Reading Luke/Acts Together #53 – Memorial Day & Luke/Acts

Memorial Day, like so many national holidays, suffers from all kinds of confusion. People say “We honor our soldiers abroad” or “our veterans.” No. Memorial Day was established to remember soldiers who died in war. We trivialize our national holidays by picnicking or drinking beer and chatting about those who died to protect our freedom. Our freedom to… picnic? The lowest church attendance days of the year are the Sundays close to Memorial Day and July 4 – so we are free… not to go to church? These things (you can tell) get me in a grouchy mood.

You have to think of each death not in some swoon of patriotic emotion, but as a real death and loss to real people, one by one, who are grieved and broken forever. In the Iliad, with words that move me deeply, Homer narrates Andromache’s fear and then realization that her husband Hector has been slain in battle: “My heart is in my throat, my knees are like ice… Andromache ran outdoors like a madwoman, heart racing. She reached the tower, pushed through the crowd, and saw her husband as the horses dragged him disdainfully… Black night swept over her eyes. She reeled backward, gasping, and her veil and glittering headbands flew off. ‘Hector, you and I have come to grief. Now you are gone, leaving me in sorrow, a widow in the halls, with an infant, the son you and I bore but cannot bless.’”

And this… Novelist Wendell Berry imagined Jayber Crow reflecting on the death of his friend Forrest in World War II: “I imagine that soldiers who are killed in war just disappear from the places where they are killed. Their deaths will not be remembered where they happened. They will not be remembered in the halls of government. Where do dead soldiers die who are killed in battle? They die at home – in Port William and thousands of other little darkened places, in thousands upon thousands of houses like Miss Gladdie’s where The News comes, and everything on the tables and shelves is all of a sudden a relic and a reminder forever.”

Let us never, ever glorify death in war. Or in paying tribute to those who died, we try to think of them not as a vast host but one by one. One death in a war is a huge number.

As Christians, the lens through which we see all suffering, all freedom, and all of life and eternity is the brutal killing of our Lord on the field of battle that is our world at odds with God. Who died for our freedom? Jesus Christ – and a freedom that isn’t me doing as I wish, but freedom for a life of holiness and service to that same Lord.

And so we’re always a little at odds with the culture in which we find ourselves. Luke/Acts teaches us this. Kavin Rowe, in his brilliant book on Acts, World Upside Down, reminds us that Acts makes “the startling claim that Jesus simply is the Lord of all, and the mode of being that is Caesar’s represents a violent refusal of this lordship. It is Caesar who is the challenger, not Jesus. The self-exaltation necessary to sustain Caesar’s political project is inevitably idolatrous.”

Political ideology, parties and leaders become idols to us when we believe they can either deliver the goods or ruin us. They are mere pretenders, shabby fakes. Our loyalty is never to them; our dreams are never vested in them; our priorities and values are never even found in them. Christ really is the Lord of all. Nothing is uglier, and more antithetical to Christ, than the rampant religious nationalism in America that blasphemously pastes Christ on top of their ferocious, angry, self-indulgent political agenda. Idolatry, pure and simple.

We have good cause to be humbly patriotic. God made all people with a kind of natural fealty – a loyalty and love for home. Americans can be proud to be Americans, and we surely honor those who lost their lives in war (and those left behind). But we’re never cocky, as if we’re the greatest or only zone of goodness. The Swiss are proud to be Swiss. Haitians are proud to be Haitian. So we are rightly proud and in love, but we never attach God to only my nation and its priorities, as if others don’t matter or can just go to you know where in a handbasket. We pray for our leaders, not castigating or drooling over them – and we pray for the leaders of other nations. They are all under the purview, care and love of God.

Acts 16 (which we’ll come to soon) reports on Paul’s visit to Philippi. Years later he wrote to his beloved friends, the first Christians there, reminding them of the way we parse living in the culture, and making sense of nations and political allegiances: “Many, I tell you now even with tears, live as enemies of the cross of Christ. Their end is destruction, their god is their belly, they glory in shame, their minds set on earthly things. But our citizenship is in heaven” (Philippians 1:18-20). On this Memorial Day, may it be so for us.