I recall the advice of an older pastor to a young assistant, “One thing you must never do: never ask people to choose between their country and their church.”

This Sunday's reading from Acts seems to pose that kind of radical alternative. Peter and John are arrested, hauled before the Sanhedrin, and ordered to cease preaching in the name of Jesus. In response to this expression of the highest authority in their Jewish lives, they assert boldly, “We must obey God rather than men.”

That episode has become a classic text supporting Christian resistance to misguided authority. When human lawgivers contradict divine law, the faithful are to resist, obeying God—as their conscience, formed by the community, leads them to hear God's will. Does this vision of Christian resistance to erring or unjust authority present precisely the awful choice warned against by the pastor's statement quoted above? Only rarely, it seems to me.

What this passage suggests, in our situation as U.S. Catholics today, is our call to be vigilant and active citizens. We are rarely, if ever, faced with that either/or choice of Church versus country. True patriotism requires that we participate in our democratic system in ways that sometimes challenge laws and public policy in order to heal and improve the life of our nation (the “commonweal,” to use a venerable word).

Our immigrant forebears were necessarily preoccupied with building an alternative school system, enabling Catholics to keep the faith as they worked to enter the mainstream, and proving that Catholics could be good citizens who offered no threat of some clandestine Roman takeover. That task accomplished, we are now in a position to help shape the mainstream of our culture with the humane vision of Catholic social teaching—a vision of the common good that challenges both of our political parties.

Even in those cases when the consciences of some call them to conscientious objection and even civil disobedience, the presumption is that we do these things within the setting of our legal system, and with the intention of making that system more just. This is not a matter of Church versus state. Indeed, we serve our nation best when our primary effort is to obey our God. That obedience can help overcome our selfishness and enable us to look beyond our vested interests and attend to the common good.

We need not reach far to recall how the US Church has heard and responded to the call to obey God rather than men. For example, our Church leadership has rallied us to oppose the practice of abortion, even as our highest court has sanctioned it. Our Pope and our bishops have strongly opposed the death penalty, even as most of our states continue to mandate it. Our Pope and our bishops opposed the use of military force in the Middle East at the time of “Desert Storm” and in the current crisis with Iraq, even as our nation worked to rally the UN to such a military effort. Our US bishops, in their pastoral letters on peace (1983) and economic justice (1986), dared to teach that our faith vision provides the basis for critiquing and challenging military and economic policy and for seeing that Christian discipleship and citizenship are intimately connected.

Two charcoal fires burn in the Fourth Gospel. The first warms Peter in Caiaphus's courtyard when, as predicted, he denies his master three times. Today’s Gospel presents the other charcoal fire, near which Jesus invites the denier to atone for his cowardice by confessing his love three times. Each time Jesus asks Peter to demonstrate that love by service: “Feed my sheep, my lambs.” He then predicts that Peter's service will take him where he does not want to go. The Church's social justice ministry is an important form of that pastoral service. And, yes, sometimes that ministry takes us where we do not instinctively want to go.

The scene from the Second Reading presents every creature in the universe praising and honoring the risen Lamb that was slain. This is a healthy reminder that our own service of that Lamb involves a living out of his teaching regarding love of enemies, meeting the needs of all, and the nonviolent resolution of conflict. The Easter victory of that Lamb can, if we allow it, energize us as it did the apostles.

Taking a stand for the unborn, the displaced, the downsized, the harassed, the “disappeared,” the overlooked, the hungry, the homeless—these things will sometimes take us where we do not want to go and find us “worthy to suffer dishonor,” but, done in the spirit of the risen Jesus, they lead to rejoicing.