Memorial Day Meditation: Finding the Sacred in a Secular Holiday

May 28, 2010 By Guest Contributor 5 Comments

As a child of the 60’s, I remember protesting the war rather than honoring the lives of soldiers. Memorial Day was a non-event for most of my generation.  But, over the years, I have come to appreciate the men and women who’ve made the ultimate sacrifice on behalf of our nation.  Once known as Decoration Day, because tombstones were decorated with flags and flowers, Memorial Day is a time of remembrance and gratitude for those who have died serving our country in the military, beginning with the Civil War and today in Iraq and Afghanistan and across the globe.  Many of these women and men did not choose to fight, and came to military service with grave reservations, but they nevertheless obeyed our leaders’ decisions and fought on our behalf.  Memorial Day is not a glorification of violence – and it is not a denial of the spiritual quest for the Peaceable Kingdom – but a time to remember and give thanks.

Regardless of our feelings about a particular war or military service in general, Memorial Day invites us to remember the sacrifices of others and the intricate interdependence of life.  Our freedoms and lifestyle are not accidental, but the result of the sacrifices of others.  None of us is self-made.  We all need one another to achieve the most important things in life, whether in relationships, personal well-being, spiritual growth, and business success.

Memorial Day is, of course, a secular holiday, honoring our nation and its fallen warriors, and while many of us object to the naïve identification of God with country, many of our congregants will come to church this Sunday, remembering loved ones who died in foreign wars or are currently serving overseas in the military.  For them, there is no separation of faith and national well-being, nor – despite our theological misgivings – should it be for us.  Even if we object to having an American flag in the sanctuary, those of us who affirm the doctrine of divine omnipresence must recognize that God was present in the lives of those who died serving their nation then and now.  Following the biblical narratives of the nations of Israel and Judah, we must also remember that God is moving through the lives of nations and their leaders, not in some deterministic or chauvinistic manifest destiny but, in the spirit of the prophets, to seek the foundations of Shalom – justice, equality, care for the vulnerable, security, and safety.  Securing Shalom, the reign of peace, requires social order and national integrity in the context of  affirming the quest for international order and justice.

Most preachers will avoid addressing Memorial Day in their sermons, although in many congregations, good pastoral care requires recognition of Memorial Day in congregational announcements or pastoral prayers.  At first glance, Memorial Day has nothing to do with Trinity Sunday.  Memorial Day is concrete, flesh and blood, remembrance of fallen heroes, while Trinity Sunday deals with one of Christianity’s most challenging doctrines, something that, at first glance, has little to do with the ethical decision-making, personal values and stewardship, and faithfulness in daily life.  Indeed, many mainline Protestants are “practical Unitarians,” whose theological focus is more likely to be God the Creator or the historical Jesus, rather than the mysterious and freely-moving Holy Spirit.

However, if the preacher chooses to address the issue of sacrifice – military, martyrdom, or peace-keeping – the words of Romans 5:1-5 provide a starting point for conversation.   In the context of his own sacrifices, and the first Christians sacrifices, the apostle Paul notes the connection between grace and character, and divine affirmation and human spiritual growth.  Having awakened to God’s grace and glory in our lives and the world, we can “boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given us.”

In Romans 5, Paul is not glorifying suffering, but asserting that in a grace-filled world, we have all the resources we need to grow through the challenges of life.  We are not victims, but actors and artists in the transformation of our lives and the world.  In the journey of faith, character is everything and character is grounded in moment by moment choices to look beyond our self-interest to embrace the well-being of others.  On Memorial Day, we remember those who sacrificed their lives for a cause greater than themselves, but we also commit ourselves to sacrificial lives – to letting go of the ego for the greater good of our families, churches, community, nation, and the world.

In this time of growing self-interest in the political world, where the greatest good many people seek involves such lofty goals such as paying fewer taxes, making more money, and doing exactly what I want with my money and my property, Memorial Day challenges us to balance self-interest with the larger community and planetary interests.  These soldiers did not die just for us to pay fewer taxes or make more money or live individualistically, they died for a dream – a dream still partly unrealized in the USA – the dream of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all people in our community; the dream of liberty and justice for all; and to secure a place of refuge for the hungry, persecuted, and oppressed.  Living by these values is how we honor those who have sacrificed on our behalf.

