The Lutheran Hour
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"Raise the Flag"
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Text: Acts 1:1-11
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“Now stands the flagpole bare.” That was the opening line of a poem broadcast over the radio in 1940 in Norway: “Now Stands the Flagpole Bare.” Because in April of 1940, Nazi Germany invaded and occupied Norway for the next five years, and Norway’s national flag, a white cross tilted horizontally over a red background, the flag, a symbol of belonging, visible material endowed with powerful, yet invisible meaning, for a brief time, Norway’s flag was banned. The puppet government set up by the invaders tried to strip the symbol of its meaning.
One thousand miles to the east, five years later at the end of the war, after the Nazis were defeated and Norway was liberated, on June 24, 1945, 12,000 Soviet soldiers assembled in ranks in the city of Moscow for a victory parade. Soldiers in the parade clenched in their fists strips of cloth dyed red, white, and black, imprinted with symbols: an eagle, lightning bolts, a broken, tilted cross known as a swastika. The parade’s music stops, the drum roll builds, a column of soldiers marches forward, carrying 200 captured Nazi flags, banners and guidons. They march through Red Square, each rank executes a sharp right turn, and one soldier after another takes the lifeless fabric of his defeated enemy and flings it down into the dust, snapping a salute to the red banner flying above them with a golden sickle and hammer.
Forty-five years later, when the Soviet Union was falling apart, satellite states previously under Soviet domination would cut out those very emblems of communism from their flags, sometimes literally with a knife, leaving a tattered hole smack in the middle of the flag. Again and again, material once revered and feared is stripped of its meaning, robbed of its promise and purpose. A flag is more than a decoration. When a flag is activated in the hearts and minds of its people, when it’s been bled for, died for, saluted, served and sacrificed for, it becomes more than ornamental fabric.
In the ancient Roman Empire, a commander would throw the Roman flag into the ranks of the enemy and then order his men to recapture it, ready to die to retrieve it. Flags aren’t merely material. The visible material matters because it’s endowed with meaning. The meaning and the material are meant to go together. This truth also captures the connection between earth and heaven as described in the Bible.
Bible scholar Tom Wright summarizes the Bible’s teaching about heaven and earth. Heaven and earth, he says, are two halves of God’s creation, not like two halves of an orange but like two parts of a flag: the visible cloth and the unseen meaning. These parts—the material and the meaning, earth and heaven—are meant to go together. The invisible meaning infuses the material, fills it with promise and purpose. The visible material becomes a witness to what it stands for. The fabric matters because it’s more than just material. Tom Wright, the Bible scholar who made this analogy of how the material and the meaning of flags helps us see the connection between earth and heaven, he was commenting on the opening chapter of the Bible’s book of Acts.
Over the next several weeks on this program, we’re going to be listening to the book of Acts, and I invite you to listen along with us. As you listen, try keeping this view of heaven and earth in mind, how the meaning and the material are meant to go together. That’ll help you see what’s happening in the book of Acts. Now, Acts is a sequel. It was written by a follower of Jesus named Luke. He also wrote the biography of Jesus known as the Gospel according to Luke. Acts is Luke, part two. Luke says that in the first book he has dealt with all that Jesus began to do and to teach until the day He was taken up, after He’d given commands by the Holy Spirit to the apostles, to the representatives He had chosen. To them He presented Himself alive by many proofs.
After His suffering and His death on the cross, Jesus appeared to them alive over a period of 40 days, speaking to them about the Kingdom, about the rule and reign of God. And while He was with them, He gave them orders not to depart from Jerusalem but to wait for the promise of His Father, the promise of God. He told them, “You will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.” So when they had come together, they asked Him, “Lord, will You at this time restore the Kingdom to Israel?” Jesus told them, “It’s not for you to know the times or the seasons the Father has set by His own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you and you will be My witnesses in Jerusalem and all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth.”
And when He had said these things, He was lifted up, and a cloud took Him from their sight. And while they’re staring into heaven as He went, look, two men in white robes stood by them and said to them, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand here staring up into heaven? This Jesus who is taken up from you into heaven will return in the same way you saw Him go into heaven.” So they returned to Jerusalem to wait, as Jesus told them.
