Scripture: Acts 17:22-28; Revelation 22:1-5.
I need to say at the outset that for me a service of Christian worship and the Memorial Day holiday are not an easy fit.
When the idea came up in the worship committee, it seemed like a natural and right thing to do—to acknowledge Memorial Day, some of the meanings of Memorial Day, on Memorial Day weekend.
At the same time, I know I felt a twinge of anxiety wondering how we would acknowledge respectfully all the different feelings people may have that are interwoven with such a holiday and how we do that with integrity in a Christian worship service.
Acknowledging Memorial Day, specifically acknowledging people who gave their lives in war and acknowledging the losses felt by loved ones, seems in one sense natural and necessary, but that doesn’t mean there are not issues. And I thought I better begin with the issues as I see them.
First of all, issues that have to do with church and state—not church and state in a constitutional or legal sense, but church and state in a spiritual sense. National holidays, when brought into the church, always run the danger of turning the worship of God into a celebration of the nation. It seems that there is a natural human tendency to confuse self-interest or national interest with God’s will. Patriotic holidays do, I think even the most patriotic among us would have to admit, lend themselves to certain rhetorical excesses. People speak profusely of the heroism of soldiers fighting on behalf of national defense, national interest, and national ideals. People speak grandly of the nobility of national causes and of national greatness and greatest-ness.
But the purpose of church is to check our tendencies to identify ourselves or our nation with the will or the particular favor of God.
The purpose of church is to question, no not just to question but to speak against, any tendency that would substitute devotion to country for devotion to God.
The purpose of church is to remind us that we are not the greatest—the United States—Christianity—any group we happen to belong to—we are not the greatest. We are human beings and we are God’s children. Nothing more. But then how could there be anything more than being God’s children?
And in that light, the purpose of church in a more long range sense is to envision and work for a time when the realm of God replaces all these strange inventions called countries that have funny lines around them that you see on maps, so that those who live inside these lines fight against those who live inside those lines. “God made from one blood all the people of earth.” Paul is reported to have said that to the Athenians. I would hope that always and everywhere the voices of the church can be reported to say that. So I do get spiritually nervous whenever we move in the direction of combining national holidays with worship services.
And of course there is the issue of war itself.
I know that there are more than a few people here at Sojourners who are anywhere from uncomfortable to outraged that there are passages in the Bible, many passages in the Bible, where God is portrayed as condoning, even commanding bloodshed. Some stories even have God punishing people for not being sufficiently thorough in their destruction. The use of violence as a tool of either national interest or religious interest is at the very least troubling. The idea of God as a participant, or a commander-in-chief, in the wars of this world is much more than troubling, and many of us feel that it needs to disappear.
Some of us read the gospel in part as a call to non-violence, not a call to passivity but a call to non-violent action in the service of setting captives free and bringing justice to the oppressed.
And again there is the vision of God’s realm, distant though it may be in some ways, but central to the gospel, and central to the church, and when we work and dream and pray for the coming of God’s reign on earth, how can it mean anything other than a reign of peace? How can the church be anything other than anti-war?
Of course we do live in a world that hasn’t quite arrived yet at the reign of God, and there are a lot of ideas about how we live in such an imperfect world in the meantime and most of those ideas allow for the possibility, and the occasional necessity of war. Good and courageous people have fought in wars out of duty and conscience. Good and thoughtful people defend the fighting of wars as a sad necessity in a fallen world. Good and loving people have mourned the loss of soldiers killed while doing what they felt they had to do.
When called upon, the church can and does and should be a community of support for the children of God who have chosen to fight and for those who mourn their loss for a lifetime. But it is not, I repeat, an easy fit, a holiday like Memorial Day and a service of Christian worship.
But then, life often does not present us with easy fits. I have a Quaker connection, as I know a number of other people at Sojourners do. One of my several ties to the Quakers is that I went to a Quaker college, and it was in the days when we were required to go to 5th day meeting. Being that it was a Quaker college pacifist views were well represented, and one Thursday someone had risen to speak in an anti-war vein not just about war in general but about the Vietnam war which at that time was just beginning to escalate.
On the way back to my dorm after the meeting was over, there was an older man walking next to me, someone I recognized but didn’t know personally, and he just started talking to me. I’ve remembered the conversation ever since both because of what he said and the fact that he just felt he had to say it to someone, even this stranger at least 20 years younger than he was.
What he said was that he was a lifetime Quaker who believed that war was always wrong and that taking a human life was a violation of his Christian beliefs. And yet he said that when World War II came along he enlisted in the army because all his friends were going and if they were going to die, he needed to die with them. And if the whole world was going to hell, he wanted to go too. But he never stopped believing that war was always wrong and that it violated his personal faith at its deepest levels. Life does not present us with easy fits.
I had several things in mind when I decided to call this sermon “The Other Side”. Of course I had in mind the people who Memorial Day is meant to commemorate, those who have gone over, the people who gave their lives in battle. Another meaning had to do with the thought that in a service of Christian worship we cannot commemorate the soldiers of one side only. In any war there is also the other side, and the children of God who fought and died wearing the uniform of another army. One source I have seen said that in fact Decoration Day, which later became Memorial Day, had its origin with a group of Confederate women who held a ceremony to decorate the graves of both Union and Confederate soldiers. If that is true, then the idea of including “the other side”—all other sides—in our memorials has been around from the beginning, though we must say it has been most often neglected.
And then there is the other side of our beliefs or values. For the soldier the pacifist may be the other side, and for the pacifist the soldier. And sometimes that other side is within our own bodies, as it was for the Quaker man I just told you about who was still struggling with having gone to war after 20 years, not so much carrying on an argument with himself as trying somehow to allow space within himself for two separate, opposing convictions to exist side by side in the same person. The world does not always provide us with easy fits, and sometimes the other sides of ourselves are not so easy to live with.
And sometimes we find beliefs or values or attitudes that we find deeply offensive, even abhorrent to us—we find such attitudes not just in mean, awful people but in people we love. It would be much easier, much neater and more convenient all the way around if people who stood for opposing values were just thoroughly despicable and dismissible. But of course they aren’t always, and sometimes even our efforts to make people dismissible by demonizing them fall apart. For some reason the world does not just magically divide itself into friends and enemies, our side and the other side, good guys and bad guys.
The pieces of our world do not fit easily together, And sometimes the conflicting pieces of our lives need to be in conflict. Sometimes we need to find our moral ground and stand it, even if it means coming into conflict with people we may deeply respect or care for. Sometimes we need to seek out what we hold to be just or good or true and hold on to it and be willing, at least figuratively, to fight for it.
But sometimes, and I am thinking that this morning is one of those times, we need to be able to cast a vast net of mercy over friend and foe, or perhaps to see that God does—cast that net of mercy over us—over soldier and war resister, over those killed in battle who were on our side and those killed on other sides, those who mourn the loss of loved ones and countless ones unknown, those who live their lives with the visible wounds of war, those whose wounds cannot be seen, those who march not with guns but with picket signs, those who fight courageously with weapons and those who courageously refuse to do so and fight worthy battles with other means, and all those who fit no category or description at all.
Today, may we remember and give thanks for that vast and holy mercy that embraces us all—that embraces us all. Amen.
Jim Bundy
May 27, 2001