On the secular calendar, this is Memorial
Day weekend, a time when we honor those who’ve given their lives in service to
the nation. On the church calendar,
we’ve begun a different marking of time, the “long green season” of ordinary
time, the Sundays after Pentecost. For
the next few months – until Advent, in fact – we’ll hear stories from Jesus’
ministry, as well as their Old Testament roots, fleshing out for us the
never-ending journey of Christian discipleship.
So in this odd juxtaposition of a national holiday and the Church’s
ordinary time, how do we make sense of our need to remember those who’ve died
in our nation’s conflicts, as well as our need to worship the God who commands
us to beat our swords into plowshares and follow the Prince of Peace?
Though war is certainly “all hell,”1
as William Tecumseh Sherman said, God also lifts from its blood and ashes what
Lincoln famously called “the better angels of our nature.”2 On Memorial Day, I think we’d say it’s not simply millions of deaths that we
honor but the purposes we imagine those deaths sought to realize. After all, simply honoring death is not a
particularly Christian thing to do. But
we also believe, deep in our national soul, that a war must mean more than
death, more than raw assertion of power, if it is to be just. So we focus on the good we believe the war intends,
as well as the virtues war can raise up in otherwise unremarkable people.
As it happens, I think an event in town
last weekend, as well as our readings here this morning, help us glimpse some
of those better angels of our nature rising from the hell of war. The event last weekend was a concert by the
Kansas City Symphony that included the world premiere of a work to mark the
centennial of World War I. It is
altogether fitting and proper that we should do this in Kansas City, home of
the national World War I Museum. The new
symphony reflected on the war not just instrumentally but through the words of
two Americans who served in it. As it
happens, one of those voices belongs to the father and uncle of two members of
our parish family. That soldier is 1st
Lieutenant Burnham “Burnie” Hockaday, uncle of Irv
Hockaday and father of Laura Rollins Hockaday.
In his letter home, you can hear Burnie’s
pride and hope as he writes to his mother from England, on the threshold of six
months literally in the trenches, suffering he surely can’t yet imagine. On that innocent side of the bloodshed,
Burnie readies himself for what I’m sure he sees as a noble conflict, a war the
U.S. entered intending to end all wars and make the world safe for
democracy. A hundred years later, we
hear those words and cringe at their naiveté, for we know about the failure of
the League of Nations; the unspeakable carnage of the next, even greater war;
and the sinful acts that have been perpetrated in freedom’s name. But Burnie and his comrades believed in the
nobility of what they were doing – making the world safe for democracy,
fighting to inaugurate an era of peace.
That was the good those young men intended, for no one wants lasting peace
more than the 18-year-old who’s heading into the trench. They saw their mission not simply as winning
a war but as extending liberty to those outside the boundaries of that
blessing.
And there in England, as he made his way
to the front, Burnie Hockaday noticed a virtue arising among the people, a
virtue that enabled the mission he and they were striving to achieve. Riding a train through the English
countryside, Burnie Hockaday was surprised by the first fighters he saw in
action – the women of England who literally were making the war possible. He wrote to his mother about the example they
set: “One of the things that impressed
me most was the women in the big factories and plants. … [In] every factory,
whether it [is] an iron foundry or a chemical plant or what[ever] we passed, …
[i]t is the English women who are winning the war today, in my opinion. The sacrifices which they are undergoing
ha[ve] won from all of us [soldiers] the highest admiration.”3
But even more than the women’s work ethic,
Burnie noticed the last thing he
expected to see in a society strictly divided by class. Here’s how he described it to his
mother: “[T]he servants are working side
by side with the mistresses, all in [overalls] and cheerfully doing any
unpleasant work assigned to them, all the way from making shells, [to] running
a steam engine … to delicate tasks in a chemical factory.”3 Now, anyone who’s watched Downton Abbey knows social class was an
unbridgeable gap in Edwardian England, and the Conservative and Labor parties
are still fighting that battle in English politics today. But the fire of war can fashion noble
virtues. Among those British women, that
virtue was unity – setting aside longstanding and intractable division, setting
aside a deep and sinful presumption of difference, all for the common good.
And what, you may be asking, does any this
have to do with our discipleship, as we follow Jesus with stumbling steps through
this long, green season as he teaches and heals and brings the commonwealth of
God to life? Here’s the connection I
see: In our best moments – certainly as
Christians but also as Americans – in our best moments, we transcend our
temptation to make life all about “us” and “them.” In our best moments, we seek to reach across
human boundaries and bless those we find on the other side.
