Several years ago now, I was asked to pray a prayer as part of a community service for Memorial Day. Standing on the county courthouse steps, in front of that county's war memorial, I mourned the dead and prayed for peace. I confessed the sins that lead to the deaths of so many. Once I'd finished praying, someone read the line from John's Gospel (15.13): "Greater love has no man than this".
I'm always moved when I stand at war memorials. And yet the awe I feel when I stand at any war memorial is just as quickly disturbed by another realization: The brilliant Great War poet Wilfred Owen, in "Dulce Et Decorum Est", bitterly called it "the old lie" (the translation is "It is sweet and right / To die for your country"). Nor should it be overlooked that Owen took his famous line from an ode by Horace, the Latin poet, the Laureate of Rome -- Rome, the great pagan empire and war machine, one of whose procurators, known as Pontius Pilate, sent our Lord to torture and death for the threat he posed to the way that all states do business when push comes to shove: Namely, they lie to their own people and they kill people in other states.
That's what's so profoundly disturbing about war memorials. And, since Monday is Memorial Day, it's what's so hard for me to observe it as a "holiday" -- a holy day.
This Monday, we honor people who've killed other people -- including other Christian brothers and sisters -- in the name of America or Britain or whomever. That is, they do it in our name, which is disturbing enough. But to then turn around and quote that line from John? To do such killing in God's name? Because, let's be honest, we always assume God is on our side -- "God bless America!". "God is with us", I've heard countless folks tell me during war, any war.
But in a church, where God is not just any old deity, and certainly not the tribal deity of any nation, but the God and Judge of all nations (and who is the God of all nations but the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ?), is that not profoundly disturbing?
The line that person quoted before that war memorial all those years ago -- "Greater love has no man than this" -- goes on to finish, "... that he lay down his life for his friends". At such moments, we rip that line out of the rest of its story. The Jesus we praise in our places of Christian worship -- the Jesus she quoted that day at that war memorial -- is the Jesus who did not seek to kill his enemies, but to love them. The Jesus we exalt taught us not to destroy our enemies, but to pray for them. The Jesus we adore demonstrated his bravery not while taking the life of an opponent, but while laying down his life for the good of those who hated him.
I mean no disrespect for any person who's gone to war. I can't in good conscience do anything other that respect all those who've become soldiers.
But we Americans valorize our dead for a reason. War is simply the only glue we have as a nation to unify us in all our diversity. War serves as the only way to forge the American identity. Because our national identity began in war, and thrives in it.
So to all those presidents and potentates who say, in all their pompous pronouncements, that we fight for the "national interest" and "our great cause", well, yes, I seethe when they send away people -- always young people, usually poorer young people -- to kill or be killed; and as for the "enemy", they don't count, and the civilians are, literally not even counted as human beings -- they're simply "collateral damage".
What else should I expect from statesmen who, prodigally, fashion armies and perfect weapons of mass destruction as if they will not, eventually, use them, and who deploy propaganda, disingenuously, as if mendacity and mayhem weren't bloody blood brothers? No, finally, it's not the soldiers, and not even the statesmen, it's the Church that drives me to despair -- and to shame. Of all the parties involved in perpetuating Memorial Day's great "old lie", I grieve most for the Church.
The Church: Until the fourth century the church was pacifist, not only because soldiers of the empire had to take oaths of loyalty to the emperor, and Christians were forbidden to pledge their allegiance to anyone but Christ -- Christ alone was their Caesar -- but above all because Christ, as the early church father Tertullian put it, "in disarming Peter, Jesus unbelted every soldier from that time forth". "Those who live by the sword, die by the sword": Put away your swords, the Church said.
The Church: With the conversion of Constantine in the fourth century, the Church became the Church of Empire, and with the birth of nations in the sixteenth century, the Church of this state and that -- the word here, that leaves such a foul and bitter taste in my mouth is Christendom -- such that the Church became the spiritual wing of temporal power and wealth, and, worse, itself took on the accoutrements of temporal power -- coercion -- and wealth -- corruption.
The Church: When dissenters spoke out against this abrogation of the practice of Jesus and the early church, when during and after the Reformation they formed communities of the non-violent -- the Anabaptists, the Mennonites, the Quakers -- they were marginalized and martyred by Catholics and mainline Protestants alike.
The Church: Now, in the West, here we are, enterprises in the business of selling the commodity of religion, with all the usual concerns of shopkeepers -- packaging the product, luring the punters, keeping them happy, outfoxing the competition -- and the state is delighted as long as we keep the enterprise a private enterprise and don't dare let it interfere with the public enterprise of Realpolitik. And here is the irony: Exalting the nation that guarantees our "freedom" in the marketplace of religion, we maintain the religion we are free to practice -- how? -- precisely by setting aside the way of Jesus in whose name we practice it.
So no, this Memorial Day, I will not disrespect soldiers, or be inordinately shocked by unscrupulous politicians, or even by the international dealers in destruction who operate on the cynical principle that "War is good business: invest your son". For how should these people know any better when they have been baptized into churches that have colluded in chiselling that saying enchanting words at war memorials all over the world, thereby engraving those words on our minds, too, like stone? No, it is to the Church, and the Church's leadership, which this morning I represent, that I will say, "For shame!" For we have failed you by not radically problematising war -- all war -- and by not firmly fixing your faith on Jesus of Nazareth, the man who stalks the pages of the gospels, unmistakably and indefectibly preaching and practicing the way of non-violence, and who, as Risen Lord, continues to call, "Follow me!"
Jesus is the bearer of a radical new way of being human: Free from the compulsion of being in charge, of thinking that we can fix things by breaking things; free to be obedient rather than effective, and effective only as salt, not steel, is effective; free to believe that little flocks of sheep, and not big packs of wolves, are the bearer of God's purpose for the world; and free, finally, to see that the question of non-violence is not "Is it realistic?" but simply "Should it be?" And then to trust that "if it should, then God can", and that "whether we can depends only on whether we believe and obey" (John Howard Yoder, adapted).
That same year that I stood on those courthouse steps -- that same weekend, in fact -- I simply asked a question: "Why not move the flag out of the sanctuary for the day? Instead of displaying it, why not mourn the dead -- all the dead?" You'd think I'd declared war.
Most folks don't realize that the American flag is a recent introduction into the Church's sacred space. Around World War I -- "the Great War, the war to end all wars" (talk about a lie!) -- churches throughout America would display the flag as a way to signal allegiance, especially in German and Italian immigrant communities. It caught on from there.
But allegiance to what? The old lie!
Killing fields are wretched places for forming moral memories. Nothing produces peace activists like killing machines.
I want a Memorial Day that tells the truth, not "that old lie".