Years ago, I read this opening to Acts and thought, oh, there go those foolish disciples again. They just don’t get it. They still think Jesus has come to set up a Kingdom on earth. Because after all, that’s what the Jewish people had been waiting for all those years. For a messiah, a king like David or Solomon, a king chosen by God who would rule the world. See Psalm 2 or Psalm 110. But I thought Jesus has come to take us to another world, to take us to heaven. That’s how I read the book of Acts. But then I had some teachers who helped me see something that I’d been missing. If you read the whole narrative of Acts, you might notice that these followers of Jesus, when they’re filled with power by the Holy Spirit and they become Jesus’ witnesses out to the ends of the earth, they never tell anyone how to get to heaven. Not once.
Instead, they talk about how heaven is returning to earth, like how Jesus taught us to pray to God our Father. “Let Your kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.” The good news in Acts is not “Here’s the way to get to heaven.” No, the good news is Jesus is the way heaven is returning to earth, God become human. Jesus is the reunion of the meaning with the material. The earth, the whole visible creation, you and me included, we aren’t temporary decorations. We are the flag of heaven, created to be the visible representation of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, the sign of belonging, material God has activated, fabric the Son of God has bled for and died for and sacrificed for, witnesses the Spirit endows with promise and purpose. But this flag has been desecrated, trampled in the dust, robbed of its meaning, treated as though it were only material, even though God made earth and heaven to go together.
That’s the vision the Bible gives of the Garden of Eden at the beginning. The garden was the place where earth and heaven, the meaning and the material, were united. The King of heaven walked with His people on earth, and His people were ready to represent Him, not as slaves but as His beloved adopted children, God’s partners in caring for the creation. But an enemy, an unseen invader called Satan, created good by God but now in rebellion against God, deceived us. He set up a puppet government, said that matter is just matter and doesn’t really matter. So you can use it and abuse it as you please. And we believed it. We robbed the material of its God-given meaning. We banned God’s flag and raised our own instead. But then ours never last, do they? One conqueror is conquered by another. All the flags we fly are soon forgotten. So maybe nothing matters.
The good news in the book of Acts is that the risen King Jesus has started a resistance. We threw God’s flag into the ranks of the enemy, but Jesus won it back with His blood. And He rose from the dead and ascended into heaven, not to leave the earth behind but to raise God’s flag, to restore the old glory, to make matter matter again. You, your body, your business, your neighborhood, our contacts, communities, and conversations, they all matter. Because Jesus will return to end the enemy’s occupation, to raise the dead, raise the praise, raise the flag. When? It’s not for us to know the timing of the campaign, Jesus says. But He is enlisting us in the resistance.
From the day the Nazi-appointed puppet government in Norway banned the flag in 1940, there was resistance. In some cases it was violent, but mostly through civil disobedience. And the church, the followers of Jesus in Norway, they were at the heart of this civil resistance. A prominent leader in the church during the Nazi occupation was a Norwegian bishop, a Lutheran pastor named Eivind Berggrav. I learned about him in Alex Johnson’s biography of Bishop Berggrav, published in 1960. Johnson tells how Berggrav led Norway’s followers of Jesus to peacefully resist the Nazis. Now, pastor Berggrav led the resistance, not because he thought the exiled Norwegian government was perfect or permanent. Now Norway had been through many political upheavals over the centuries. But in this case, Bishop Berggrav was compelled to resist, not because he was unwilling to compromise.
For example, the Nazis had mandated that the Norwegian pastors could no longer publicly pray for their exiled monarch, King Haakon VII, who had fled to London. And in that case, Bishop Berggrav counseled the pastors to obey the mandate, trusting that God would hear His people’s silent prayers, nonetheless. But when the Nazis started to mandate what pastors should preach and what the teachers should teach to children in the schools, when they tried to set up a version of the Hitler youth program in Norway, teaching them that one race was superior and that the leader, the Führer, was supreme like God—that’s when Bishop Berggrav resisted. It wasn’t about his rights or his patriotism or conservatism, it was about Jesus. And because of Berggrav’s actions, the Nazi puppet government tried to put him in front of a firing squad.
