Acts 1:15-17, 21-26

1 John 5:9-13

John 17:6-19

Easter 7

Memorial Sunday

NUCC and Calvary Lutheran

Prayerfully consider this….  You have heard those words.  Especially when the church is asking for money.  Prayerfully consider a generous gift to our building fund.  Prayerfully consider what God is challenging you to give today.

            I’ve also seen this phrase used in other ways:

·        Prayerfully consider what you buy and how to help others.

·        Prayerfully consider the Christian ministry.

·        Prayerfully consider who you will vote for.

·        Prayerfully consider our board rules.

·        Prayerfully consider the following…

Prayerfully….  Prayerfully consider.  That is what some  people in today’s Bible readings did:

After Jesus’ ascension about 120 early Christians gathered to make some important decisions.  They were short on leadership.  Judas had defected and they needed to replace him.  Who should they choose?  Matthias or Barsabbas?  They prayerfully considered who to choose.  They asked God’s guidance.  And then they cast lots.  In this way they believed God was still speaking to them.

            Shortly before he was betrayed, arrested and executed, Jesus prayed.  He prayed for his disciples,   He prayed that they would be made holy in the truth.  He prayed that they would be protected after he could no longer be with them.  Jesus loved his disciples so much that he was worrying about them and praying for them rather than for himself.

            Living a prayerful life.  Prayerfully seeking God’s wisdom and God’s protection.  Prayerfully seeking to discern God’s will for our lives and our world.  Prayerfully listening for a voice of truth.  Such a prayerful life has been described as an “intimate dance of trusting and acting.”

            On this Memorial Day weekend we remember those who have engaged in this “intimate dance of trusting and acting.”  We remember those who have prayerfully considered God’s purpose for their lives.  On this Memorial Day weekend we especially remember those who were willing to offer their lives in service of their country.  Beyond that we will be remembering loved ones who went before us in this life, those who served in the military and those who did not.  At Neillsville UCC we will be reading the names of church members and friends who died during the past year and we will honor their memory.  Tomorrow many of us will gather, perhaps at the Highground, perhaps on the O’Neill Creek Bridge, perhaps at a cemetery where a loved one is buried ---- and we will remember those who engaged in the “intimate dance of trusting and acting.”  Prayerfully we will lift to God the memory of those named and unnamed who prayerfully considered God’s call in their lives and now have been called by God in death.  This we do on Memorial Day.

            Do you know the origins of Memorial Day?  Originally it was called Decoration Day.  After the Civil War people went out to the cemeteries where soldiers were buried and “decorated” their graves.  Of course after the Civil War there were other wars, and this practice of decorating graves and honoring war dead was extended to other conflicts.  Then the practice was extended beyond that to remembering all dead, no matter if they wore a uniform or not.  For this reason my wife Karen will be going to her father’s grave this afternoon to plant some flowers and make sure his grave is neat and clean.  Many of you will be going to other cemeteries to make do some spring cleaning and make sure that your dear dead are properly honored.

            As I said, Memorial Day has its origins in the Civil War, the most horrible and deadly conflict our nation has ever experienced.  State against state.  Brother against brother.  Sister against sister.  Church against church. 

One historian has described the battles of this war as “Fountains of Blood”.  Places like Bull Run, Shiloh, and Antietam.  September 17, 1862 at Antietam still ranks as the deadliest in U.S. history --- with nearly 23,000 casualties, including approximately 8,000 fatalities.

            Just this week I came upon two books examining the religious dimension of the Civil War:

• Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the American Civil War by Harry Stout, Jonathan Edwards Professor of American Religious History at Yale University.
• The Civil War as a Theological Crisis by Mark A. Noll, formerly professor of church history at Wheaton College and soon to be professor of religious history at Notre Dame University.

They are sobering reading and do not show so-called organized religion in a pleasant light.  They tell us how Christians of the nineteenth century thought they were prayerfully considering God’s call and got it wrong.  Basically the churches became apologists for war, firmly maintaining that God was on their side, not that they were on God’s side.

Both combatants and Christian advocates grew to ignore two venerable principles of just war thinking:  proportionality and discrimination.

1. According to the first principle, the degree of destruction should be proportional to the threat at hand.

2. According to the second, combatants should target only enemy soldiers, not innocent civilians.

            As the war progressed both of these principles were laid aside and Christian preachers were the first to foment, sacralize and then memorialize the hostilities.  If war was hell, Christians, North and South, males and female, seemed to do everything they could to make it more hellish.  They urged the armies to slaughter each other without restraint or remorse.  They glorified the civilian and military leaders who orchestrated the engagements.  They sanctified the killing after the guns fell silent.  Above all, they insisted that their side’s cause was not only right but righteous. 

• Fallen soldiers became martyrs;
• battlefields, altars;
• flags, sacraments;
• Northerners, holy warriors;
• Southerners, God’s chosen people.

There were those who did not embrace this view, including the gaunt and melancholic man who occupied the White House.  He sensed that the Almighty might have his own purposes.  Lincoln was not a professed Christian, and perhaps that reticence prompted a corresponding reticence about the holiness of his region’s cause, especially in the war’s later years.  Even though Lincoln waged total war he seemed to have a much better sense of its dark side than did a lot of preachers, who possessed a piety that came too easily and a knowledge of God’s purposes that came too quickly.  I suspect that when Lincoln offered his prayers, he did so with fear and trembling.

            Prayerfully considering God’s will.  Prayerfully asking for God’s guidance.  Humbly acknowledging our human fallibility.  Realizing that this is God’s good earth, not ours.  Seeing one another as God’s creatures and people for whom we need to pray.  Knowing that even in the depths of war there are absolute principles of conduct.  I believe this is the message which General Hagee is telling his Marines today in Iraq.  Even when we are numbed by war and overtaken by fear we dare not lose our humanity or forget that all people are created by God.

            Tomorrow we will observe Memorial Day.  I hope you will do more than grill some bratwurst.  I pray that you will acknowledge your debt to those who have gone before you in death, especially those who, in the midst of this ambiguous, fallen world, served a higher purpose.  I also pray that you will prayerfully consider the life God has given you and use it for God’s glory, not yours or any other human being.  A great Lutheran named Johann Sebastian Bach took as his motto Soli Deo Gloria.  To God alone be the glory.  It would also be a good motto for non-Lutherans.