May 29, 2016, Memorial Day Sunday
10:30 a.m.
MORE THAN
REMEMBERING
PLYMOUTH CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH
1900 Nicollet Ave.
Minneapolis, MN 55403
www.plymouth.org
the Rev. Dr. Carla J. Bailey
Senior Minister
Text: Luke 10:41–44
In Ashland, Wis., where I spent my early childhood years, Memorial Day was a big thing. This was in 1960,
’61, around that time. There was a parade, and a ceremony at the bandstand in Memorial Park on a bluff
overlooking Lake Superior. The girls who sold the most crepe paper poppies were crowned the Poppy
Queen and her princesses. The high school band played, of course. The mayor spoke, the priest prayed, and
while John McCrae’s famous poem was recited by the winner of the Wilmarth Elementary School poetry
contest, a wreath of poppies was flung out onto the waters of Chequamegon Bay.
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
I liked ceremonial occasions, and I was too young to question the particular practices or even to understand
that we were supposed to be remembering our fallen war heroes. It was before Vietnam, so I didn’t
understand why a Navy veteran like my father didn’t want anything to do with the events in Memorial Park,
why he didn’t put on his uniform to march in the parade, why he tried to go to the lake cabin rather than
stay in town where the fun stuff was going on.
Years later, when I was serving my first church as a pastor, I was asked to march in a parade to the
cemetery and to offer the prayer on Memorial Day. I was a little stuck—trying to decide what to wear,
especially on my feet for marching, and whether to have something of a festive parade demeanor or a
more somber countenance, befitting the solemnity of remembering the war dead. And what could an
ardent war protester like me say in a prayer that would not offend or embarrass my parishioners and still
remain true to my conviction that war is a failure of moral imagination?
You probably know that the origins of Memorial Day are uncertain. Decoration Day was established in 1868
by Major General John A. Logan, the commander in chief of the Grand Army of the Republic, the primary
organization representing Union veterans of the Civil War. Logan called for May 30th to be the day to
decorate war graves. But according to historian David W. Blight, the first recorded act of honoring Union
Civil War dead actually occurred in Charleston, S.C., on May 1, 1865, when former slaves, all of African
descent, unearthed 257 dead Union soldiers buried in a mass grave in a Confederate prison camp. The
freed slaves reburied the bodies individually in a landscaped cemetery.
Memorial Day has only recently come to be a less-conflicted observance for me. Others can make the
patriotic speeches, freely using words like honor and sacrifice. I will make this a day of grief for the
prematurely dead and ask forgiveness of God that we have not yet learned the ways that make for peace.
© 2016 Plymouth Congregational Church
In his powerful and disturbing book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (Random House, 2002), Chris
Hedges explores the force of our American war mentality. He was a war correspondent, a journalist
hopelessly addicted to the adrenalin of covering uprisings, skirmishes, the first Gulf war and the war in
Bosnia and Kosovo. Hedges contends that war works on our contemporary psyche in ways we rarely
question or explore. War provides an enemy, a cause, a national passion that excites and inspires.
Interspersed among his observations of war’s psychological sweep are stories of the sufferings of
individuals, civilians and soldiers, scenes of destruction, grief and shame. He wrote his book, he says, “not
to dissuade us from war but to understand it. We must guard against the myth of war and the drug of war
that can, together, render us as blind and callous as some of those we battle. . . . The only antidote to ward
off self-destruction and the indiscriminate use of force is humility and, ultimately, compassion.”
I studied for a time in London while in college. Of the courses I took, one was “Poetry of World War I.” The
Imperial War Museum in London had a magnificent exhibit at the time of WW I British poets—Rupert
Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen and others. How could I read such poetry and not come to
understand that for those who fight, for soldiers, war is not a radiant experience? That is a fiction we have
allowed to intoxicate us. War is a profoundly individual and usually damaging experience. Listen to these
words written by Rupert Brooke in the fourth of his War Sonnets, “The Dead”:
These hearts were woven of human joys and cares,
Washed marvellously with sorrow, swift to mirth.
