Memory is a funny thing. We take it for granted so much, don’t we – we remember how to drive our cars, we remember how to follow the familiar routes in our houses, so much so that we could walk them blindfolded. We get so frustrated when we can’t remember the grocery list we scribbled down in the morning when we get to the store at 4 in the afternoon.
If you’ve worked in a people-intensive occupation, you know the panic and muck that builds up in your brain when you suddenly realize that you have to remember the name of 8 people you met and spent some time with a year before. You know they’re going to be disappointed if you can’t remember their names. So you wrack your brain trying to will their names to float through your grey matter. Doesn’t always work, though. Maybe doesn’t even often work.
Memory can make us relive every moment of stupid adolescent stunt with all the same emotions, as if we were actually there again. A familiar scent worn by a loved one can help us recollect favorite memories – or can curse us, when we can’t remember what they even looked like, past vague descriptions. In the middle to late 19th century mortuary photography – the final posing of the deceased (children, spouses, criminals) – became popular as a way of immortalizing that person at their final moments, as if they had just closed their eyes in sleep.
But memory can also haunt us, and hound us to the ends of the earth. We have lost generations of young men, who have come back from Wars so haunted by the images of what they have seen that their brains are incapable of processing anything else. I once worked with a man just a few years older than I was – he was a bouncer in a bar, worked his way up to management, and he loved the lifestyle. The pounding music, throngs of people, the casual violence that he wore like a glove.
I asked him once, why he liked it so much. He replied that he had been a soldier, part of the UN peacekeeping force to Rwanda, except as he wryly observed to me, that was more like trying to keep pieces of people together, rather than a political peace. Having been ordered, under the threat of full military law, to stand still while he watched the aftermath of women and children being executed, had so deeply scarred him that the only thing he cared to do at night was stay awake. In sleep, the nightmares came.
But you know, we have clinical terms for stuff like that now. In the American Civil War, it was called Soldier’s Spirit. In WWI, Shell Shock. WWII, the term ‘combat fatigue’ was coined to describe it. My grandfather, along with tens of thousands of other young infantrymen, probably had another term for it,
I think, the generation that’s going to come home from this war is going to face the exact same reaction that soldiers have experienced upon coming home since war became the hobby of governments. “Don’t say too much. Let the memory of this fade, because people don’t want to think about it, now that it’s over.” And they won’t. Because they’re soldiers. And soldiers follow orders.
As a people, our memory is very short. We don’t like to think of the ‘bad’ too often; we want to sweep it under the rug. That’s an old, old story that’s been repeated often, even as we read about our Savior.
The writer of the Letter of the Hebrews was, I sometimes think, the conscience of a people who wanted to twist the sacrifice of Jesus for their own gain. At times the writer argues like there’s some twisting of Christ’s words going on in his culture that he can’t stand. But some people stood to gain.
I can guess at what that gain was – priestly power, authority over others who ‘knew less’ than they did. The same reasons people sensationalize events now. So the writer to the Hebrews took the time to remind his readers – and listeners – what it was that was so important.
Christ died, once, for all, for the whole world. There is no one, not one single man, woman, child, that Christ did not die for. Christ bore the penalty for their sins – death, not just physical death, but the death of the soul – and then conquered it by His resurrection. He will come again, to save those who wait for Him.
Yet we forget that, too often. But the good news is that Jesus won’t forget, no matter what we do; we are not forgotten. No one is.
But as this is Remembrance Sunday our own history bears witness to the fact that too often, we do want Jesus to choose between His children. As Robert Runcie said, those who dare to interpret God’s will must never Him as an asset for one nation of group rather than another. War springs from the love and loyalty which should be offered to God being applied to some God substitute, one of the most dangerous being nationalism.
Nationalism is the belief that one’s own country is better than all others, and that domination is the prerogative of that nation.
Let me give that an illustration. There are all kinds of people around us. Rich people, poor people, skinny people, fat people, hungry people, full people. We all give our pennies to the treasury, out of love and obedience to God.
But some people begin to notice that if hold one penny back, then they have one penny they wouldn’t otherwise have kept. Besides, they’re still putting in lots of pennies, supporting the poor, the widows, the orphans. But pretty soon, they’re holding back 8 or 9 pennies out of every ten, only one goes to the treasury. It feels good – powerful – to have more pennies than anyone. And then they look around and notice – others have more pennies. Suddenly, their pile of pennies doesn’t look so big. But if they talk to their neighbor, who has also been keeping pennies out, they can form a group that’s more powerful than just that one other individual.
And pretty soon, they’re fighting each other for their pennies. But of course, by then, they’ve realized that the treasury holds far more pennies than they’ll ever have. So they figure out a way to get the pennies from the hands of those who’ll contribute all they have. Because by now, the treasury has become competition to them, and they don’t want that. They want everyone’s pennies. And people are willing to give all they have, all that they have to live, to the hoarders, instead of to the treasury.
And the stink of this is, it’s not the hoarders who pay the price. It’s not the people who make the hoarders the recipients of all their pennies; they’re fairly well rewarded. It’s the people who still honour the treasury – what is good, what is right, what is necessary – who pay the price, because to the hoarders, they are expendable.
Lest we forget. Lest we forget that the cost of war is borne by the soldiers, sailors, and air corps who have stood for – fallen for – and still stand for what is good and decent. It is borne by their mothers, their families, their friends. It is borne by us; we, who will grow old. Let us not forget that ‘blessed are the peacemakers’ who bear the cost of peace, and that is our responsibility to strive for it, pray for it, and to not despair in its seeming absence.
Let us not forget that to Christ, there is no one who is expendable, no one who is forgotten, no one who is unknown, no one who is left behind.
Let us remember that is the will of our Creator to hold all of creation in a single peace, and that on the last day at the sound of the last trumpet the dead in Christ will rise and the sea will give up her dead and at last, there will be peace. And no mothers will cry and no families will be torn apart, because all of creation will be joined together in praise of the Creator.
And that day, the guns will be silent, forever. Amen.