Think about the reading we heard from 1
Kings, part of the great history of the people of Israel as they moved from
scattered tribes, to a unified nation, to grievous division, and finally to
destruction and exile. Today we pick up
that long history at its Camelot moment, at least from the historian’s
perspective, with the great Temple of Solomon just completed. Solomon is Israel’s most powerful king; he
has taken what his father, King David, left him and built Israel into a
regional power. As his crowning
achievement, Solomon builds a great Temple to the Lord – a magnificent
structure to reflect the glory of the one true King, Yahweh, whose palace the
Temple would be. And in this moment of
national triumph, with the people gathered around this symbol of the
exceptionalism Israel claimed – in this moment, as Solomon prays to dedicate this
symbol of divine nationhood, Solomon also prays for the outsiders. He asks
God, “When a foreigner comes and prays toward this house, then hear in heaven …
and do according to all that the foreigner calls to you, so that all the
peoples of the earth may know your name…” (1 Kings 8:42-43).
Even in Israel’s greatest national moment,
Solomon knows his nation’s existence is not about itself. Israel is there as a missionary
presence. As the prophet Isaiah says,
speaking for God, “I have given [Israel] as … a light to the nations, to open
eyes that are blind, to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon, from the
prison those who sit in darkness” (42:6-7). “You shall call nations that you do not know,
and nations that do not know you shall run to you because of the Lord your
God…” (Isaiah 55:5). And about that glorious
structure Solomon built, Isaiah makes its intention clear: The Lord will bring outsiders to join
themselves to the Lord’s family. “[T]hese
I will bring to my holy mountain,” God proclaims, “and make them joyful in my
house of prayer … for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all
peoples” (Isaiah 56:6-7).
Then, in the Gospel reading, God keeps
pushing back the boundaries that our world and our hearts erect. Jesus gets a plea for healing from probably
the last person he would have expected – a Roman centurion. Roman army officers were more likely to kill
Jewish leaders for sport than to seek a blessing in respect. But this company commander is what they
called a “God fearer” – not a Jew, because Roman army officers were forbidden
from professing allegiance to anyone but the emperor, but someone who honored
the God of Israel nonetheless. This
centurion stands for the nations that Solomon and Isaiah described, those who
would come to Israel’s God to share in the blessings of healing
providence. And Jesus takes the
opportunity to teach the Jewish elders around him that God welcomes this
outsider with open arms. “I tell you,”
Jesus says, “not even in Israel have I found such faith” as his (Luke 7:9).
At our national best, we know we’re called
to serve the outsider, too. We’re called
to light “the torch of freedom for nations [yet] unborn,” as the collect for
Independence Day puts it (BCP 242). But
before we can reach across our boundaries to bless those on the other side, we
must first join together ourselves, like the English women of all classes whom
Burnie Hockaday saw laboring in the iron works.
In our best national moments, we have found ways to join hands so that
we might reach out in blessing to those beyond us.
But more often now, we hear the discourse
of division and the rhetoric of retrenchment.
We vilify those who disagree with us, and we fan the flames of fear of
the outsider – especially those who look “different” somehow. Yes, the world can be a dangerous and ugly
place; but God’s call to people of faith is to proclaim a contrast reality, not
to buy into a narrative of negativity.
As Lincoln noted, “the Almighty has his own purposes”;4 and
nothing frustrates those holy purposes quite like dividing ourselves from one
another and walling ourselves off from those we’re called to bless.
This weekend, as we honor those who have
given their lives hoping to bring blessing to people they didn’t know, and as
we worship our God who always looks to push back the boundaries of the circle
of blessing, we might do well to ask ourselves, “How are we measuring up?” Are we answering the call to become “out of
many, one”? Are we adding chairs to the
welcome table? Are we following Jesus’
lead and looking for the next person to bring into the family?
As a people, our greatest generations were
those that came together, and gave themselves away, to bless those they didn’t
even know. Are we among those
greatest? We can be, if we spread out our hands to heaven and pray for our
hearts to be changed.
1.
Military
Quotes. “William Tecumseh Sherman
Quotes.” Available at: http://www.military-quotes.com/william-sherman.htm.
Accessed May 28, 2016.
2.
Lincoln,
Abraham. “First Inaugural Address.”
Available at: http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/lincoln1.asp.
Accessed May 28, 2016.
3.
Hockaday,
Burnham, to Clara Hockaday. Personal
correspondence, June 23, 1918. Archives
of the National World War I Museum, Kansas City, MO. For more information on Burnie Hockaday, see https://kcsymphony.wordpress.com/tag/kansas-city-symphony. For information about the Kansas City
Symphony commission involving his letter, see http://www.kansascity.com/entertainment/music-news-reviews/classical-music-dance/article77235677.html
and http://www.kcjc.com/index.php/current-news/latest-news/3745-jewish-mystical-thought-inspires-leshnoff-s-symphony-no-3.
4.
Lincoln,
Abraham. “Second Inaugural Address.” Available at:
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/lincoln2.asp.
Accessed May 28, 2016.
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