MUMC
Mamaroneck United Loving God and Neighbor...
Methodist Church
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MUMC |
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Mamaroneck United Loving God and Neighbor... |
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Methodist Church |
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Second Sunday after Pentecost Written on Holy Hands Isaiah 49: 8-16a; Matthew 6:24-34 The Reverend Richard E. Allen, Jr.
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Like generations high school survivors, I have a dim memory of reading Macbeth in high school. I even had a minor acting role in a college production a few years later. But until I saw it again last week, I had forgotten just how bloody it is, describing a country nearly destroyed by unbridled ambition and a couple’s lust for power. So I admit that it was something of a relief when Shakespeare brought the last act to a close and the stage lights went dark. In the last few minutes, order emerged from the chaos of the previous two and a half hours. As house lights came up, I was back on Broadway in the 21st century, squeezing my way between myriad busloads of the current generation of teens, beginning the journey back toward my more tranquil life.
But the play’s images and words persist, as insistent in their own way as the imagined blood staining Lady Macbeth’s guilty hands. I find myself haunted anew by them. There is, first, the opening scene, in which a wounded soldier recounts the “multiplying villainies of nature” he has recently seen on the battlefield, a true prologue of the gore to come. Then we watch, at least in our minds’ eyes, the bloody murder of the king, grateful that the deed takes place off stage and is evoked by blood on knives and clothes. Later, horror mounts as we watch subsequent assassinations, including that women and children. The crescendo of violence erupts as Macbeth and McDuff, hunting knifes in hand, fight to the death. Finally, Macbeth’s own bloody head is raised, center stage front, toward the audience, a grim warning to any traitors in attendance or any who would serve the gods of power, greed, or narcissism. For that brief but eternal afternoon, Shakespeare drops us into the very heart of the chaos and corruption that tempt all humanity. It is tragic, this world, we see before us: wounded and wounding. Macbeth laments, our life is truly “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
This tragedy is a world far removed from the church’s hope for humanity, but not that distant from our own lived experience. Especially on the occasion of Memorial Day, a time of remembering those of our nation’s citizens who died in the conduct of its several wars, we know that our history, too, is a violent one.
Memorial Day, or Decoration Day, as it was first called, has somewhat hazy beginnings. But though exactly who this celebration, and how it started are in dispute, we clearly know when we began this special remembrance. Memorial Day began after our nation’s most costly conflict, in terms of humans lives lost. The Civil War saw about 620,000 combatants killed, both outright in battles and as a result of wounds or disease. Civilians died too, in similar numbers. Those deep losses affected every community and almost every family, causing such pain as to beg remembrance, and remembering sprang almost naturally at several places in the country.
So remembering began. And memory grew to include not only the dead of the Civil War, both Union on Confederate, but also the 25,000 killed in the Revolution; and another 20,000 in the war of 1812; another 116,500 lost in World War I; 405,400 lives, mostly boys, really, in World War II; 36,500 in a Korean conflict never ended but only suspended; 58,000 in Vietnam; 300 in the first Gulf War; and now 4,081 and counting in Iraq, and 506 thus far in Afghanistan. We are called to remember them all. Though these few boggle comprehension, there were other conflicts, too, and smaller losses too numerous to name now.
But numbers alone don’t tell the story. These who died had names, and some of their names we find tucked into our communities, like on the stone pillar forming the base of the flagpole in Thomkins Park, the little triangle of green just east of us on the Post Road, defended by two rusting machine guns. Names on that memorial are common: Adams, Brown, Black, Smith. And some family names have a local familiarity: Coffin, Haviland, Lyon, Merrell, Sullivan, and Nichols. A few of the names have letters after the names: CPL, PFC, CAPT. One even notes, “REV. CHAPL.” Just boys, in most cases, their names recalled for us on the bronze plaque that circles the granite base of the flagpole. What did they lose, these named ones, because someone, somewhere decided to follow the gods of war rather than the Prince of Peace?
Though armed conflict – warfare – may at times be necessary, or at least inevitable, it is a desperate last resort when all other diplomacy fails. Or as General William Tecumseh Sherman bluntly said, “War is all hell.” Sherman should have known; he saw much of it. And he famously brought it to the South, glad to go to the heart of the rebellion and extract a bit of revenge. The echoes of hell linger on the soul of that part of our land.