The years had given them kindness. Dawn was theirs,
And sunset, and the colours of the earth.
These had seen movement, and heard music; known
Slumber and waking; loved; gone proudly friended;
Felt the quick stir of wonder; sat alone;
Touched flowers and furs and cheeks. All this is ended.
There are waters blown by changing winds to laughter
And lit by the rich skies, all day. And after,
Frost, with a gesture, stays the waves that dance
And wandering loveliness. He leaves a white
Unbroken glory, a gathered radiance,
A width, a shining peace, under the night.
Or this, “How to Die,” by Siegfried Sassoon:
Dark clouds are smouldering into red
While down the craters morning burns.
The dying soldier shifts his head
To watch the glory that returns;
He lifts his fingers toward the skies
Where holy brightness breaks in flame;
Radiance reflected in his eyes,
And on his lips a whispered name.
You’d think, to hear some people talk,
That lads go West with sobs and curses,
And sullen faces white as chalk,
Hankering for wreaths and tombs and hearses.
But they’ve been taught the way to do it
Like Christian soldiers; not with haste
© 2016 Plymouth Congregational Church
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And shuddering groans; but passing through it
With due regard for decent taste.
Or this, by Wilfred Owen, “Dulce et Decorum Est”:
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Poetry, like scripture itself, cuts to the heart of the human experience. These heartbreaking poems of
British First World War poets flow in the same stream of poems that stir us to battle still, that make us fairly
sing with patriotism and the rhythm of “Christian soldiers marching as to war.” My heart was bruised by
these poems of soldiers reminding us of war’s terrible, terrible cost. No more parades for me. No Poppy
Queens or high school bands. Only thinking and grieving, confessing and longing for the day when we will,
one day, recognize the things that make for peace.
John Hall Wheelock, an American poet born in 1886, wrote these words in his introduction to the book of
poems, Dear Men and Women, published in 1966. “The statements of science are hearsay, reports from a
world outside the world we know. What the poet tells us has long been known to us all, and forgotten. The
poet’s knowledge is of our world, the world we are both doomed and privileged to live in, and it is a
knowledge of ourselves, of the human condition, the human predicament.” I would like to close today by
reading his poem of remembrance, “Dear Men and Women,” responsively:
© 2016 Plymouth Congregational Church
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Leader:
In the quiet before the cockcrow when the cricket’s
Mandolin falters, when the light of the past
Falling from the high stars yet haunts the earth
And the east quickens,
I think of those I love.
Dear Men and Women no longer with me.
People:
And not in grief or regret merely but rather
With a love that is almost joy I think of them,
Of whom I am part, as they of me, and through whom
I am made more wholly one with the pain and the glory,
The heartbreak at the heart of things.
Leader:
The years go by. March flows into April,
The sycamore’s delicate tracery put on
Its tender green; April is August soon;
Autumn, and the raving of insect choirs,
The thud of apples in moonlight orchards;
Till winter brings the slant, windy light again
On shining cities, towering stone and glass;
And age deepens—oh, much is taken, but one
Dearer than all remains, and life is sweet
Still, to the now enlightened spirit.
People:
And there dwell, those ineffable presences,
Safe beyond time, rescued from death and change.
Though all be taken, they only shall not be taken—
Immortal, unaging, unaltered, faithful yet
To the lost dream world they inhabit.
Leader:
Truly, to me they now may come no more,
But I to them in reverie and remembrance
Still may return. In me they still live on;
In me they shall have their being, till we together
Darken in the great memory.
People:
Dear eyes of delight, dear youthful tresses, foreheads
Furrowed with age, dear hands of love and care,
Lying awake at dawn, I remember them.
With a love that is almost joy, I remember them;
Lost and all mine, all mine, forever.
Amen.
© 2016 Plymouth Congregational Church
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