The normal service of the lectionary has been resumed. We have a passage that requires more coffee, for thinking my way through this makes my head hurt. Yet it is important: for within it are a few promises those of faith stake their life on. That our belief is not in man, or our tribe, or our nation, but in the death and resurrection of Christ. Although our body will die and rot, we will see God in our flesh, and we will gain eternal life by the work of Christ.

We are approaching the centenary of the landing at ANZAC cove, the start of a failed campaign which has been celebrated as our day of remembering those fallen in battle since the first world war. This is a time that the patriotic drum is being beaten in Australia and NZ. We are wearing poppies on our coats and on our wrists. But our tribe and our nation will not save us.

Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God, and everyone who loves the Father loves whoever has been born of him. By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and obey his commandments. For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome. For everyone who has been born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that has overcome the world—our faith. Who is it that overcomes the world except the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?

This is he who came by water and blood—Jesus Christ; not by the water only but by the water and the blood. And the Spirit is the one who testifies, because the Spirit is the truth. For there are three that testify: the Spirit and the water and the blood; and these three agree. If we receive the testimony of men, the testimony of God is greater, for this is the testimony of God that he has borne concerning his Son. Whoever believes in the Son of God has the testimony in himself. Whoever does not believe God has made him a liar, because he has not believed in the testimony that God has borne concerning his Son. And this is the testimony, that God gave us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life.

(1 John 5:1-12 ESV)

I’m aware that love comes in many types. Lewis, whose scholarship related to the invention of romantic love by the troubadours (before that we jogged on as a species with duty and desire) noted that apart from lust or desire and the wishing for the best or agape there is the love of friends, which is different, and love of our tribe.

Our county, our nation. The land in which our forebears are buried, the skies under which we are raised. What is, to us, Home. This is natural: one of the things I find in the South Island is that although the society is much more akin to that in which I grew up, the hills look wrong and the trees are the wrong species, for I grew up not in a temperate latitude. You can grow bananas in Auckland: in Dunedin the Lemon Trees are in glasshouses.

The people who oppose our nations know this. There have been plots discovered to distrupt the events that are planned. But they miss the point. Our salvation does not lie in our nation, our confidence is not in our nation, for a nation is but made of men and men fail.

Our confidence is in Christ. All the components of the trinity bear witness to each other, and all are faithful. And the spirit makes the duties we have in Christ acceptable: so that which was a burden becomes less so, and may, by the grace of God, be transmuted into joy.

So, yes, let us pray that we love our brothers and sisters in Christ, as that we are commanded to do. And let us pray for the Prime Minister, and the Parliament, and our Queen and Governor. For two things: that they have indeed a saving faith: and that they allow us to live in peace, in sobriety, and in Godliness. For an evil elite does not leave us alone.