A man walked into a Unitarian Universalist Church, looking for a minister to marry him and his soon to be husband. Up on the wall was a list of all the soldiers from that neighborhood who had died during combat. He walked up to the plaque for those who died during Vietnam. He scanned the list of names listed, and he saw his brother’s name. It brought tears to his eyes. He later told me that is how he knew he had found his community.
A community is a collection of more than what is present and seen. A true community honors the past and prepares a path for those who come next. It is a place to get in touch with our family, with our roots, and to find a rootedness that is deeper than we originally thought. It is thought that the seed for Memorial Day came from Abraham Lincoln’s speech at Gettysburg, a speech that came to define the meaning of sacrifice and the character of our nation. In that speech, Lincoln described a people conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all are created equal.
He described those who had sacrificed, for which no words could adequately honor. He also closed with the prescription that it is our task to take up what is left undone, so that others’ sacrifice may not be in vain. The speech provided a framework for justifying and centering the abolition of slavery. Many citizens were upset about this speech. Many parents and relatives of Northern soldiers were upset that he made the death of their loved ones about the abolition of slavery, a dedication to the proposition that all are created equal. To their defense, this was a different narrative than what Lincoln first introduced.
Up until that moment, the driving narrative was that the Civil War was about the preservation of the union. Even Lincoln himself said that if we could preserve the union without abolishing slavery, he would never have abolished slavery. But he couldn’t. Just as much as our country was conceived in liberty, it was also conceived by the seeds of slavery and human exploitation.
For a nation like ours to endure, for a nation dedicated to the proposition of freedom for all, human exploitation and disregard for life needed to be addressed.
I think Lincoln stumbled upon a truth, whether he wanted to or not, that we are still slow to learn today. There is only one way you can continue to preserve a union, and that is through a commitment to justice, a commitment to equality. Even if you wanted to find another way, there is no other way. You can only have harmony, if there is steadfast commitment to righting the wrongs of the past.
So Memorial Day has a lot of meaning for me. It has meaning because of close friends and relatives who have died in combat. It has meaning because of congregants and many people in this community who are signing up to serve in our military, and the inherent danger and sacrifice of this service. It has great meaning to me too because since that great speech at Gettysburg, our reasons and justification for war have become increasingly fraught, disturbing and unjust.
Both at home and abroad in military service, our nation seems to be all too willing to sacrifice lives for economic gain, gain for a few. This makes the sacrifice of our family members, our close friends, our community members far more painful and sad. To cover this sadness, it is tempting to find a form of patriotism that doesn’t question or challenge, but I think there is another path.
It’s this other path I would like to explore with you this morning. I think there is a great power in recalling the humanity of those who have died in military service. And for us to do this effectively, I think we must learn to recall our own humanity, including our deepest values and aspirations. And I think like Lincoln discovered, there is only one way that we can find peace and healing even in grief, and that is through works recognizing equality for all, the path of justice. There is no other way.
Many of you may have heard about the recent shooting of Ahmaud Arbury, a 25 year old black man, who was jogging in his neighborhood outside Brunswick, Georgia. It was captured on video, showing two white men pull in a vehicle next to an unarmed Arbury jogging.
It is disturbing to watch. One of the white men gets out of their vehicle holding a shotgun, and confronts Arbury who tries to wrestle the gun out of his hand and is shot and killed. The only thing that is unusual about this case is that the video was posted voluntarily by the men who did the shooting. They believed it would look good on them, and prove their innocence. It was at this moment I realized something that I have been very slow to realize. When I look at this footage, I see something disturbing and obviously unjust. Many millions of people feel the same. But there are also many people who view this footage, and they don’t see injustice. They see innocence.
It is this perceived innocence that has become a cancer, a disease, and it demands our attention and care.
Last summer I delivered a sermon on alternative facts that I know many of you responded to, where many are so desperate to seek an escape from disturbing and scary truths, an alternative to the crisis we are in, so much so that we as a people will construct false narratives, just so we don’t have to feel pain or discomfort. We feign naivety. We feign innocence so we can avoid bearing the terrible weight of our actions.
