Memorial Day week-end.

Dear Congregation,

As we come to the beginning of Memorial Day week-end, which has come to be thought of as the beginning of summer, let’s be reminded of the meaning of this national holiday.

Memorial Day, originally known as Decoration Day, originated in the years following the Civil War. The first Decoration Day was celebrated on May 30,1868, when people were called to “strew graves with flowers” to honor those who had died in that war. There were approximately 620,000 casualties in the Civil War. That number exceeded our nation’s loss in all its other wars from the Revolutionary War through the Viet Nam War.

Memorial Day, as Decoration Day came to be known, was expanded after World War I, to honor all the men and women who died while serving in the American military and became an official federal holiday in 1971. Tomorrow will be the 157th Memorial Day our country has celebrated. As The United States of America engaged in war in Iraq and Afghanistan our military deaths numbered 4,419 in Iraq and 2,459 in Afghanistan. There are now more graves of servicemen and women to decorate. There will be even more on which to place flowers and flags as long as war continues.

The online resource Wikipedia defines a memorial “…as an object which serves as a focus for memory of something, usually a person (who has died) or an event. sculptures, statues or fountains. The most common type of memorial is the gravestone or the memorial plaque. Also common are war memorials commemorating those who have died in wars. We may think of the striking Viet Nam Memorial wall of names in Washington, D. C. or the more recently constructed WW II memorial where honor flights of veterans are taken.

All these memorials, as beautiful and as meaningful as they may be, share something in common. They are inanimate, made of stone, brass, concrete, or wood. They do not move or breathe or live.

And so I have for your consideration, a different kind of memorial—a

living memorial. A living memorial honors those veterans who have died in war by being advocates for peace, as followers of Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace. Up to and including our present time, countries always have had war as their option of last resort. Their thinking is, “If this conflict cannot be resolved in any other way, we will kill.” This headset has to be challenged and changed.

I have had the privilege of ministering to many veterans over the years. A few from the Korean and Viet Nam Wars, but mostly World War II veterans. I have been blessed to hear their stories of unbelievable sacrifice. These Christian men, mostly in their 80’s, were teen-agers or in their early 20’s back in the 1940’s when they went to war. They were from small towns or farms, when they were transported out of the familiar to places they hadn’t even heard of, to islands in the Pacific, far out to sea on huge destroyers or in submarines, to the European countryside, Africa, Okinawa. They would share stories with me about funny things that had happened, like the time a couple of pilots on a remote island took a keg of beer, they’d somehow managed to get, up into the air in their plane, hung it outside, then flew around in circles to cool it. And they would share others that weren’t funny at all, about terrible suffering and deprivation, sometimes breaking off in tears, saying, “I can’t go on.” They had seen and experienced the worst that war can offer, and so made it clear to me that they were indeed “Veterans for Peace.”

And so let us, as individuals and as a church, renew our dedication to working to make peace possible even as we honor our veterans who have died.

In Christ’s love,

Pastor Candy