For a variety of reasons, the story—the whole story—of my family isn’t really known. Once, a good hundred or more years ago, my great-great-grandfather was at a border crossing, and was asked his occupation, or so he thought.
“Ich bin ein Kellner,” my ancestor, whose name I do not yet know, replied, using the German word for “waiter.” As my 82-year-old father tells it, the border guard, who may have been confused, wrote down “Kellner” as the family name, and, well, here we are.
My dad’s father, one of my grandfathers, died about six months after I was born. He’d come home to a small apartment in the Forest Hills section of Queens, in New York City, collapsed, and passed away. His widow lived for almost 30 more years.
I have a picture of these grandparents, now long gone, in our home. Leopold Kellner, my grandfather, and Josefine, his wife, my grandmother, who used to bake up a storm, stare out from a long-ago place.
Leopold is wearing the uniform of the Austrian army. He was a captain, and for meritorious service in World War I—a conflict more bloody and terrible than can be described in a few words—he won a high honor, the Iron Cross.
From what my father says, Grandpa was quite proud of his accomplishments: a Jew in a decidedly non-Jewish arena rising to an officer’s rank, earning a medal. He was loyal to his country and its military.
Then, Dad recalls, came Hitler and the National Socialist era in Germany, then Austria. Because he was a Jew, my grandfather was declared worthless. His valor mattered little, his allegiance even less.
Grandpa Leopold threw away the Iron Cross, escaped the coming horrors in Europe, and brought his family through Turkey, what is now Israel, and Kenya. Then my father came here, to the United States, and moved next door to a young woman who played the piano. He heard the music, met and married that woman, and they shared 47 years together.
I recount this history not merely for its own sake. The lesson I learned—the thing I see as I pass that picture of my grandparents often during the day—is that allegiance to any earthly power is likely to become an unrequited love. “My kingdom is not of this world,” Jesus told Pilate (and us) in John 18:36. And that’s something we all would do well to remember as a political season dawns in the United States, or as periodic elections come and go in other lands across the globe.
There is nothing wrong with believers exercising their democratic privileges to participate in political life, by voting or by running for office. We can often become quite enthusiastic about the candidates or political movements we support. And while I pray for all humankind, I’ll admit to a particular gratitude for having been born a citizen of the United States of America.*
But allegiance to anything other than God is, and must be, finite. This world shall pass away; a new age is to come. Nations will not “learn war any more,” as Isaiah 2:4 (KJV) tells us.
As we enter the death throes of humanity’s attempt at godless self-government, and await the birth pangs of God’s eternal, just, and happy kingdom, I take comfort in knowing my allegiance is well placed: I’m loyal to “the blessed hope—the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ,” as Paul says in Titus 2:13.
_____
* Mark A Kellner, “America: Another View,” Adventist Review, December 2003, pp. 20, 21. Available online at http://bit.ly/zZpLIO.
__________
Mark A. Kellner is news editor for Adventist Review. This article was published April 19, 2012.
