New Market UMC
Memorial Day Sermon
I am grateful to Pastor Scott Clawson for inviting me to preach at New Market UMC in MD on May 29, 2022, the day before the Memorial Day holiday.
To all God’s beloved in New Market, who are called to be saints: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen
Thank you to Pastor Scott for inviting me to preach here at New Market UMC for this Memorial Day weekend, and to each of you for joining us this morning either online or in person. I take it that he has done so after reading my latest book, God is a Grunt, copies of which are available wherever you get electronic, hardcopy, or audiobooks.
Within the military community, Memorial Day is more known for what it is NOT than for what it is. It is NOT Veterans Day, when we celebrate those like me who have served. It is also NOT Armed Forces Day, when we celebrate those who are serving. Memorial Day is also about who is NOT with us anymore; it is when we celebrate those who have died while serving.
For most Americans, the phrase “military funeral” conjures up folded flags, next of kin, and 21-gun salutes; what soldiers and veterans call a “full military honors” funeral. Regular military funerals involve grilled meat, cold beer, and hearty conversation; they come off as more celebratory than mournful. Old battle buddies sit around remembering their friend rather than lamenting their loss. There is room for grief, and pouring one out for the homies is a staple practice, but grief doesn’t steal the show.
For most Americans, it would be awkward to roll up to a cemetery with a BBQ, cooler, and camping chair in tow. But soldiers and veterans are not most Americans, in fact we are a minority. Just under 7% of Americans have ever served in the military. Nonetheless, civilians celebrate Memorial Day the same way military families do, albeit for a very different reason. In fact, civilian Memorial Day doesn’t memorialize anything, it looks forward to the start of summer rather than back, upon ended lives.
What is Memorial Day if, for most Americans, service members are out of sight and out of mind? When we pontificate about military service, we’re not recalling human beings with complicated life stories, just manufacturing caricatures that divinize our own preconceived notions about violence, statecraft, and national identity. Dead soldiers are venerated as saints who made the ultimate sacrifice or vilified as sinners who committed the ultimate sin.
Like politics, theology has never been a spectator sport, there is no standing back from the fray. In this morning's reading from Revelation, we are told “I am coming soon; my reward is with me, to repay according to everyone’s work.” He doesn’t say everyone’s thoughts and prayers, but everyone’s work. Not the things we say we do, not the things we want to do, not even the things that people think we do. What soldiers actually do is important to understand for any military holiday, because many people falsely believe that all soldiers kill. Progressives expect all veterans to do penance because all military service is a sin while conservatives justify killing in war and venerate all soldiers as saints.
For Psaul and the early Church, calling someone a saint was to name them as one of “God’s beloved,” a fellow member of the body of Christ. Not every Tom, Dick, and Sally were saints, but every believer was. A saint was not just someone remembered from our past, they were part of the ecclesia militans, a living organism disclosing our future by bearing witness to the Lord of Lords, the emperor of emperors. Psaul begins each of his epistles by greeting his audience with the promise of “grace and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.” In his letter to Romans, from which I borrowed for my own salutation, he greets those “who are called to be hagioi” meaning saints or holy ones. (v.7) He is not suggesting that some Christians in Rome are not called to sainthood, he is pointing out that not all Romans call themselves Christian.
The earliest Christian memorials were cause for celebration rather than mourning. The saints would amass at the cemetery, wine in hand, and throw a party. Folks would share their favorite memories of their dead friend and these stories would eventually be collected into biographies, called vitae, or “lives” of the saints. These annual days of memorial would come to be known as feast days, because breaking bread and chugging wine was the main attraction. As the festivities wound down, the mood would become somber as the time came to say goodbye for another year. Before leaving, an alcoholic beverage would be poured out for the deceased, a practice preserved in military memorials to this day. It’s almost as if soldiering, its values, and customs have been a part of the church since the very beginning…
I like using the Revised Common Lectionary because it puts scripture in control and prevents preachers from cherry-picking texts to make a predetermined point with their sermon. To be fair, I did choose overtly militaristic hymns to accompany today’s readings because it just so happens that one of the passages for this morning features a soldier saint that few Christians seem to remember, or notice in the first place.
Acts 16 is set in Philippi, a city earlier identified as a “Roman colony.” (v.12) Luke, the author of Acts, is not being entirely forthright here. Philippi is a Roman military colony, where Octavian and Mark Antony retired combat veterans of the Liberators Civil War in 43 BCE. A few decades later, even more were settled there and the city was placed under the municipal code of Rome rather than the provincial leadership. It became a recruiting station and influential outpost of the empire filled with military families young and old. Lydia, the woman who dealt in purple and befriended Psaul, probably gained access to that highly insular textile economy through a veteran father or dead soldier husband. If you follow the lectionary, you heard about her last week. This week Luke’s attention turns to another military family, of Dez, the jailer of Philippi.
