“God
Mend Thine Ev’ry Flaw.”
A
Sermon for Memorial Day
Episcopal Church of the Messiah
Santa Ana, California
26 May 2013
Jack
Miles
Happy Memorial Day weekend,
everybody.
Some of our friends are off to
their three-day-weekend destinations, but that means that we few who are
sticking around are having a quiet little weekend to ourselves, doesn’t it. I
actually love to spend the Memorial Day weekend at home. By late May in
Southern California, everything is in bloom, but nothing is yet parched. As you
leave church today, check out the jacaranda on Bush Street. In the weeks
leading up to Memorial Day, there are no presents to purchase. On the day
before Memorial Day, there is no big turkey dinner to prepare. Traffic is
light. Brothers and sisters, this weekend is just good for the soul.
On the national calendar, of
course, this is a weekend when we commemorate and honor the sacrifice of our
countrymen who died for our freedom in the wars of America’s past. But this
also a weekend when we might well call to mind our future war dead, including
those who might die next week or the week after. Here at Messiah Church, we do
this every week, don’t we, when we pray for members of our congregation serving
in the military. The impulse to do that is not just natural and beautiful but
also long sanctioned by Christian tradition. In the church calendar, this
Sunday is Trinity Sunday—informally known as Preacher’s Despair Sunday. Maybe
that’s why when I proposed that we do something special for Memorial Day
Sunday, Fr. Abel instantly drafted me to become a lay preacher for the
occasion. In any case, the Trinitarian hymn we’ve included today, “Eternal
Father, Strong to Save,” happens to be the traditional hymn of the U.S. Navy,
its final stanza expressing the hope that we all share in any week when we pray
for our men and women in uniform:
O Trinity of love and power,
Our brethren shield in danger’s
hour;
From rock and tempest, fire and
foe,
Protect them wheresoe’er they go.
Each week,
as you will have noticed, we also pray for “all innocent victims of war,
especially children.” But this morning, let me suggest that as followers of
Christ, we are called to go a step further. We are called upon to go where our
Savior led and pray even for our enemies. Innocent or not, some of them are
surely victims. Innocent or not, they, too, have mothers and fathers, brothers
and sisters, sons and daughters who are as bereaved when their men die at our
hands as we are when ours die at theirs. Rome was the enemy of the Jewish
people. The century that followed the crucifixion of Christ was a century of
violent Roman-Jewish war. Yet when Roman soldiers were driving nails into
wrists of the King of the Jews, his prayer was, “Father, forgive them, for they
know not what they do.”
Today’s Old
Testament lesson recounts a poignant incident from the life of a man who was
not just a bold fighter but also a famously passionate lover. An anonymous
jingle about King Solomon and King David goes like this:
King Solomon and King David
Led merry merry lives
With many and many concubines
And many and many wives.
But when old age came on them
With many and many qualms
King Solomon wrote the Proverbs
King David wrote the Psalms.
Well, folks, the consequence of King David’s many and many
wives was many and many children. And his many and many children had many and
many quarrels, one of which—led by David’s son Absalom, whom the Bible calls
“the most beautiful man in all Israel”—metastasized into a full-scale
insurgency. David’s tough-fisted general, Joab, put down the insurgency. Like
all good soldiers, he had a job to do and he did it. But when successive
messengers brought the good news of victory to David, all the poor king could
do was ask “But what about my son Absalom?” And when they made it plain to him
that Absalom was dead, he wept: “Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would I had
died instead of you, O Absalom, my son, my son!” (2 Samuel 18:33).
During the Iraq war, those we
fought and killed by the thousands were insurgents like Absalom. They were
trying to kill us the way Absalom was trying to kill David. We had every right
to defend ourselves. But now American combat operations in that war are over,
and for whom do we mourn? Whose bravery do we commemorate. This Memorial Day
weekend, what would Jesus do? I think he might call on us to include in our
mourning the many insurgent Absaloms who stood against us during the war, the
many fathers who like David are still rocking back and forth and saying, “My
son, my son, would that I had died instead of you!” and the innumerable
children of the missing who still hope that someday Daddy may come home.
We mourn
for the fallen, but we honor the brave, and bravery is a moral virtue. David’s
most eloquent lament, surpassing even his grief for Absalom, is his psalm in
honor of Saul and Jonathan: father and son, the two of them slain in the same
battle, defending Israel against the Philistines. I quote the King James Version:
The beauty of Israel is slain upon
thy high places:
how
are the mighty fallen!