Bruce Epperly is a professor and administrator at Lancaster Theological Seminary and co-pastor of an open and affirming emerging congregation in Lancaster, PA, Disciples United Community Church.  He is the author of seventeen books, including Holy Adventure: 41 Days of Audacious Living,  a progressive theological and spiritual response to Rick Warren’s Purpose Driven Life. A Reiki master/teacher for over twenty years, he is the author of Reiki Healing Touch and the Way of Jesus (with Kate Epperly).  He can be reached for engagements at bepperly@lancasterseminary.edu.

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Creation is Dying – What Can We Do?

May 27, 2010 By Christine Sine 2 Comments

This week I have read several articles about the impact of the oil spill that is now hitting the Louisiana coast.  Looking at some of these photos this morning  filled me with despair and left me feeling helpless.  But the impact of this catastrophe goes far beyond what is happening on the Gulf coast and the solutions we need should go far beyond the endeavours to still the flow and clean up the coastline.  For many of us this problem though horrible seems far away and disconnected from our lives.

Sojourner’s fundraising email this morning and the post Jim Wallis recently added to sojonet about the oil spill challenged me to think beyond the immediate disaster to the deeper question – the need for all of us to reconsider our lifestyles.

With every headline, I am challenged again – as I’m sure you are as well – to reconsider my own lifestyle. Where do I draw the line on my energy consumption? How can I educate others about the effects of energy greed? How do I advocate for strong climate change legislation?

The questions they ask are important for all of us to grapple with.  Our daily decisions about driving, flying and eating all contribute to the huge consumption of oil that is the accepted norm in our world today.  I grapple with this everyday as so much of our ministry is dependent on flying across the country and around the world and I am not sure that carbon offsets really make that much difference.

So what can we do?  Here are some great suggestions from this Grist article 10 Ways to Kick the Offshore Oil Habit for things that all of us can do to make a difference.  We don’t need to be politicians to see the world change in fact I am sure that change is more likely to come through the small and seemingly insignificant mustard seeds planted by ordinary people everywhere.

Creation does indeed groan waiting to be set free from the curse of death and decay (Romans 8:20 – 22).  And part of that groaning I think is that creation waits too for humankind to recognize its responsibility to be good stewards of the world that is entrusted into our care.

So what can we do – apart from the usual efforts of using public transport, eating local food & getting rid of gas guzzling cars what creative solutions have you found that cut your oil consumption?

Christine Sine blogs at Godspace.

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Have Christians Sinned Against the Gospel?

May 26, 2010 By George Elerick 2 Comments

The ancient Greek word for sin, hamartia, is an archery term that refers to missing the mark. It evokes an image of someone who tries to hit the bull’s eye, who has the intention of hitting it dead on, but who fails. As pure as our intentions may have been, what if our past interpretations of Jesus’ message have created a Gospel that was never meant to be?

Wouldn’t that mean that we have sinned against the gospel?

It is important to remember that Jesus spoke Aramaic better than he spoke Greek and Latin, and that most of the people with whom he interacted likely spoke Aramaic as well. It was the common language spoken by most of the locals. Given this fact, wouldn’t it make more sense if we bypassed the intermediate translations and tried to find out what his message was in his own idiom? Thinking that we can only find truth in Jesus’ words in our own language makes no more sense than accepting at face value a Spanish text translated into English via Russian. That’s what a new movement of Aramaic linguistic study is all about: Discovering the words of Jesus in his spoken tongue. The ancient Greek word for gospel was euangelion, which meant, literally, “good news.”

It was a term employed by messengers to announce to a ruler that his armies had won a battle.

For delivering euangelion, the messenger would receive a reward from the people, which was also referred to as euangelion; thus, euangelion referred to politically charged good news and the subsequent reward for that news. Applying the word euangelion to Jesus’ message, then, implies that it was laced with political treason. This is definitely a possibility, but what if euangelion is not what he called it? In Aramaic, the word for gospel was sevartha, which means, simply, “hope.” It was not a politically charged word; it had no connection to a government in place.