He is not named in the text, but Dez is short for dezmophylax, Greek for jailer or warden. In most towns, the dezmophylax might be a blue collar worker, just another resident duly authorized to oversee the local jail. But Philippi was not most towns. Not just any Tom, Dick, or Sally would be trusted with the political prisoners kept under the watchful eye of its imperial chain of command.
After depriving some local businessmen of their (enslaved) source of income, Dez is ordered “to keep [Psaul and Silas] securely,” so he “put them in the innermost cell and fastened their feet in the stocks.” (v.24) The missionaries are treated as the most dangerous of detainees, and only the most loyal legionary would be trusted with political prisoners like Psaul and Silas.
Dez’s imperial indoctrination is on full display in his reaction to the earthquake setting all of his prisoners free. Only the most brainwashed warrior would be so invested in military honor and duty that their first instinct upon failing their mission is to fall on their own sword. Psaul intervenes before the soldier can take his own life, telling him that his prisoners havent gone anywhere. Dez is so relieved that he slips up and calls them by a name the emperor reserves for himself, kyrioi, “Lords, what must I do to be saved?” (v.30) Psaul tells him pisteuō, “believe,” (v.31) So he does.
Dez takes Psaul and Silas to his own house and washes the wounds that had been inflicted on the two of them by his own battle buddies. Then, maybe with the same blood-stained water, he and his family are baptized, becoming the last of several Christian soldiers already depicted in the New Testament.
For instance, the first Christian soldiers are baptized by John at the Jordan River according to Luke 3:14 and 7:29. I call them rakes, a play off the Hebrew word rakak, meaning penitent. Then there is the Galilean noble of Matthew 8, Luke 7, and John 4. I call him Captain Marvel, because he commands 100 men as a centurion and makes Jesus marvel at his great faith. Then there is Loginus, a composite character combining the soldier who pierces Jesus side at Golgotha in John 19 with the synoptic centurion who declares him divine (Matthew 27, Mark 15) and/or innocent (Luke 23). In Acts there are more, including Cornelius of Acts 10 and the commander in chief of Cyprus and Psaul’s highest ranking convert, Sergius Paulus, of Acts 13. After Lydia, the military brat and/or spouse, Dez is the last in the narrative New Testament, but there is good evidence to suggest Philemon, the bishop of Collosae and recipient of Psaul’s final canonical epistle, is also a soldier. His slave, Onesimus, was probably acquired in typically battlefield fashion and the letter is one of just two appearances of systratiotes, translated “fellow-soldier.” Scholars have pointed out that this word only appears in wider Greek literature in letters sent between battle buddies on the frontlines, suggesting Psaul uses it to tug on the heartstrings of military families like Philemon’s (v.2) and military communities like the Philippians (2:25)
If I am making it sound like soldiering, its values, and customs have been a part of the church since the very beginning, it is because they have been. For most Christians, service in scripture is out of sight and out of mind because most Christians aren’t soldiers, and there are understandable (if overstated) doubts about the morality of military service. I know because I had them, even I had to overcome my own bias against soldiering and I. Was. A. Soldier.
A combat deployment in 2004 had forced my eyes open, put me in the position of having to choose between being an artileryman and a Christian. A year after coming home from war, I applied to be a noncombatant conscientious objector, to change jobs but stay in uniform. But an acrimonious commanding officer created a hostile environment in which long time friends were afraid to speak or be seen with me. Becoming a Christian soldier cost me everything I had known.
To hear some people tell the story of my life at that time, I was saved from the evil of further bloodshed and spared the life of sin that military service necessarily entails. I certainly felt that way at times, and influential Christians were eager to enhance their own credibility by sharing their platform with me when I did. As I matured spiritually and theologically, the complicated feelings I held about military service were increasingly unwelcome. When I objected to the most harmful stereotypes, other veterans voices were ready to rotate in and continue to prop up toxic theology. The loss was not as sharp, but it still hurt. I was left wondering why I was expected to leave six years of my life at the altar as though soldiers could not be saints, just because so many saints held some bias against soldiers.
The reading from Revelation closes with “The grace of the Lord Jesus be with all the saints,” an echo of Psaul’s favored epistlatory salutation. When I read it, especially in tandem with the story of an unknown soldier like Dez, I am reminded that even soldiers and veterans can be saints; even sinners like me, and saints like… a father (or mother), a close friend or relative, or maybe your own child. Their service doesn’t set them apart, either up on a pedestal or down in the dumps; they are holy because they are God’s beloved. They are human, not divine; imperfect, but good. May the grace of God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ be with ALL the saints, not just the ones we’re used to or the ones we would choose, but each and every believer. What good is memory if we pick and chose stories that reinforce our own prejudice? What is the church without its soldiers?
So for all of you grillmasters and beer enthusiasts out there celebrating a feast tomorrow; eat, drink, and be merry, but be not ignorant! Remember that sacred someone whose sacrifice made freedom free. Not soldiers, of course, they are not gods. But they are saints, and that’s good news for everyone.
