Thoughts about Memorial Day from a sometime preacher

Memorial Day is one of those occasions which make anything one says about them seem trite.

We take our freedom for granted and are sometimes willing to treat the values for which the heroes of our nation died as less than sacrosanct for the sake of winning a political argument. We might not be so eager to shut the other fellow down or limit her freedom to express disagreement with us if we remembered the price that has been paid to obtain and maintain that freedom.

Thomas Jefferson- who was anything but a Christian- nevertheless realized that there are only two alternatives when it comes to human freedom. It's a point which we are in dire jeopardy of forgetting in this increasingly secular age. Yes, those who have died in defense of our nation and of our Constitution died, among other things, for the right of each of us to believe as our consciences dictate regarding God and ultimate things- and that includes the right of outright disbelief. Yet Jefferson understood that either human rights are not rights at all, but only privileges those with power deign to bestow and have every right to withdraw at a whim, or sacred things that come from the hand of God Himself, which no mere mortal has the right to take away. There simply is no third option.

As a Christian, I believe that the Hand from which our freedoms come was once pierced by a nail. I believe that the Power which called the worlds into being and at Whose slightest whim galaxies tremble finds not only its most perfect but its most characteristic expression in the cross.  Counterintuitive though it may be, power is most powerful when used with restraint, and- as the apostle observed- is often made perfect in weakness. It is the weak and fearful who must be cruel and aggressive; gentleness is the privilege of the strong. One of the great paradoxes of existence is that it is the small and inconsequential who must be loud and aggressive; the strong can afford to be gentle. The narcissist is finally a weakling;  humility is a characteristic of the truly great.

There is no power in the multiverse greater than love, and no motivation nobler. The greatest Power of all is defined by it, and in it, finally, works its every work. It is fitting, as well as beautiful,  that the God from whom our freedom comes chose that it should be preserved the same way His creation was redeemed. "Greater love has no one than this" Jesus said in John 15:13 (ESV),  "that someone lay down his life for his friends."

I am extremely squeamish about the path this post is taking me down. I am not a fan of American Civil Religion, which tends to water faith down to its lowest common denominator and deprive it of its very essence the way watering down a vaccine robs it of its power to fight disease.  I will not use the metaphor of overcooking vegetables until they lose their nutritional value because some vitamins and minerals probably remain no matter how long you boil the broccoli.

But there is precious little left that is of help to anyone in a prayer "to Whom it may concern." My Uncle Walt, a Christian Scientist who was managing editor of Stars and Stripes during World War II, twice president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, and who rubbed shoulders with the great and the famous, titled the chapter of his autobiography which dealt with the death of his young daughter Willa Anne "Religion Must be Useful Here and Now." I've always wished that I could talk that over with him. A religion that is only useful- that is simply a means to noble or comforting ends, a collection of what Kurt Vonnegut called foma (noble lies we tell ourselves to make ourselves strong or wise or good or happy) is finally no use to us at all.  To be useful, finally, a belief cannot only be useful. It must also be true. Lies- even beautiful lies- will always fail creatures who have to live and die in the midst of reality.

But it must be said that nevertheless, Uncle Walt had a point.  I have stood by the bedside of the dying and offered them the consolations of our Faith. And thinking back to much of the theology I learned from liberal seminary professors, I have often reflected that nobody is helped at such a time by metaphors. There is something obscenely real about death, and about all human suffering. Evil is not an abstraction; Good cannot be, either. A metaphorical resurrection is of very little help to somebody who is very literally dying, and neither are facile fictions. At the moment of death, there are certain realities which can be avoided. The very finality of the moment confronts us with the fact that we have lived the life we have lived, and that we cannot change it. Whatever good we have done, we have done- and whatever harm we have done cannot be taken back, and it while we may be tempted there is really no point in denying it. To paraphrase Dr. Johnson, the prospect of death concentrates the mind wonderfully.

Death is a time for honesty, and for confronting reality. And any comfort that is going to be of any use at such a time must be as stark and real as death itself. Any absolution that is offered must be as substantial and as actual as the sin that is absolved. Any comfort must be as firm and as sober as the grave.

