MOURNING MEMORIAL DAY

Today is Memorial Day in America. A day of remembrance for those who died in active military service. A day that comes with an incredible amount of widely varying emotions for me. As a child, I looked forward to this day every year. My family would come home from camping Monday morning, us kids would decorate our bikes in red, white, and blue, and we’d attend the local Memorial Day parade, followed by a BBQ to kick off the summer. As we got older, some of us would march with the high school band. The festivities were a patriotic coming together as a nation united, not only around memorializing those who made the ultimate sacrifice but also as an unspoken realization that more sacrifice would be needed. In the early years of my husband’s active duty service it was a proud holiday for us as we’d joined the ranks of those who were willing to give everything for freedom. But as our time in the service dragged on, our eyes were opened to the ugliness of war, to the ugliness of the military industrial complex, and to the sad reality of the religion of nationalism.

Several years ago I was invited to attend a celebration to honor Veterans and Active Duty in my local community. My husband was overseas at the time and we had recently lost two more men in the fighter pilot community. As an active duty military family we were coming to see the harsh reality of the absolute needlessness of lives lost. I sat through the ceremony as local children performed songs and dialogues and a walk through American war history, honoring each branch of the service. It was nothing new really. I’d sat through a decade of active military ceremonies and balls, of men with medals stacked on their dress blues giving motivational speeches, liturgies of the war machine. But as the ceremony came to a close, the kids, dressed in their parents’ old uniforms, reenacted a flag folding ceremony to give to a family member and in that moment I couldn’t take it anymore. I got up and walked out.

I sat in my car and I sobbed. I cried because I knew in my heart of hearts that it was all for naught, that the loss was so pointless, that the pain of widows and children and parents left behind, of lives destroyed, was not for freedom. It was not for God. It spoke nothing of Jesus. It was for empire. It was for nationalism. It was for power. The America I loved was just another Babylon. And the worst part is that it had been neatly wrapped in the language of God’s people, a wolf in sheep’s clothing. It was, at its core, the most insidious form of idolatry.

And as my husband was serving this insane machine thousands of miles away and I knew full well that I could receive a knock on my door at any time, I cried for all that was lost serving this machine. I’d felt the loss coming for years but in those moments, the thoughts of an honorable life and death that pulled me through those panicked moments of fear and what-ifs through the drudging days of deployments were gone. There was nothing honorable about the war machine. The realization that nationalism was a religion and war really was it’s liturgy had been forming for years as we lived out the realities of active service, but that moment solidified it for me.

I cried for the patriotic memories of my childhood, knowing they were rooted in idolatry. I cried for the wives I knew whose husbands were gone and whose children were left without a father. I cried for those men who were tortured by what they’d done in war, unable to escape PTSD. I cried for the 22 veterans who commit suicide every single day. I cried for the pointlessness of it all. And in that moment I knew that if my family was ever put in the position of draping a casket in the national flag, there would be no patriotic fanfare. I could not participate in perpetuating the liturgy of war, in perpetuating the religion of nationalism, in perpetuating the idolatry of the people of God.

Today, we are no longer an active duty family. I have very mixed emotions about our time in the service. The friendships formed through shared trials were some of the closest bonds and connections. We were family and I miss the close knit community. I am proud of all the we accomplished but I don’t miss the toll it took on me, on my husband, on my kids, on my friends. On a day like today, I take the time to mourn it all again.

And in the midst of mourning, I do have hope. I have hope that God really will redeem it all, that he really will restore it all. That He will take what was meant to destroy and bring resurrection and new life. I have hope that the way of Jesus, the sacrificial way of Jesus – not a sacrifice for empire, but a sacrifice at the hands of empire – the way of peace will prevail in the end. In looking at Jesus, the full revelation of God, I know that peace will never come through war, peace will never come through empire, peace will never come through power. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely were the wise words at the entrance of my high school. Peace comes through laying that power down and serving the least, the outcast, the marginalized, the foreigner, the refugee.

So today on Memorial Day, not only am I remembering those lives given on the altar of empire, I’m remembering those lives taken by the empire, and I’m remembering the very anti-cultural way of Jesus, and I’m hopeful that it truly will be redeemed one day and that Jesus’ prayer that the Father’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven, will be lived out by the people who claim his name. I’m hopeful that eyes will continue to be opened to the idolatry of God’s people in putting their hope in the power of empire instead of in the power of the cross and the way of the cross, the way of the power-under, power-giving up Jesus whom we profess to be God. I’m hopeful for the union of heaven and earth and the redemption of all creation by the creator who loves beyond comprehension. In the midst of mourning today, I hope.