Good morning, happy Memorial Day weekend. This weather certainly lends a more subdued tone to the occasion, as does also the fact that our choir is finished now for the season. We’ll miss them very much but let’s do our best to sing out and keep making music a priority.
Every year I’m aware that there are some out in the pews who haven’t been here for a Memorial Day weekend. To my right, your left, is a plaque that I always draw our attention to on this day. It lists the young men from our parish who died in WWII. Who went off to serve--bright, buoyant, promising young men--and never came home.
I am privileged to be the rector of a church with such a history, where part of my job is to carry on the memory of these young men who died. We all here bear witness to their lives and all the war dead; here in this setting it’s just that it’s less abstract. Their graves are out there, in our archives are pictures of them and their families, on Easter, or Christmas. Before their lives ended tragically on the battlefield, they received Communion at this altar, were baptized at this font, played sheep in the pageant, ran in the churchyard outside, got confirmed, thought, like we all do when young, we’ll just live forever.
This is a weekend when we remember those who died in war, and also the fragility of life, the importance of civic engagement, and that peace takes work, commitment, it’s a way of life. It’s daily. And we practice it here, week in and week out in this sacred place that teaches us the value of life--our own, and that of every single person we meet.
Sometimes people confuse Veterans’ Day and Memorial Day. Veterans’ day is for those who served; Memorial Day is for those who died. It’s not a church holiday, of course, but the church is well equipped to help us find meaning in this day, and (as I said) especially here, at St. James.
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They don’t overlap most years, but this weekend (today) is also Pentecost, the birthday of the church--in England known as Whitsunday for the white baptismal robes worn on this day when baptisms were traditionally performed. Pentecost in this country and in the suburbs especially tends to get lost in all the barbecues, graduations, final exams, school concerts, board elections--all that stuff we pile on in May.
But it’s an important day and a great story, not to be missed. It comes from the book of Acts. The disciples--the twelve but also many others who’d followed Jesus during his earthly ministry--are waiting in Jerusalem, as Jesus had told them to do--for what exactly, they don’t know. They’re just supposed to return to Jerusalem and "wait for the Holy Spirit.” Nothing happens, until it does, and it’s dramatic: flames, as of fire, descend on their heads, a wind rushes in. They move out into the streets and begin speaking in languages they didn’t even know. From here on out the rest of the book of Acts is filled with such dramatic stories and incredible feats.
I’ve preached so many different angles on this story and will do so again in future years — about the miracle of listening, the importance of the almost silly in the spiritual life (you can, by the way, be drunk at 9 in the morning).
But because Pentecost this year happens to fall so close to Memorial Day, I’ve been thinking a lot about all these young men, and their families, and how it is we pull overselves up out of loss, and deep pain.
We don’t think much about the disciples’—and again I don’t just mean the twelve but all the others, and there were more—the disciples’ grief following the crucifixion. The confusion. The locked rooms. It’s all there in the Scriptures if you pay attention. There’s a looming question in the latter part of the Gospels and beginning of Acts: how will they ever recover, what will they do next, and with what strength? How do people move on when their world’s been shattered?
That’s today’s story. Pentecost reminds us that there’s always a life force that returns, not always as dramatically as here but sometimes, and carries us out of our isolation and grief, helping us stand up again, speak again, and be once more in the world.
On this Memorial Day Weekend I’m thinking of those mothers, those brothers and sisters, fathers, grandfathers, schoolmates, wives, girlfriends of the war dead, Who with the help of the Holy Spirit somehow at some point found the strength to come back to church, stand up at the lectern again for a Sunday reading, watch kids scooping up Easter eggs right near their loved ones’ graves.
What explains human resilience if not the Holy Spirit, which we celebrate today. It will be here for us, when we need it. Just as it’s come for others, so many times and for so many centuries, before.
O God, who on this day taught the hearts of your faithful people by sending to them the light of your Holy Spirit: Grant us by the same Spirit to have a right judgment in all things, and evermore to rejoice in his holy comfort; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.