Tell it not in Gath, publish it not
in the streets of Ashkelon;
lest
the daughters of the Philistines rejoice,
lest
the daughters of the uncircumcised triumph.
Gath and Ashkelon are cities in Philistia, and the thought
of the Philistine women rejoicing—gloating, even—over so devastating a defeat
for Israel and so heart-breaking a loss for David is just too much to bear. But
through the grief, David honors Saul and Jonathan for their bravery in combat.
Bravery matters: “the bow of Jonathan turned not back, / and the sword of Saul
returned not empty…They were swifter than eagles, / they were stronger than
lions.”
Jesus, Son
of David, the Messiah, is no less brave than his distant ancestor. In the
Gospel of John, the last words he speaks to his disciples at the Last Supper,
just before his apostles and he leave for the Garden of Gethsemane, where he
will be taken into custody, are (in the Jerusalem Bible translation): “Be brave,
I have conquered the world.”
“Be brave,
I have conquered the world”! The bravado of this statement, spoken by a man
about to be humiliated, tortured, and executed, is breathtaking. But if Jesus
calls upon his followers to be brave, he does not call upon them to be
foolhardy. He knows that in the long run, their victory is assured. In the
Gospel of John, such is his self-assurance that the armed henchmen of the high
priest do not need Judas’s kiss to identify him. Judas arrives with them; but
Jesus preemptively asks whom they are looking for. When they reply, “Jesus of
Nazareth” he says, “I am he. So, if you are looking for me, you may let these
men go” (John 18:8).
In the darkest hour, he is serenely
in charge. In the New Testament reading today, Paul recites the tribulations
that he has been through with a similar proud confidence. His tribulations are
just passing battles in a war that Christ has essentially won. But that Christ
has won the war, defeating Satan, does not mean that Paul’s bravery, or yours
or mine, is not necessary. No enterprise of great pitch and moment, not even
Christian salvation, has ever been accomplished without bravery.
So, we are
right to honor the bravery of those we commemorate on this weekend and not to
allow our mourning to become the whole of our commemoration. But as we honor
the bravery of those who fight for us and as we shed tears of grief for those
who have fallen, let us in imitation of Christ honor the bravery of the other
side as well and shed tears for them as children of the same heavenly Father.
Though we
enjoy the incalculable blessings of peace at home, our hundreds of thousands of
enlisted men and women and our many thousands of mercenaries, also known as
contractors, many of whom are not Americans but merely employed by America, are
engaged in military conflict of one sort or another all around the globe. But though this may fill us with a
kind of awe, I don’t think it fills many of us with what you could call joy.
When did we decide as a people to take on the whole world in quite this way? The
United States of America has overwhelmingly confidence in its military might
and spends accordingly. Writing in the periodical Foreign Affairs four years ago, a retired diplomat and past
president of the Foreign Service Association, noted that:
The number of lawyers at the
Defense Department is larger than the entire U.S. diplomatic corps, there are
more musicians in the military bands than there are U.S. diplomats, and the
Defense Department’s 2008 budget was over 24 times as large as the combined budgets
of the State Department and usaid
($750 billion compared with $31 billion).
Are these proportions just? Do they reflect American values,
much less Christian values? Jesus may have been a pacifist. I confess that I am
not. But is patriotism or legitimate self-defense incompatible with restraint?
May we not pray that in military expenditure our national leaders should
exercise a little prudence and temperance, to name two other cardinal virtues
that stand alongside bravery in the traditional quartet?
I think that we may indeed; and so,
to conclude, as we honor the bravery of the mighty who have fallen in defense
of our freedom on this latest Memorial Day, let us pray for our country in the
wise but chastened words of “America the Beautiful”:
America! America!
God mend thine every flaw,
Confirm thy soul
In self-control,
Thy liberty in law.
Amen.
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Scripture passages read on 26 May 2013:
2 Samuel 18:24-33 (New Revised Standard Version)
2 Samuel 1:19-27 (King James Version)
2 Corinthians 11:22-31 (New Revised Standard Version)
John 16:25-33 (New Jerusalem Bible Version)
Also:
J. Anthony Holmes, “Where Are the Civilians? How to Rebuild
the U.S. Foreign Service,” Foreign
Affairs, Volume 88 No. 1, January/February 2009, pp. 148-160.
