I want to begin my sermon today with another one of my West Virginia stories. Then I want to talk about the history of Memorial Day and then actually go back to John’s text and show you that there is a connection between all 3 of those things. It’s interesting to me as we look in the year 2003 that some of the cultural rituals of our Nation have been slowly eroded under the guise of modernity.  And of seeing what once were holy days as far as Christians go, as “holidays” meaning fun, and that days that were set aside for, I don’t want to say austere commemoration, but serious commemoration have also been replaced by a notion that those days are for amusement. I’ve often said that I’m a great supporter of Marten Luther King day, but I would much rather students be taken somewhere so they can learn about Marten Luther King, or taken to some event where there is a celebration of the ethnic diversity of this country. I think kids simply sitting at home is of little value to them in remembering that day. And I feel that way about many of the holidays that we have. Memorial Day to the vast majority of people in our culture has become the day that marks the beginning of our summer.  We think of it primarily as a time to barbeque and being that entertainment time. Labor Day has also taken on the same meaning.

I want to go back just a little in my own memory. When I was a child when someone died, we didn’t call a commercial cemetery, and pay them a fee to dig a person’s grave. You see all the cemetery’s where I grew up were community and family cemeteries. And when someone died, the women would start cooking and the men with their sons, would go to the cemetery and gather as a community and literally dig the grave of that person. Now what I want to tell you about that is, unlike our modern culture, death was not something to be ignored or that somehow got in the way of a more pleasant view life. It was woven into the tapestry of life, and when it occurred, people had rituals as communities in which they observed so people could grieve naturally and properly. I’ve often said I have nothing against cremation, particularly the fact that it’s much cheaper than other alternatives. But that I fear that cremation has more to do with people wanting to pretend death away.  I mean, after all, who wants to look at a dead body and be reminded that someday you may die too right? That many of these rituals, and this isn’t meant to be a commercial for funeral homes, but to say that many of the rituals that accompany death for generations have been lost.  It’s simply because of our own uncomfortable ness with death. When I was a kid, when we would dig those graves, somehow there was this tangible reality not only of death, but also of honoring and respecting the person who had died.

Now we have Memorial Day weekend, we didn’t call it Memorial Day, we called it Decoration Day. And the reason that we did, was that every family where I grew up would go to their family plot, pull the weeds, tend the flowers and maybe plant some new flowers. As a family we would remember on Memorial Day, those who had gone before us. Maybe shed a tear, but more importantly to have a warm good memory of the connection between us, and those who had gone before us. My first memory of that, that is the most stunning to me, is when I lost my great grandmother. I was age 7. My great grandmother’s name was Bessie May Mitchem. She grew up on a tobacco plantation in Greenbrier County. Have any of you ever heard of the Greenbrier Resort?  It’s a very famous resort in that same county. Her father was a very wealthy man, and she also happened to be a full-blooded Cherokee. Which was an interesting twist on things. When I was a child she would baby sit my sister and me.  We would often choose to stay home with her, instead of going shopping or whatever else that was going on because she was so wonderful to us. She had a wonderful dry wit.  I remember as she got older and strokes started taking over, her mouth was twisted to one side.  I asked her one day, “Grandma why is your mouth pulled to the side?”  She got a glimmer in her eye.  She said, “I bit a woolly worm when I was a kid.” About 3 years ago I was thinking of my Grandma Mitchum and I realized that she had made fun at me.  It took me 40 years to figure it out. But do you see that she was still enriching my life 40 years later? That is the kind of strength that Memorial Day was meant to give us. I remember the first Memorial Day not long after her death, of going and having to deal with the sod that was still on the ground and hadn’t quite settled. And having to move away all those dead flowers that had been placed on her grave. My mother who wasn’t even her blood relative had promised her that she would always keep lilies on her grave. I suspect that sometime tomorrow, my mother will be going to put another lily on my Grandma Mitchum’s grave. I remember the sadness I felt at her loss, and yet, that in the midst of that sadness, feeling so proud that I was her great grandchild and that she had given so much to my life.

