SERMON FOR MAY 24, 2020          TEXT: JEREMIAH 29:10-14

          When I was growing up, my dad was the keeper of the Kodak, and consequently we don’t have a lot of pictures of him. But I know of two that my mom treasures. The first was taken almost 80 years ago. It shows my dad standing in the driveway of his boyhood home in Oakmont, PA. 6’ 4” tall, gangly, dark hair and wire-rimmed glasses, serious and proud in his Navy uniform, just before leaving for his first active duty post, where he would meet the woman who became his wife. The second was taken some 40 years later. By then Dad was chairman of the mathematics department at the United States Naval Academy. Some one caught him off guard while he was sitting at his desk. Dad looked up with his remarkable sweet smile, his tie straight as an arrow, his hair gray, and his intelligent eyes bright behind his bifocals. Dad was a civilian but still and always a Navy man. When it came to “last wishes,” he asked only that we sing the Navy Hymn at his funeral and bury him in a veterans’ cemetery.

          Ten years ago we celebrated my father’s funeral on the Friday before Memorial Day. Because of the holiday we were unable to lay him to rest until the following Tuesday. The State of Maryland has a veterans’ cemetery about 20 minutes’ drive from our home, and we buried him there. My mother was so distraught and already hard of hearing that she experienced the funeral and the reception afterwards in a haze of confusion and grief. But that morning, when a member of the honor guard expressed the nation;’s gratitude for her husband’s service to his country and presented her with the flag, she clutched the tightly folded red, white and blue to her heart and wept.

          That first year I took Mom to the cemetery on Christmas Day. Despite the cold there were many people there, come, like us, to lay holiday wreaths on the graves of their sons, spouses, and parents, some graves so fresh they didn’t have a stone yet, others weathered and familiar. We greeted one another; we spoke of the ones we had come to honor. We were that thing I treasure    about the United States — a motley crew of different races, different faiths, people whose lives might well not intersect in any other way except the experience that brought us to this place. Members of our families had served this country; all had given of their lives to do so; some had died in warfare. And the legacy of their service affected all of us they left behind. Every time I have visited the cemetery over the last decade, I have had to walk farther and farther to find Dad’s marker, because the rows of graves keep increasing. Now the Vietnam vets are claiming their place there. And as I find my way through I stop to read the various names, the dates, the places people served.   

          Many years ago, when I was a junior in college I spent a semester studying in Europe. At the end of the term I went to visit the Italian woman who had been my roommate at language school. She was a student at the University of Milan in political science, and I accompanied her to a class there. The professor called the roll, and I reflexively thought, “Weird, all the names are Italian.” Then I caught myself. Not weird at all if you live in Milan. But definitely weird to the ears of an American. I have reflected on that each time I look at the names on the markers in every direction from my father’s grave. Many nationalities yet all American. My daughter Lucy, who has lived in California for most of her life, says what she likes best about her West Coast home, even more than the weather and the redwoods and the rhythms of Oakland city life, is the fact that, as she puts it, “You can’t look at anyone and say, ‘You’re not from here’; everyone belongs.”

          God does’t love us generically; God loves us specifically. God doesn’t love us better because we are Americans. But God loves us, and we are Americans. Our call to discipleship addresses us where we live. It challenges and encourages us as heirs to this particular history and as actors in the here and now shaping its future. Jesus charges us to love our neighbors as ourselves. What does that mean for our lives as citizens in a nation that guarantees our right to speak but does not, and ought not, privilege our voice in the public square?

          Memorial Day began as a day of remembrance after the Civil War, when people decorated the graves of the fallen. Over time the holiday evolved to commemorate those who died in all wars, including the First and Second World Wars, Korea , Vietnam and our current military actions in Iraq and Afghanistan. This year Memorial Day finds us mourning deaths in numbers comparable to some of these combat losses. Over 96,000 dead since February 29, and the virus is nowhere near done with us yet. This disease does not spread risk equally among Americans, but everyone who suffers because of it, everyone who becomes ill, everyone who dies in these united states is equally an American, someone who belongs here, one of us.    Now is the time, my brothers and sisters in Christ, with whom I share a citizenship on earth as well as in heaven, to call upon God’s strength and rely upon God’s promise.

          In the text from Jeremiah which we just read the prophet was addressing the defeated people of Judea who had been driven into exile in Babylon. They had faced unimaginable loss and destruction, and their suffering was by no means over. Yet God is watching over them: “For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm to give you a future with hope.” Surely God has plans for our welfare too. We can meet the challenges of this pandemic so as to claim that future with hope. The journalist Liza Featherstone points out that we have learned that “when we must, we can assume responsibility for one another’s well-being.” Even as the pandemic has exposed unconscionable inequities and injustice, “it also proved that we can drop everything to organize society around a profound act of solicitude. As we give up many of our pleasures [and] make terrifying financial sacrifices . . . we are doing so with the understanding that the work of keeping people alive must be shared by all. The coronavirus may leave our society shattered, traumatized, and economically devastated, but if we can rebuild from this insight, we’ll still be better off than we were before.” And we will honor the 96,000 Americans who have lost their lives in the war against COVID-19 as they deserve. Amen.