Our Church Flags: 4. Brazil

Some flags are easy to draw.  This is emphatically not true of the Brazilian flag - I pity the elementary school child trying to reproduce it:

The representation of the night sky has stars for each state - not so unusual - but the number of states (27) and their representation as actual southern hemisphere constellations produce a flag that makes the United States or Australian/New Zealand starry flags a doddle to draw by comparison.

On the flag the night sky replaces the Imperial insignia that was on the flag when the Empire of Brazil was a colony of Portugal.  It represents the declaration of a new start one night!

So at Christmas it reminds us of the Christmas night sky from which the angels brought the message of a new Ruler who would bless humankind with true peace.

Our Church Flags: 3. Barbados

On Barbados's national day it only seems right to add their flag from our church's multi-national congregation.

As it happens, today Barbados became a Republic.  The flag will survive this transition because it already represents the same sense of antagonism and freedom-seeking that spawned republicanism - the broken trident symbolising the end of colonial rule at the country's independence in 1966.

There is not much to be said about this flag (which simply won a competition at independence).  For me the broken trident reminds us of the way humankind turns paradises into problems - as in the Garden of Eden.  The beauty of Barbados, the yellow sand and the blue sea represented here, has a human imprint represented by the trident.  Slavery, colonialism that did not go well for the island, an angry independence which is still represented in today's transition over 50 years later brood over its natural beauty.

The human story is not the best story in the world without its Saviour and true Monarch.

Our Church Flags 2. Montserrat

London rarely fails to amaze.  Having a church member from Montserrat is a statistically unlikely event - but one day a few years back we had a visitor (unconnected) from Montserrat too!  To have two unrelated congregants from Montserrat is vanishingly improbable in any church in the world that doesn't have a direct Montserrat connection, because the island had a small population even before half of it was made uninhabitable by its volcano erupting some decades ago.  Today its population is less than 5000.

More amazing still is its flag:

Public Domain

There on the flag is the familiar sign of the territory's connection to the UK - the Union flag in the corner of the blue ensign.  But who is she?  Why is she white-skinned, and wearing green?  And holding a harp while embracing the cross?

She is white because she is Irish.  She is Erin.  That's why she holds a celtic harp.

This unlikely symbol for a Caribbean island is unlikely only because most of us have no idea that Montserrat was once populated largely by Irish immigrants.

Most special of all, I need no imaginative line of thought to squeeze Christian meaning from this flag.  The reason that Erin embraces the cross is officially explained as symbolising the islanders' love of Christ.

Our Church flags: 1. Latvia

Over the years in London we have met people from all over the world.  London (pre-Covid) has been likened to an International Airport, with people from the world crossing one another's paths in most unlikely combinations.

Like other London churches, we often celebrate this by displaying or talking about national flags.  Let me reflect on some we have thought about over the years.

One thing about flags is that you cannot tell how interesting they are by how they look.  Some sophisticated-looking flags have little story and others that look thoroughly uninteresting - like this one - are a story that needs to be told.

What we loved about this flag is that it has a Christian connotation without intending one.  The story goes - and as it is a 700 year old story it is not fact-checkable - that the flag derives from a sheet on which a warrior's body was laid when bleeding.  The white representing the body, the crimson the blood.

And we thought about it in the context of Communion.

Communion, where we might sing the words of Isaac Watts (though this verse from 'When I survey the wondrous cross' is rarely sung)

 His dying crimson, like a robe,

Spreads o'er hi body on the tree;

Then am I dead to all the globe,

And all the globe is dead to me.