I’m going to pull back from that memory only to say, how does that compare to a barbeque? Memorial Day has that kind of depth if we let it have it. The Battle Hymn of the Republic which the chorus sang is the first hymn I learned to play out of the Hymnal, so its one of my favorites. But for more than one reason. It was used by the Union soldiers as they sang around the campfire. Because they saw in the conflict between them and their southern neighbors, a moral battle between good and evil, and that some how if you look closely at the words in that hymn, that the freedom which they were giving to Americans who deserved it and had been denied it, was somehow connected with the redemptive sacrifice and death which Jesus had brought in the gospels. I don’t disagree with them in their understanding of what they were doing, but in that war as in all wars, death came and it came mostly to the young. More people died in the Civil War of amputations and disease than ever died from bullets. But all over this great land of ours mothers morn the loss of their sons. Anyone who has read Uncle Tom’s Cabin knows that it may have been fiction, but that many of the realities, which it played out where real. That as bad as the upper South was, even as gentle and caring as a nice master might have been, they were still a master who owned people as if they were cattle and that was wrong. Every slave dreaded being sent to the Deep South because it was in places like Mississippi that they would see the most brutal forms of slavery. Which makes the story of Memorial Day even more remarkable. After the end of that war, our country was somehow trying to settle back. After loss, and after brother had fought brother, in the deep South there were mothers who had lost their sons to that war, and had lost the battle. In many of those towns in the Deep South in Mississippi there were graves lined up of boys from the North who had died. Now you would think that these Southern women would want to go spit on those graves.  After all, those boys were the ones who helped defeat them. But mother’s instincts are always stronger than what we give them credit for. They set aside a day, every year, when they would go and clean those graves of those Northern soldiers.  They would decorate them and they would honor their memory. It’s an extraordinary story of how Memorial Day began, and the pain and the suffering of a war, when the opposite side decided to honor the dead of the side that they had lost too.

My son is always asking me questions that sometimes I don’t have the answers to.  Since he is smarter than I am, it makes it rough sometimes. This week he was talking to me about some things he was learning in class and he was pondering these issues of war. He started quoting statistics to me. In World War II close to 300,000 Americans lost their lives. 600,000 British lost their lives, 4.1 million Germans, and 43 million Russians died in World War II. Now we can understand a little bit of what led them so quickly to try to take over Eastern Europe. They had suffered so much loss that they wanted to buffer themselves from the rest of the world. This morning, I think that I don’t want to argue whether war is right or wrong. I think that we often miss-step, when we start making those arguments. It’s not the war itself that could be wrong. It’s the human condition that often leads to war. And those human conditions have not changed from one generation of humanity to the next. They involve greed.  They involve the absolute need for power against others. War is caused by persons wanting more of the gifts of life than their concern of what other's needs might be.

Now before we talk about those things which have come so much in focus in our minds, I want to remind you of a few things that are going on the in the world today. I read in the paper this week that 4 million people have died in the Congo over the last 2 years. Do you know why? Because one ethnic group is fighting another. Because some how people believe that human life isn’t worth anything, and there is no one to blame for those deaths but the brutal people that are enacting those deaths. Indonesia has been held together ever so fragilely for generations by a wide variety of ethnic peoples. War has broken out there again. Why? Because one group is afraid that another group may have more power than they have, so you just kill a few people to make your point that you have the power. Wars are caused because of human sinfulness. We battle mightily over the war with Iraq. As bodies continue to be dug up in mass graves in the country, no one will argue that what was going on there was little more than a powerful man deciding that he would brutally take from others the freedom that they deserved so that he could stay in power. That war with Iraq brought the death of many Iraqis, and even some of our own citizens. But nothing will ever compare to the decades of people who have lived under a brutal regime which had no respect for his own people.

Memorial Day is more than just picnicking.

Now I want to go back to John’s gospel. We often quote that first line because we like good pieces of lines. A new commandment I give you that you love one another as I have loved you. We don’t want to read on because what does it say? How much do we love another except when we are willing to give our life for our brother? And we living in the creature comforts that we live in, we don’t want to think that at times, “I may have to give my life so that others might have life.”  Memorial Day is a reminder to us, that people have done that from one generation to the next.    That until we come to a point as human beings where human greed and where the human desire to control and have what I want over whatever other peoples needs are, Memorial Day will still be a remembrance of even that in this generation, yes even young Americans, have died because others needed freedom. Jesus’ words are strong words this morning. And they remind each and every one of us that central to the gospel is knowing the love of God has been revealed to us through Christ, and never being able to live our lives the same ever again. That it’s not about me and it’s not about what I want or I desire. It’s what God desires in my life.

I know I’ve gone on, but give me 2 more minutes and I will shut up. I was going through the web, this week and came across First San Diego’s website. It’s the largest Methodist Church on the West Coast and it happens that one of my very close mentors is pastor there now. I was reading some of his sermons, because there is no good idea that is new, you usually find those good ideas from someone else. Jim was preaching a sermon series and it was on the Ten Commandments.  What was an interesting twist on it was that Jim was saying that the commandments give us the freedom to live as God would have us to. And I thought it was interesting how he used the word freedom, because on days like this, when we are patriotic, we want to talk about our freedom. And we usually interpret freedom to be I can do what I darn well please. Isn’t that what we think? But what Jim was reminding his congregation in that sermon was the freedom allows us to do what God wants us to do. What do we think of when we think of the sacrifices that others have made that we might be free? We must think that that freedom gives us the responsibility to use that freedom, as God would have us use it, not as we would want to use it. Now there are a few words to chew on. And I think I’m done. Let’s stand now and affirm what it is which we believe.