So we come to July — the most patriotic month of the year. On July 4, 1776, a group of patriots cast their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor on the cause of freedom. Ironically, on that very day King George III of wrote in his diary, “Nothing important happened today.”

If he had only known.

I recently heard a speaker refer to what he called, “The Patriot’s Dilemma.” What is the patriot’s dilemma? On one hand, it is avoiding the peril of loving our country so badly and blindly that our love degenerates into idolatry. These are the folks who shout “My country, right or wrong,” while not having a clue about the meaning of “liberty and justice for all.”

On the other hand, the patriot’s dilemma is avoiding the peril of a quarrelsome love in which we become so obsessed by our country’s flaws that we damn it in the name of God. These are the folks who rant and rave over every deficiency, while enjoying the freedoms and opportunities that make such criticism possible.

Ted Loder puts it this way: “To damn a country in the name of God is as mistaken as anointing a country to replace God.” I hope we can avoid both of these extremes and still speak the truth.

Surely our country has earned our criticism. There are great blessings mixed with worrisome flaws, and faced with that reality, it is important that we keep our balance. In truth, it seems likely that every act of injustice is matched by an act of justice done at a sacrifice. Every act of violence is matched by one of compassion. Every act of oppression is matched by one of liberation. Every act of condemnation is matched by one of mercy, and every act of exclusion by one of inclusion.

Robert Frost gave us the right words: we need to have a lover’s quarrel with our country — understanding that a lover’s quarrel which emphasizes “lover,” and is clear about the quarrel, is different from a quarrelsome love that confuses the two. The key is loving our country not only for what it is, but for what it can become.

Loving what our nation can become is what led women such as Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Julia Ward Howe to keep agitating for the right of women in America to vote, leading eventually to the 19th amendment to the Constitution enacted in August 1920.

Loving what our nation can become is what led the great theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, then a young pastor in Detroit in the 1920s, to facedown Henry Ford’s manufacturing policies, which were having such a devastating effect upon the laboring class.

Loving what our nation can become is what led Martin Luther King Jr. to question a national dream which excluded people of color, and which only in our time has led to the kind of civil rights legislation that helps to ensure equal access and opportunity.

I have a lover’s quarrel with my country. Remember, however, to have that kind of quarrel with is to love it in the first place.