We’re in a national moment where everything is becoming politicized. We’re living in a moment where we are invited to live in our preconceptions, and go at war with those with a different set of preconceptions. Even our health as a people, as individuals, the health of our loved ones has now become a partisan issue about how to respond. It is sad to me.
Why do I bring all of this up on Memorial Day? Because I think similar to the Civil War, we are in a time of great division, and a time when many people are yearning for a sense of peace and harmony. We want to feel a sense of family, a sense of being together, even if we can’t agree on anything.
But we can’t have harmony, a preservation of our union, through the compromising of our values. We can only preserve our union one way, and that is the path of recognizing equality of all.
We have a lineage as a slave holding nation. We have a nation that has and continues to value others’ lives above others based on false categories, like race. We have still not fully digested this as a fact. It seems too painful to digest. But this memorial day I think we can return to the roots of this holiday, and commit ourselves again to taking this in, and allowing this to transform us. We don’t do this because we’re masochists and like to feel ill feelings. We do this because there is no other way to preserve ourselves and preserve our people, there is no other way to live in integrity.
Wars have everything to do with human life. It has to do with the lives of our soldiers who enter service with faith and aspiration and murky confusion. It has to do with the quality of life for our citizens, and in this particular country, it has everything to do with the proposition that all are created equal.
It can be tempting to be cynical or naive. It can be tempting to see that the original authors of this country set us up for a proposition that is impossible to realize. It can be tempting to think also on the other side that just because we say we recognize equality of all people, that this will make it so. The middle path is to see that to be an American is to live by a vow, to commit ourselves to a truth that is bigger than partisan politics, a truth that is bigger than our fear of pain and discomfort, a truth that is about a way of life that preserves our soul and character.
A lot of us are carrying so much right now. Many of us carry so much that it can feel overwhelming at times. Many of us are feeling afraid and frustrated for a number of really good reasons. Those who fought and died were no different than us. In a book entitled The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien, there is a poignant description of some of what soldiers during the Vietnam War carried, many things that were intangible: “They carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing—these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight.
They carried shameful memories. They carried the common secret of cowardice barely restrained, the instinct to run or freeze or hide, and in many respects this was the heaviest burden of all, for it could never be put down, it required perfect balance and perfect posture. They carried their reputations. They carried the soldier’s greatest fear, which was the fear of blushing. Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to. It was what had brought them to the war in the first place, nothing positive, no dreams of glory or honor, just to avoid the blush of dishonor. They died so as not to die of embarrassment. They crawled into tunnels and walked point and advanced under fire. Each morning, despite the unknowns, they made their legs move. They endured. They kept humping. They did not submit to the obvious alternative, which was simply to close the eyes and fall. So easy, really. Go limp and tumble to the ground and let the muscles unwind and not speak and not budge until your buddies picked you up and lifted you into the chopper that would roar and dip its nose and carry you off to the world. A mere matter of falling, yet no one ever fell. It was not courage, exactly; the object was not valor. Rather, they were too frightened to be cowards.”
For many of these soldiers who were 18, 20, 21, their day to day life like ours perhaps were not filled with visions of equality or justice, but the getting through the day, trying to get through without disappointing ourselves or others. This can work for a while. It can last a lifetime. But it’s a hard load to carry. The heaviest yoke is not living by our values, but living to avoid something.
There is another way. I hope we find that other way this Memorial Day. I hope we feel a kinship with those who have died, and those who are still here. I hope we are able to preserve ourselves and our union through a commitment to justice. There really is no other way.
It may seem that attempting to live toward equality within such an unequal system would be a heavy weight to bear, but that is only true if we attempt to bear it ourselves. The weight is not ours to carry. It belongs to those who first conceived of liberty, it belongs to those who have come and gone and each generation, and it belongs to those who may continue that which we’ve been part of. Living in integrity seems like a hard weight to carry, but the alternatives are much heavier. Avoidance is the heaviest. Denial, and pride divorced from tenderness – this is the heaviest load. Fear is another heavy load. Living trying to avoid what we don’t want to happen, instead of living for what we aspire to. All being equal, may we recognize who and what we love, right in front of us, and ensure their thriving. In so doing, we will preserve ourselves and our union.
