I'm not at all sure, but I think this bird is a wren, perhaps a Carolina wren. The house wrens that have built a nest on our back porch every spring are not quite as colorful as this fellow; and because of the color, I think it is male. I wish I could have recorded his song... wonderful!

Whenever I am tempted, whenever clouds arise,
When songs give place to sighing, when hope within me dies,
I draw the closer to Him, from care He sets me free;
His eye is on the sparrow, and I know He watches me;
His eye is on the sparrow, and I know He watches me.

The Gospel song, “His Eye Is on the Sparrow, “based on a saying of Jesus reported in Matthew’s Gospel (Chapter 10), is a favorite of those who believe God intervenes in history. They are the people who say God will “continue” to bless America if Americans “get right with God.” They are the people who express a belief that homosexuals and women who resort to abortion and people who perform abortions are the cause of most of America’s troubles.

DEFINING AMERICA

Although I don’t remember ever thinking America was chosen by God to be the superior nation among the world’s nations; I do recall a high school history teacher’s declaration that it was America’s destiny to be the principal economic and military force in the world. As I recall it, I defended, probably a bit obnoxiously, my answer to a test question about “Manifest Destiny,” an answer which Mr. Lucas had marked wrong. Looking back on it, I realize that at age sixteen I was a naive linguistic purist (or at least I was prepared to argue as if I were one.) who was convinced that phrases meant literally what the individual words implied. “Manifest,” I argued, meant “something is obvious,” and “destiny” meant something is going to happen and nothing can get in the way. When I was sixteen, I probably didn’t know the word “inexorable;” but if I had known it, I would have used it to try to prove my point. I argued that it was greed assisted by soldiers, and not an imperative from God, that had sent my Cherokee great, great grandparents walking on what became known as "The Trail of Tears" from a farm somewhere in the mid-Atlantic region to an Indian reservation in Oklahoma Territory. I had failed to mention in my response to Mr. Lucas' question, and I guess I can see that in a way he was right, that American expansion toward the West was inevitable. My point was that I didn’t think God or any other force in the universe had anything to do with it and was prepared, as most sixteen-year-olds always are, for an argument.

Americans long ago latched onto the idea of Manifest Destiny (notice that the phrase is always capitalized in print), and most are not prepared to let go of it easily. Polls showed that the majority of Americans approved of the Iraq War in 2004. The Bush-Cheney administration would never have used “Manifest Destiny” as their reason for taking America into the war; but clearly they thought it was America’s right and obligation to “secure” for America and its allies the Middle East with its great oil and other mineral reserves. The attack on the World Trade Center Towers in Manhattan was as good as any excuse to go to war, and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was the most obvious target. George Bush had declared earlier that he was not in favor of “nation building” as a strategy for keeping America strong, but Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, and Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz convinced him that he had to declare war to get rid of Saddam Hussein... the only way to keep America safe. They convinced the President that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. They presented war as the same sort of inevitability that westward expansion on the North American continent had been a hundred and fifty years earlier. They convinced Congress that it was the “right” thing to do. Manifest Destiny has never been an official doctrine in American domestic or foreign policy. While it is not formal doctrine, it is a powerful idea, a notion that America’s existence as a nation at a time in the history of the world has something to do with destiny. It’s an easy sell especially in fundamentalist church communities that are built around another dangerous idea or notion, that there is an interventionist god at work in the world, a god who chooses favorites from among the many nations. Of course, the problem becomes dangerous when other powerful nations operate with the assumption it is they who have been chosen by God to be the favorite one. Israel and Iraq are the best examples of two other points of view on the subject of whom god favors most.

I don’t believe in an interventionist god. There is no force in the universe that is going to swoop in dramatically, or creep in subtly, to save Sacramento or Washington from economic or social ruin. No ultimate power in the universe has determined that it is America’s destiny to be the top economic power in the world. Many “Christians” in America and in California where I live believe some ultimate power will “save” us if we make the “right” decisions about gay marriage, gays in the military, and abortion. They are easily convinced that most social and economic problems would be solved if legislators would just hunker down and outlaw all the practices which they think God disapproves. The televangelist spiritual leader Pat Robertson was speaking for a large segment of the American population when he said God let an earthquake devastate Haiti because that nation had behaved badly and had to be punished. Muslim fundamentalists say they believe 9/11 was Allah’s punishment of America, the Great Satan. And Israel can go on violating it’s covenants with neighboring people because of its favored nation status as described in Jeremiah 32: 40-41, “I will make an everlasting covenant with them (Israel): I will never stop doing good to them, and I will inspire them to fear me, so that they will never turn away from me. I will rejoice in doing them good and will assuredly plant them in this land with all my heart and soul.”

It ain’t necessarily so!