It just meant hope.

Some circles within Christianity define the Gospel as a verbal message that should end with the listener’s conversion. This is not what the words for gospel meant in either ancient Greek or Aramaic. Maybe if we look at the original words in context, we might get a better picture of what Jesus meant. Matthew 4:23 reads, “Jesus was going throughout all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every kind of disease and every kind of sickness among the people.” In this context the Gospel of Jesus is about healing people. In a society where diseases got people kicked out of town and isolated from human interaction, the act of healing such outcasts, of dealing directly with them, had political, social, economic, and spiritual ramifications.

The gospel then becomes about inclusion.

Could the Gospel of Jesus be hope in the form of healing?

Healing governments.
Healing homelessness.
Healing indifference, intolerance, and injustice.

If the Gospel of Jesus is about hope, then to prescribe a formula to it (i.e., you must say this prayer to be saved) is to introduce caveats that Jesus never intended. If we accept that the gospel is some determined mechanistic formula that excludes rather than includes, than we deny the very Gospel that Jesus came to bring. Out of either fear or an inadequate spatial awareness, we have for centuries perpetuated a gospel of exclusion. Christianity needs to be healed from the oppression it might have helped create by treating the Gospel as a tool for exclusion. In seeking to find ways to create exclusion rather than inclusion and thus subverting the grace of God, we have sinned against the gospel. Even if we had good intentions behind our need to define who’s in and who’s out, we ultimately chose a different gospel from the one Jesus sought to impart. What about the Kingdom of God? In context, Jesus seems to talk about the Kingdom of God in terms of whom it interacts with. He treats the Kingdom of God as dynamic and alive.

It empowers. It inspires. It doesn’t constrain or confine.

If anything, it opens up possibilities.

In ancient Greek the word can mean “realm.” We might think of the word “realm” literally, as a geographical space, but it may have meant something more like “reality.” If the Kingdom of God is a reality, then everyone everywhere can participate in living it out together. There are no denominations, no religions, and no labels. It’s people working together to live out heaven here. Now. The Aramaic word that is rendered as “Kingdom of God” is melak, which meant “counsel” or “advice” and typically had a divine connotation. (It was related to the Aramaic word for angelic messenger.) In this light, the Kingdom of God is better understood as the Divine Counsel of God. When Jesus begins parables saying, “The Kingdom of God is like…,” he is essentially saying that God wants to interact with his Creation, not be separated from it.

This is why believing that we are separated from God cheapens the desire that God has to be with all of his creation and unintentionally alters Jesus’ message.

A child who is learning to walk might bump into the same object over and over while he is learning to adjust to his surroundings. What he doesn’t understand is that he is only bumping into a corner of that object, all the while missing the rest of that object. I think that’s what has happened over hundreds of years. We’ve somehow touched only a corner of the gospel, and in recent years we are discovering the rest of it. I think it’s safe to say that the gospel is bigger than you or I or even one religion. I want to make it clear, though, that I am not an enemy of Christianity, and that I do not want to dissolve it. I am simply looking for a new kind of Christianity that exists beyond our presumptions. The Gospel as we know it is one of the presumptions I am dealing with. Looking at the gospel in its original Aramaic reminds us that it isn’t ours to claim, that everyone can join in it, and that it should compel us to bring hope in its many forms. It opens us up to the realization that preaching the gospel means looking for arenas where we can heal others. It doesn’t mean that we should colonize it; it simply means that we should participate in the creative, subversive application of extreme hope to all of the contexts in which we found ourselves. It means that we should believe in hope over religion.

It means that love has the last word.

Perhaps we shouldn’t call it “gospel” but “hope.” Hope against all hope. The sort of hope that transforms governments. The sort of hope that ardently views humanity as healed rather than broken. The sort of hope that lives and embraces the reality of hope having the last word. When we start living in that kind of reality, we are already perpetuating the Gospel.

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