabit.