Exodus 3:5
Ecclesiasticus 4:11-16
John 15:7-17
We Stand on Holy Ground
Just about one year ago, I was privileged to make the journey to Washington, D.C., to Arlington National Cemetery, with the family of Betty Smith, to lay her to rest beside her husband. Betty was a member of our congregation, and a dedicated volunteer in our food pantry. Her husband, Dewitt Smith, was a two-star general in the Army, and served for a number of years as head of the Army War College. General Smith had personally endured the ravages of war, and in his later years came to write beautifully about the deep sadness his experiences had etched upon his soul.
In these past few weeks, as the drums of war have begun to sound in our nation’s capital, I have wished I could bring General Smith back to speak to our legislators and members of the executive branch. So few of those in power right now have, themselves, suffered in the trenches of war. So few have had to contemplate the incredible sacrifice threatened when one’s own child goes off to war. How could they know the cost of war to the human soul?
Standing in the green rolling hills and meadows of Arlington, with the small stark white, neatly ordered gravestones stretching as far as the eye can see – is a humbling experience. The sight conjures up in my imagination scenes from novels like The Red Badge of Courage and Cold Mountain, and movies like Glory or The Thin Red Line. The numbing sameness of those simple white markers, numbering in the tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands, and stretching out to the edges of the seen horizon, creates a kind of sea of incalculable human loss– as if all the wars could merge to form a great ocean swell of grief. Standing there, I find myself saying, silently, “Oh please – no more war.” And a subtle wave of nausea overtakes me that takes days to shake.
Arlington haunts the spirit. Standing there, one hears again those words God spoke to Moses, “Take off your shoes, for you stand on holy ground.”
The state of Connecticut has a veterans’ cemetery in Middletown where we laid to rest a son of this congregation not long ago. That cemetery, too, is staggering in its size and scope. It’s quiet there. The graves are unadorned, and stretch out far over the meadows. There is peace at the last – or so we hope.
General Smith concluded his annual Memorial Day speeches with a poem he had seen etched on the wall of a cemetery in Normandy,
“Let them in Peter, they are very tired
Give them the couches where the angels sleep.
And let them wake whole again to new dawns fired
With sun – not war. And may their peace be deep.
Remember where their broken bodies lie.
And give them things they like.
Let them make noise.
God knows how young they were to have to die!
Give swing bands, not gold harps, to these our boys….
(Elma Dean, author)
It won’t surprise you to know that as a preacher, as a mother, as a grandmother, war decimates my soul. Is there such a thing as a “just war”? Maybe….. maybe…… The great Harvard ethicist Amos Wilder, writing in the shadows of WWII, made a credible case for it. But the older I get, the more I realize that human life is precarious and tender and fleeting. And death- any death – falls heavy upon my soul.
Toward the end of the gospel of John, with the crucifixion imminent, Jesus says to his disciples,
“This is my commandment: love one another as I have loved you. There is no greater love than this: that someone should lay down his life for his friends.” In other words: “I go into Jerusalem knowing full well that death awaits me there. Confronting the principalities and powers is a cause for which I am willing to lay down my life.”
I like to think that each cross in our national cemeteries represents a person who made a choice to lay down his or her life for a good and worthy cause. But in truth, that is not so. Too often we have gone to war under false pretenses, or with faulty recognizance. There are veterans of our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq who suffer from the trauma of physical and psychological injury and carry the added burden of knowing they were deceived from the onset. Did we go to war over oil? Or was it for pride or vengeance? Was it the rabid greed of the military-industrial complex that we were so eloquently warned about in Dwight Eisenhower’s final address as President? Was it a combination of all the above? Whatever the cause, those wars have put the hearts and souls of the men and women who served there through a veritable shredder.
The founding of America was, from its inception, a “noble Christian enterprise.” Listen to these words preached by the Puritan leader John Winthrop in a challenge to those who were to become the founders of this nation:
“The only way to provide for our posterity is to follow the counsel of Micah: to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God. For this end we must…entertain each other in brotherly affection, we must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities for the supply of others’ necessities… we must make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labour and suffer together, as…member of the same body. So shall we keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace.
The Lord will be our God and will delight to dwell among us…we shall be as a “City Set Upon a Hill.” The eyes of the world will be upon us….
But if our hearts shall turn away so that we will not obey, but shall be seduced and worship other Gods- our profits, or our pleasures -… then we shall surely perish out of this good land…
Therefore let us choose life that we, and our seed, may live. We cleave to our God and obey his voice, for He is our Life and our Prosperity.”
(excerpted from “A Model of Christian Charity,” John Winthrop, 1620)
Written one hundred and fifty years later, the Declaration of Independence concludes with these words:
“For the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.”
Those ideals form the soul of our country, and the Holy Ground of this nation.
Not long ago, David Brooks, in an editorial in the New York Times, said we are a country whose very birth is steeped in the Exodus narrative. We were founded by a people who sought freedom from oppressive systems, and who journeyed forth in hopes of creating a better world. “This,” says Brooks, “is our “overarching narrative.””
Our Christian forefathers and mothers left the Old World determined to create a social politic that was true to the Judeo-Christian values they held dear. The “promised land,” the land of Canaan, biblically speaking, was never, and never should be, about real estate. From the earliest pages of the Bible, from the earliest pages of the Torah, “the promised land” has always been about an ideal. It’s been about creating a place of brotherhood, equality and compassion; a place of mutual dependence and respect. It’s been about an engagement in faith and hope and truth – an engagement in the gospel. And while I freely admit that “the promised land” has never been actualized in this America we love, this was the quest that gave meaning and purpose to the founding of this nation. This is what made our ground “holy.”
“The Puritans and Pilgrims could survive hardship because they knew what kind of cosmic drama they were involved in,” said Brooks. “Being a…. people with a sacred mission gave their task dignity and consequence.” (David Brooks, NYT, April 2017)
The Puritan enterprise was NOT without its failures and shortcomings. But I would like to propose that the Exodus narrative is one that resonates with my heart and soul and mind – flawed as it may be when fleshed out. To build a nation true to the highest ideals of Judeo-Christian charity, to borrow from the words of John Winthrop, would be a mission for which, I believe, I would be willing to lay down my life.
In the years since the arrival of the Pilgrims and Puritans upon our shores, waves of immigrants have performed an Exodus narrative of their own. They have come to our nation to build a better future – and they have helped to build this nation in the process. I will take for my own the optimism, the courage, the determination and the hope that the Exodus story weaves into my national imagination; the ideals of brotherhood and compassion and mutual dependence – the gospel values – for which over 1.3 million Americans have laid down their lives.
I want to believe that we Americans are always working toward becoming an ever more perfect union – and that that is what consecrates the ground of this nation and makes it holy . But the truth is that we stand this Memorial Day weekend as a nation deeply divided; torn asunder by our differences rather than enriched by them. Our politics have sown distrust among us. Some of our politicians have capitalized on our fears. Too few voices can be heard standing up for those who live on the margins – those who look different, or speak a “foreign” language, or worship or dress differently. Too few voices speak with conviction for the immigrants who knock at the doors of our borders today – just as so many of our own forefathers and mothers knocked at America’s borders in generations past. Too few voices can be heard standing up for the just and equal treatment of all the brothers and sisters of this country who cannot live on what they can earn – those for whom the daily struggle to put bread on the table takes all the energy they can muster.
Remember the warning John Winthrop gave to the Pilgrims? “ If our hears shall turn away so that we will not obey, but shall be seduced and worship other Gods – our profits or our pleasures – then we shall surely perish out of this good land.”
Earlier this Spring a group of eighteen of us – thirteen teenagers and five adult leaders- visited Montgomery, Birmingham and Selma, Alabama. The historic sites there and the museums that commemorate them are powerful. The youth that made that journey were wonderfully responsive to all that they learned. It was an honor to travel with them.
I left those historic sites with a new and broader understanding of the sacrifices that have been made in our quest to be a nation true to our gospel roots. One cannot walk through the Equal Justice Initiative Museum or the Lynching Memorial without being profoundly impacted by the suffering and persecution and tragedy that have marked our nation’s history. There, too, like Arlington, there is a monstrous wave of grim reality that leaves one nauseous and reeling. And the ground there, where so many died, is holy. There, too, one should take off one’s shoes.
The words we read together today as our unison reading are written large on the wall of one of those museums we visited. “History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived. But if faced with courage, need not be lived again.” (Maya Angelou)
I aim to try to stay focused on those words tomorrow as Memorial Day dawns with all its festivities and celebrations. It is a day commensurate with sadness and gravity for me. It is a day that asks of each of us that we rise to the challenges that keep this nation from being all that it could be. It is a day that pleads with us to look with honesty about the history we as a nation have lived- and do all that we can to be sure the tragic stories of the past do not happen yet again. War? Racism? Religious bigotry? Persecution of the innocent? Deprivation? Too many have died already for us to forget the precious and painful lessons of our past. Enough already. Enough
I will confess that there are times when despair for the present times threatens to overwhelm me. I’m get a little older and maybe I don’t have the energy and optimism that only youth can bestow upon us. But we carry on – we go on – struggling to right wrongs and build equity because too many people have died already in the effort to hallow this ground. We carry on because the enormous threat to all humanity of a rapidly changing climate will take all the collective wisdom and courage and unified will-power we can muster in the years that are to come. Our citizenry and our government could rise to that challenge.
You may well have heard the piece Brian Cheney is about to sing. It comes from Leonard Bernstein’s Mass. The prayer Jesus taught to his disciples, the Lord’s Prayer, is followed by the simple and yet profound pledge to “keep on keeping on” because it’s all we can do in the face of challenge. In light of today’s sermon I hope we hear these words as a prayer for America and her future – as a prayer of contrition for all the errors we have committed on our journey as a nation. But also as a prayer of commitment to be the courageous citizens we are called to be in these times: citizens who are willing to speak forcefully for liberty and justice and truth. People that are willing to stand for the Judeo-Christian values that forged the founding of this nation. People wise enough to look at the past honestly, and honor the lessons we have learned from it. We can be better. We can do better. We can yet hallow this nation’s ground and deem it holy.
The Lords’ Prayer/I Go On – Brian Cheney
Let us pray,
Great God of the ages, whose wisdom and teachings nourish the better angels of our natures, we pray for peace. Peace for the nation. Peace with justice. There are so many who struggle for food, for dignity, for a chance to live a life of meaning and purpose- guide us to live beside one another with shared purpose and shared resources – with mutual respect and harmony. Take away the fears that cripple us and limit our vision – and remind us that all people are created in your image.
Help us to be unafraid to learn from the past, in order to better shape the future. Help us to hear the words of our closing hymn as a prayer, “May you, gracious God, shed all grace upon us. And with thine almighty mercy may our good be crowned with brotherhood from sea to shining sea.” Amen.
Carleen R. Gerber
The First Congregational Church of Old Lyme
