Memorial Day

Yesterday I chose to do “Peace with Justice Sunday” on the Sunday before Memorial Day. It is somewhat awkward to remember those who died in war and pray that there would be no more war, no more fighting. I pray that I spoke the truth as I talked about Isaiah’s peaceable kingdom and Micah’s call to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God.

The sermon was called “Knowing Peace” and I used the Romans 3:9-20 passage:

What shall we conclude then? Are we any better? Not at all! We have already made the charge that Jews and Gentiles alike are all under sin. As it is written:
“There is no one righteous, not even one;
there is no one who understands,
no one who seeks God.
All have turned away,
they have together become worthless;
there is no one who does good,
not even one.”
“Their throats are open graves;
their tongues practice deceit.”
“The poison of vipers is on their lips.”
“Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness.”
“Their feet are swift to shed blood;
ruin and misery mark their ways,
and the way of peace they do not know.”
“There is no fear of God before their eyes.”

Now we know that whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be silenced and the whole world held accountable to God. Therefore no one will be declared righteous in his sight by observing the law; rather, through the law we become conscious of sin.

I hope I did justice to the men and women who have served in the military as I talked about how we have “known war.” I then tied peace with justice and used the familiar phrase, if we want peace we need to work for justice.

The following is a little excerpt:

H.L. Mencken, American journalist, said, “If you want peace, work for justice.” If you want to know peace, then you have to seek justice. If you want to know peace, then you need to see where people are oppressed and work to alleviate that oppression. If you want to know peace, then you need to see who it is that is shut out of life’s resources and work to resolve that inequity. If you want to know peace, then you need to take a good hard look at yourself — and your country — and ask if you are living justly, fairly, or are you living at the expense of others. This is not a like clapping our hands together and making all of the world’s problems go away, but it is what we can do, here, now, in our lives.
Today we remember those who have died in our wars. It is Memorial Day Weekend for those of us in the US – excepting those in Indiana for whom it is also known as Indy 500 Weekend which is followed by Memorial Day on Monday. But as we remember those who have served and those who have died on OUR side, we remember, too, those who have died on THE OTHER side as well – people caught in the crossfire, people who followed orders or defended their homeland, people whose lives were taken away or messed up irreparably because of battles in which we played a part. We do not ask “where have all the flowers gone” but we do ask what is it that we can do now to know peace, and to help usher in the peace that our Scriptures, including Jesus, talks of.

And so, we remember, we honor, we pray on this Memorial Day. We remember our wars and sacrifices. We honor the memory of those who have died. We pray that there would be no more war.

Peace with Justice — Quote from NT Wright

The following is a quote over at The Ivy Bush, a blog written by Jonathan Marlowe. His post is just entitled, “A Quote”. I found this helpful as I think, pray, and search for a Peace With Justice sermon for this Memorial Day Weekend.

“We start with Jesus, as we saw him earlier, at the head of a movement through which, he believed, the long-awaited kingdom was dawning. He regarded his own work not simply as pointing forward to this kingdom, but also as actually inaugurating it: his actions make sense only if he believed that through them the kingdom was in some sense present, not simply future. Yet, these two cannot be played off against each other. The strange presence of the kingdom during Jesus’ lifetime points forward to a crisis event through which it will come in a fuller reality. Bar-Kochba, like other would be messiahs, aimed to defeat the Romans and rebuild the temple. Jesus was bound by a similar vocation.

But what weapons could he use to fight such a battle? As we saw, he denounced the use of military action, and he advocated the deeper revolution of loving one’s enemies, taking up one’s cross, losing one’s life in order to gain it. This, it gradually appears, was not simply a way of life he urged on his followers, an “ethic” to be implemented at any time and place where people felt bold enough to do so. It was, more sharply, an agenda and vocation to which he knew himself called, and one that he announced as the way of being God’s true Israel. It was his own fresh construal of the law and prophets, the controversial way by which, he proposed, Israel’s God would make Israel at last what it had always been called to be, the light of the nations. Like other Jewish would-be leaders and messiahs before and since, Jesus believed himself called to go ahead of the people and fight the battle on their behalf. Like David taking on Goliath, he would face the enemy of God’s people alone, choosing the strange weapons that matched his own vision.”

– John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Je

oops. wait a minute. I mean…

– N. T. Wright, The Meaning of Jesus, p. 96.

Church with a Port-A-Potty

This is all ours. We’ve not had running water church since…well…since it formed in 1951. Hopefully next year we’ll have running water in our new facility.