Memorial Day

Having too many friends that are no longer with us, this was a hard read no matter how spot-on it is.

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In civic religion, war is always publicly remembered as an act of sacrifice. Public remembrances of war are deeply liturgical because war is memorialized as a sacrament within civic religion. Stanley Hauerwas has taught us that nationalism is a religion with war as its liturgy. The nature of war sacrifice in civic religion is that there must always be more sacrifices. Mars is an insatiable god. The sacrifices can be momentarily suspended (in what is falsely called "peacetime") but never permanently abolished. Because the previous sacrifices must, as the liturgy states, "not have been in vain," the day will come when more sacrifices must be offered upon the bloody altar of war. This is the dark truth of war remembrance liturgies. Yes, the dead are remembered, lamented, and honored, but also boys (and now perhaps girls) are reminded in these liturgies that the day may come when they will be called upon to add more blood to the altar of sacrifice either by killing or being killed.

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Those who gather for memorial services see themselves as remembering and honoring the previous sacrifices. And this can be commendable. There is no doubt that battlefields are often sites of heroic sacrifice. But what is not generally recognized is that they are also participating in a ritual for the preparation of future sacrifices. For sacrifice to not be in vain, the cycle of sacrifice must be perpetuated. And so it goes.

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In the case of America's bitter experience in the Vietnam War, the defeat was not absolute, but ambiguous. The American objectives in the war were obviously not realized a unified Vietnam became a Communist country after all but the defeat was ambiguous enough that the civic liturgists could still try to employ the sacrificial language of "They did not die in vain" though exactly what the sacrifice of 58,000 American lives in Vietnam actually accomplished is not quite clear.

What is clear is that in terms of being a unifying sacrifice, the American experience in Vietnam was a failure. As the war drug on without a clear victory, and as much of the nation began to question if America was morally right in why and how it waged the war, that which is unutterable in civic sacrificial religion began to be spoken openly: "Our boys are dying in vain." In civic religion, this is blasphemy. And thus violent riots during the Vietnam War era wracked America as each side accused the other of sacrilege. The sacrifices of the Vietnam War, instead of being unifying, became divisive. In sacrificial religion, this is a failed sacrifice.

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When Abraham left Ur he was searching for a city an alternative to the kind of civilization created by Cain. The writer of Hebrews says Abraham was searching for "the city that has foundations, whose architect and builder is God." Abraham was looking for a city not built on the buried bodies of slain Abels. Human history, shaped by empires and the wars that form and sustain them, creates a reality for most human beings that Thomas Hobbes in his book Leviathan (named after a biblical beast) famously described as living in continual fear and danger of violent death, where human life is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

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"Who's doing this?" If we answer, "them," while pointing our finger at vilified others, we fail to recognize that the vilified "them" are just as confidently pointing an accusatory finger at us. Who's doing this? When properly understood as the complex phenomenon of accusation and empire, the best answer to this dark question is Satanwith our cooperation. Throughout history civilization has been organized around the power to kill by empires who weaponize the ways and means of death. It's the legacy bequeathed by Cain, and it seems the human race has been incapable of imagining anything elseuntil Easter. Easter is the door opened by Christ that leads to a world beyond the brutality of the Leviathan, beyond the thin red line of bloody battle, beyond a world under the domination of Satan.

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So what is the role of the church in a world that careens toward catastrophic war? Is it to shout hurray for our side and assure the masters of war that God is with us? Of course not! It's this kind of hubris and folly that led to the calamity of millions of Christians killing one another in the name of national allegiance during the two world wars. If the church is to be an ambassador of the good news and an agent of healing in the world, the church is going to have to become serious about being something other than the high priest of religious nationalism. With so many churchgoers entangled in the tentacles of nationalism, it's time for the church to actually be the church. As Stanley Hauerwas has said in so many ways, it's the first task of the church to make the world the world. And for the church to appear as distinct from the world the world of war that Jesus told Pilate his kingdom does not come from the church is going to have to face the fact that it cannot pledge its allegiance to both Caesar and Christ. As Jesus said, "no one can serve two masters."