Yet war is not sectional, but global. And our world is so prone to war, much as Lady Macbeth was prone to violence. Into such a world, what will we say to the children like those recently born into our community, and like Cameron here to be baptized this day? What say as we hold in our arms, or when they challenge us and our world when they become the teens studying Macbeth in just a few years? When they allow us to hold them no longer in our arms, but we still do so in our hearts, what shall we tell them of God’s hope for their lives? How shall we help them decipher our world’s penchant for bloodshed, its fascination with violence all around?
It might be worth remembering, and communicating, our own religious heritage. The lesson from Isaiah was given to a people who had seen war and had suffered defeat. They, or at least their parents, knew that their army had been defeated and, as final act of humiliation, their king, Zedekiah, had been forced to watch as his sons were killed in front of him, and then his eyes put out. Zedekiah and his advisors, the nation’s best and brightest, were taken in slavery to Babylon.
But soon the political winds shifted, as political winds always do. A Persian army under King Cyrus invades and defeats Babylon. Cyrus sets the captive Jews free to return home. Then Isaiah in today’s lesson, often called second Isaiah, says the Lord’s hand is at work. “Thus says the Lord: in a time of favor I have answered you, on a day of salvation I have helped you…” (Isaiah 49:8, New Revised Standard Version) It is a simple theological affirmation. When we are caught in a violent world, says Isaiah, God saves us. Translation: trust not in princes, nor in their queens, nor in their armies. Trust in the Lord, alone. I imagine that many of the dead we lovingly remember on Memorial Day would whisper the same advice if they could.
And Jesus says much the same, in more than a whisper: “No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.” (Matthew 6:24, NRSV) And, though Jesus doesn’t say so here, at least not in so many words, is worshiping power is a shabby substitute for loving God with all your heart, and all your soul, and all your mind, and all your strength. Macbeth and his ambitious queen learned as much, in the very difficult school of personal experience. Their worship of power resulted in their madness and then their deaths. Shakespeare tells their tale, in part, to spare us a similar expensive tuition.
It’s likely that the bard knew his bible well, and if you have acquaintance with Jesus and his Jewish tradition similar to Shakespeare’s, you might expect that our faith invites – even demands that we live differently. That expectation is accurate. We worship the God of Abraham and Sarah, of Isaac and Rebekah, of Jacob, Leah, and Rachel. This is the same God, of course, whom Jesus worshiped.
And Rabbi Jesus speaks of trust – not in wealth, not in power, and not in violence, what I earlier called “the gods of war” – but trust in God alone. Jesus counsels his first followers, and us, too: “Do not worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’…” Those are oddly contemporary questions, don’t you think? Had it been invented, he might have added “Do not worry over what the price of fuel will be, today?” Rather, Jesus says, ‘Strive first for the kingdom of God and [God’s] righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.” (Matthew 6:32-33, NRSV)
Isaiah says essentially the same thing. “The Lord has comforted his people, and will have compassion on his suffering ones.” (Isaiah 49:13, NRSV) When the children in our families and the children we baptize grow into adolescence, begin to lose their childish innocence, and find themselves in a darkened theater with the words of Macbeth showing them the dark underbelly of their own violent world, they will need word of comfort and hope. They will need Isaiah’s assurance, to his people, to us, and to our sons and daughters, that God ultimately has compassion on all God’s suffering children. God loves us, in spite of our darkest ambitions and our selfish designs.
And what if our children say they don’t believe it? That’s what Isaiah imagines the survivors of the battle of Jerusalem said, having watched just what happened to Hezekiah and his sons, “The Lord has forsaken me, my Lord has forgotten me.” Just tell them the story of how your love for them knows no end, and God’s love is greater. As Isaiah assures the broken-hearted survivors of his own time, God promises an eternal remembrance, better than pillars of granite or bronze: “…I will not forget you. See, I have inscribed you on the palm of my hands.” (Isaiah 49:16a, NRSV)
We Christians believe that we take our place in hands that bear the scars of nails. The violence we do to our world, and therefore to ourselves, has been broken and healed by Christ’s undying affection for us.
So, we have gratitude, this weekend, for those who’ve made a sacrifice. But our greater thanks and our greater devotion, are to the God who has written all our names on the palms of loving hands. If, we could finally trust those hands, then who knows? Maybe no more names would need ever to be remembered in granite, marble, or bronze. And we would need study war no more.
I can’t think of a better way to celebrate Memorial Day than that.
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