On the way to his hearing, knowing that he could be facing the death penalty, he read a passage from the Bible: 1 Peter 3:14. The Holy Spirit through the apostle was speaking directly to him, “Have no fear of them nor be troubled, but in your hearts reverence Christ as Lord.” Berggrav remembered why he was resisting. It wasn’t about him or the church as an institution or even the dishonored flag of his nation. It was all about King Jesus and no one else.
Okay, back up. What did Pastor Berggrav do that almost got him killed? Well, the trouble started because he was a government employee who was defying his government. See, Norway was officially a Christian nation. That’s why there’s a cross on their flag. But now this puppet government was trying to fly the flag of Nazism from the facade of the church. So Pastor Berggrav led his fellow clergymen in a very public protest, and he led by example.
During Lent of 1942, he resigned his office as bishop. He gave up his salary, his home, his benefits, his government pension, and he published an open letter explaining his actions. He wrote, “I am resigning my office. Whatever the state has committed to me, I surrender. But to be a preacher of the Word, a counselor of the pastors is and shall remain my call. I shall continue to fulfill these duties so far as it is possible for one who is not a state official. Like Martin Luther, we have tried to be loyal to the authorities so far as the Word of God and His commandments will permit it.” And then he quotes Acts 5:29. “We must obey God rather than men.” Following his lead, on April 5, 1942, Easter Sunday, 645 of the state’s 699 pastors, that’s nine out of 10, all resigned their offices. Reeling from the shock of it, the puppet government ordained untrained Nazi loyalists to replace them, but these pseudo pastors ended up preaching to empty churches, while hundreds of congregants crammed into homes to hear their unemployed pastors preach. The puppet government wanted the death penalty for Berggrav, but the Germans wouldn’t permit it. They didn’t want a full on rebellion in Norway. So instead, pastor Berggrav spent the rest of the war under house arrest, guarded by a rotation of 12 armed Norwegian Nazi loyalist policemen with three on duty at all times.
The book of Acts has a similar ending. It ends with a Jewish man named Paul, a key servant leader in the Jesus resistance movement. Acts 28 narrates Paul’s house arrest and how people kept coming to him, and he kept raising the flag, proclaiming God’s kingdom without hindrance, with all boldness. This is the Kingdom we are proclaiming. Because you and I and the whole creation, we matter. God has endowed us with meaning, we matter. We are the emblem of heaven, God’s visual representation endowed with purpose and promise. Jesus sacrificed His life and rose again to raise this flag to restore God’s honor, and we are His witnesses.
For three years under Nazi occupation, Pastor Berggrav under house arrest continued to be a witness for Jesus. Isolated in a forest north of Oslo, he wasn’t supposed to have any visitors. He wasn’t supposed to talk to anyone. But after several months a newspaper reported that the Nazis were having some trouble with Pastor Berggrav. He was converting and catechizing all the guards, and they had to keep swapping them out for new ones. In 1945, when Nazi Germany’s surrender was imminent, some of the guards helped the old bishop escape. He had spent three years in captivity. In addition to bringing many of his captors to faith in Jesus, during that time he wrote over a hundred letters to his wife, authored seven books that would be published after the war, and stacked 14 cords of firewood that he had chopped and left for the next inhabitant at the cottage. And during his third summer there, he harvested 25 pounds of strawberries, more than enough to share. Because he was a witness for Jesus in word, in deed, a sign that even under occupation, God’s flag is still flying. In the Name of Jesus. Amen.
No Reflections for April 7, 2024
Music Selections for this program:
“A Mighty Fortress” arranged by Chris Bergmann. Used by permission.
“O Sons and Daughters of the King” The Hymnal Project of the Michigan District, The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. Used by permission.
“The Strife Is O’er, the Battle Done” arr. Henry Gerike. Used by permission.
“O Sons and Daughters of the King” From The Concordia Organist (© 2009 Concordia Publishing House) Used by permission.