Veterans Sunday 10
Jn 15:9-13
Why do we do this today, celebrate Veterans’ Sunday in church? Why do we set apart time in worship to recognize those men and women who have served their country in time of war?
It is certainly not to glorify war.
In my experience, I have found the most energetic proponents for peace have always been those who have been in war. They know it as a personal experience and will not arbitrarily commit others, young men as they were, to share in their experience without great justification.
General William Sherman, Union general of the Civil War, said “It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is hell.”
Prussian statesman Otto von Bismarck, the man who unified Germany in the 1800s, said: “Anyone who has ever looked into the glazed eyes of a soldier dying on the battlefield will think hard before starting a war.”
Our own noted World War II general, Omar Bradley stated: “Wars can be prevented just as surely as they can be provoked, and we who fail to prevent them, must share the guilt for the dead.”
Dwight David Eisenhower, American general who commanded all Allied Forces in Europe during WWII, and was later president of the United States stated:
“Every gun that’s made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is spending the genius of its scientists, the sweat of its laborers.”
And one of the most famous veterans – at least to me – a waist gunner in a B24 (98th bomb group, 15th air force) who was shot down twice and wounded by flak, said to me, a high school student when I once shared my thoughts of joining the Army during the Vietnam war: “like heck you will!”
Well, he didn’t say heck, and there was something following about making me 4 F by removing a toe in the midst of a very high energy diatribe against war and President Johnson, me getting a college degree and he referred to God a few times as I remember.
Dad would have nothing of me going to war. Ironically, it was he who dropped me off at a military college some years later to see what they could do with me.
No, in my experience veterans are not normally the first ones to favor war as a means of solving problems. Their shared experience serves as a check to our national conscience, to consider the cost of war because they have all personally contributed to that cost.
We remember veterans because they remind us of things that are somewhat beyond us, above us; the higher things, the value of life, the cost of defending our country and the freedoms we enjoy.
In some ways veterans remind us of the values and attitudes that are the more noble things of human nature; “the better angels of human nature” as Abraham Lincoln said.
As the beauty of nature, and art, and music are marks
of God’s finger prints on his creation, and are mere reflections of heavenly beauty and God’s majesty, so it is that human actions or behaviors may reflect however dimly, that which we call the image of God -attributes or actions that we note as exceptional, heroic, regardless of the flawed nature of the agent.
We note the personal commitment one makes to give oneself sacrificially to something greater than oneself, be it country, freedom or to protect the men one serves with. The willingness to submit, to be obedient to orders that may put your life in danger, the ability to willfully commit yourself to accomplish things to overcome obstacles be they our own human frailties: fear, weakness, exhaustion, physical injuries or the vicissitudes of war, they seem in hindsight almost superhuman.
When they tell their stories, we are awed by what they did, what they experienced but they are very reluctant, most of the time, to tell those stories.
My dad hardly ever spoke of it until later in life after a few beers, and he always ended up crying. Gail’s uncle, a paratrooper who made all four combat jumps in Europe (Sicily, Italy, Normandy & Holland) with the 505th parachute infantry regiment, 82nd airborne division, never talked about his experience.
We want to call them heroes but they defer from that term, respectfully transferring that status to their comrades who didn’t come home.
Most of them are very humble about their achievements. Two summers ago Gail and I were in Normandy, at the cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mer overlooking the center of Omaha beach. We met two veterans. I asked one of them if he had come ashore here, he said yep, sure did, and pointing over his shoulder down at the beach said, right down there.
I asked him if he had any idea of the magnitude of what they accomplished that day. He kind of chuckled and said, “Heck no” – and I have cleaned up the conversation for pulpit use – “we were just young kids we were just following orders and trying to keep our behinds from getting shot. Just do what we came here to do and go home.” After a moment of silence he got pensive and said, “No, I really haven’t considered just what we accomplished here until rather recently. I guess it really was something, wasn’t it?”
We recognize veterans today because they remind us of the higher things, loftier things. We recognize that even in the most imperfect of human agents we have seen modeled attributes, qualities that can only have their origin in the heavenly realm.
Selflessness, self dedication, loyalty, commitment, self- sacrifice are those elements that mark the zenith of human conduct and to which all should all aspire.
These are the virtues that become descriptive, if not prescriptive of those who worship the one true God.
Recognized in the Old Testament lesson this morning, the three mighty men, David’s warriors, risk their lives to bring their king a skin of water. And their king, David, pouring out that water as an offering to the Lord, recognizing he was unworthy of such loyalty and self sacrifice.
These are the types of virtues and values that are most perfectly exhibited in Jesus himself to perfection. As God made man, he made those noble attributes that we but glimpse at times in various lives, visible to all in his one life.
Noble, heroic, humble; he was and is the archetype of heroism for humanity. He is the model for all Christians and the aspiration of all humanity.
It is Jesus who battled the devil, ultimately sacrificing himself on the Cross that we might be saved; scripture tells us while we were yet sinners Christ died for us. It is Jesus who shows complete obedience and loyalty to his commission and mission, overcoming his fears and trepidations while sweating blood and praying to his father that this cup pass from him but that not my will but thine be done.
As Christians, Jesus is our role model. His qualities are those that should be most evident in the church. That is why in the church calendar we recognize Saints, and we celebrate All Saints’ Day – we recognize those same virtues and attitudes as evident in the tradition of the Church, and are encouraged to emulate those lives.
The saints are our veterans of our spiritual battles, ones who have put on the armor of God, ones who have fought the good fight, ones whose lives given bore witness to whom they served.
We recognize today these men and women
because at their best in difficult times, in their service, in their sacrifices, in their selfless commitments and loyalties, they give a momentary and fleeting glimpse of what humanity could and should be.
They point beyond themselves to the perfection of that humanity in Jesus Christ, through whom and in whom we are all invited to attain, and live more consistently in those remarkable virtues, as we follow him as our Lord and Savior and Master, as his disciples, as his servants, as soldiers in his kingdom. Amen.