That, intellectually, is one of the reasons why I'm a Christian. Contrary to what the biblically illiterate who make up such an increasing percentage of our population seem to believe, the power of the Gospel lies precisely in the fact that it is not mere foam and froth about pie in the sky bye-and-bye when you die. That- or even less- is what the consolations of philosophy may bring, or the watered-down gruel of culturally fashionable religion.

Death is in bad taste. It is rude. It is ugly. It is crude. It is cruel. And whatever helps us in that hour must not only be as real as it is, but as bad-ass. The God of Christians is a God Who died- and died a death more ugly and grimmer than most of us will die. He died in pain. He died in weakness. And in that weakness, strength was made perfect. Through that weakness, He conquered death itself, and shame, and worthlessness, and failure, all those deeds that cannot be undone. He meets us with His power precisely at the point of our weakness, because He shares that weakness with us. He meets the sorrowing and the suffering at every point of life not by bidding us be strong, but by making our very weakness a sacrament of His strength.

Christianity is the funkiest of religions. That's why it can be of help. That's why its truth makes all of life ring true. That's why it can redeem even what seems irredeemable. God preserve us from a religion which seeks to find excuses for God not preventing the wrongs and injustices of this world. He does more than that. He shares them with us and uses them as the means by which wrongs can be righted and injustices corrected.

No, I am not comfortable with our cultural worship of the Great Benevolent Muffin in the Sky, the kindly old grandfather we have made our national idol. Nor am I comfortable with the identification of God with America so common on the cultural, religious, and political right. Precisely because my Christ is the Christ of Calvary rather than the sappy flower-child our culture thinks of when it hears His Name I cannot stand by silently while He is so trivialized. He is no more- and no less- the Savior of Americans than of Mexicans or Russians or Vietnamese or the Maori. I disapprove so strongly of the American flag being displayed within a church's chancel- outside the altar rail, but in the front of the church, is fine- not because I love America less, but because as much a force for good in the world as our nation is and has been in the past and as great as it may be it trivializes God and Christ to mention them in the same breath. Nations, too, can be idols, and to identify one of them as somehow more closely connected to God than another is nothing less than idolatry.

Historians have written about Abraham Lincoln's death as a kind of national passion narrative. He even died on Good Friday. Sloppy metaphors about slavery as our nation's original sin have been blasphemously tossed into the brew for good measure, and those with a sense of proportion and propriety wince.

Yet even though I have never been to the Holy Land, and God knows that I don't compare the two in any other way, I remember my feeling when I first stood before Lincolns tomb, and behind the theatre box in which he was shot, and in the Peterson house across the street from Ford's Theatre, beside the bed where he died. I know the feeling I get every time I walk the battlefield at Gettysburg or watch the changing of the guard at the Tomb of the Unknowns. As reluctant as I am to use this word, it is a feeling of standing on holy ground.

But not because Lincoln is our national Christ-figure, or because America is somehow especially favored by God or even has some redemptive role to play in history which the Bible forgot to mention. I have no time for nonsense like that.  It not only trivializes Christ and the Gospel but it deprives Lincoln and the nation of their appropriate and proper places in our hearts.

I get the same feeling when I think about those we honor today. And I think I know why.

Martin Luther was fond of saying that the Christian is called upon to be a Christ to his neighbor- to bear the neighbor's troubles and sorrows, to serve him as Christ came to serve us, to love as we have been loved. There is a relationship, after all, between Lincoln, and between the men and women who have given their lives to preserve the rights which are, after all, God's own gift to us, and Jesus. We and our lives are called to reflect Him in the same way, but to a far lesser degree than those who have given their lives that our nation might live.

It is not that they can be compared to Jesus in any other way, and certainly not in the sense that our patriotism should be in any way linked to our faith beyond the limits of our divinely-commanded and finite allegiance to our nation and obedience to those in authority so long as it does not involve disobedience to God.

But we are all called to be Christs to our neighbor. We are all called to bear his burdens. We are all called to serve as Christ came to serve us, and to love as we have been loved.

And greater love has no one than this, that someone should lay down his life for his friends.