Sacrifice and Memorial Day

Today I am thinking about Memorial Day, about sacrifices, about what is worth the sacrifice and what is not.  I am thinking of U.S. soldiers, of course, as this day is designed to have us do.  I am thinking of people fighting in Ukraine, where the stakes must feel higher if one is Ukrainian.  Why would Ukrainians settle with Putin?  They must know that they would only have to fight again.

This morning I was thinking about Christianity, about a God who makes the sacrifice of taking on human flesh, who comes to be with us to show us how to live a God soaked human life.  I'm thinking of crucifixion, not as a required sacrifice, not in the substitutionary atonement theology kind of sacrifice, but as the price of taking on the Roman empire and the power structures they sanctioned.

I am thinking about sacrifices, the kind we make for each other, the kind we make for our larger communities, the kind of sacrifices we might feel compelled to make for a country.  I'm thinking about Christian martyrs, from Christ onward, and I'm wondering what martyrdom looks like in the 21st century (Christian martyrdom or other types).

I'm also thinking of our current year in the U.S., how so few seem willing to sacrifice anything.  I'm also thinking about the fact that the U.S. is such a death denying culture.  We don't want to think about death, we don't want to think about what might be required of us, unless we could be super heroic somehow and still live to tell the tale.

It's a good day for gratitude, for people who have been willing to do what must be done, for those who have done their part in preserving freedoms that we currently enjoy, and for those who thought they were honoring their country, even when their sacrifice seems futile or worse (idiotic or delusional) to future generations.

Here's a prayer I wrote for Memorial Day:

God of comfort, on this Memorial Day, we remember those souls whom we have lost to war. We pray for those who mourn. We pray for military members who have died and been forgotten. We pray for all those sites where human blood has soaked the soil. God of Peace, on this Memorial Day, please renew in us the determination to be peacemakers. On this Memorial Day, we offer a prayer of hope that military people across the world will find themselves with no warmaking jobs to do. We offer our pleading prayers that you would plant in our leaders the seeds that will sprout into saplings of peace.