Well, it's Memorial Day weekend again already. It hardly seems possible that we could already be to the last weekend in May. The year has sped by and it's been such a cold spring and the jacarandas are late in blooming this year. But, it is Memorial Day weekend and many of us are enjoying picnics and barbecues and beach outings and the Indianapolis 500.

I wonder how many of us think about the real meaning of Memorial Day, the national holiday on which we remember those who have died in service to our nation. Let me share a few things about the origins of this holiday and offer some suggestions for commemorating it this year.

More than 130 some years ago, in the years just before this congregation was founded, the country was a fragile, heartbroken nation. The Civil War had torn us apart. In the words of retired Major General John A. Logan, who proclaimed the first Memorial Day on May 30, 1868: "This day . . . is designated for the purpose of strewing with flowers, or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country and during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village and hamlet churchyard in the land."

General Logan's orders for the day decreed that the graves should be decorated with "the choicest flowers of springtime. We should guard their graves with sacred vigilance. . . . Let pleasant paths invite the coming and going of reverent visitors and fond mourners. Let no neglect, no ravages of time, testify to the present or to the coming generations that we have forgotten as a people the cost of a free and undivided republic."

Prior to that official declaration, springtime remembrances to the Civil War dead had been held in several places. The first reportedly occurred in Columbus, Mississippi, in 1866, when a group of women visited a cemetery to decorate the graves of soldiers who had died in battle at Shiloh. Nearby were the graves of Union soliders, neglected because they were the enemy. The story goes that the women were so disturbed at the sight of those bare graves that they placed flowers on them as well. Memorial Day became a time not only for remembering, but for healing, too.

That healing is still needed, even for that war that occurred three, four generations ago. Do you know that there are nine states in the South that still observe a separate holiday for honoring the Confederate dead, calling it "Confederate Memorial Day"? I'll tell a story on my own family that makes that point. My grandmother Farris was a proud Texan, and an admirer of Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee. Her father was a Confederate soldier. But for some kind of reason long lost in family lore, towards the end of the War Between the States he did some spying for the Union Army. No one now seems to know the circumstances or the details. Maybe he just wanted to eat, or come out of it alive. In any case, my grandmother never forgave her dad.

Some fifty years or so after the war, paperwork turned up that showed that she was entitled to some pension money from his service in the Union Army. It is reported that my very Southern Baptist grandmother replied, and I quote, "I don't want any of that damn Yankee money!"

It's important for us as individuals, as families, as a nation, to take time to tell our stories and remember that we might learn and heal. And, boy, in a long-lived congregation such as this one, blessed with amazing octogenarians and nonagenarians and at least one that I know of who will turn 100 next month, we've got lots of stories to share!

Memorial Day need not be limited to stories of veterans from the armed forces. It is also a day for personal remembrance, to honor the memories of family members and dear friends who have lived and died. It can be a day to grieve for relationships now ended or for dreams that have not come true. This beautiful long weekend, marking the beginning of summer, can be for us a time for reflection, for grief and gratitude. Poised on the promise of summer, we can lift up the wintry seasons of our hearts and find the courage to heal and go forward.

We are to be like, in General Logan's words inaugurating this day, "reverent visitors" and "fond mourners," coming and going along the paths of our own memories and our future, strewing all along the way the most beautiful flowers of our tears and gratitude and hopes.

In all of our families, there are all kinds of stories about who we are, and who our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents were. And all those stories, all those memories, go a long way to shaping who we are now, what we value, what we fear, what we love, what we'd give our lives for. And so, I want to really encourage all of you this weekend, as you picnic and relax, to get out those old scrapbooks and family albums and sit around and tell some of your stories. Make sure your kids know them by heart and make sure they know what Memorial Day is really for.

I've heard some of your stories as we've visited together and I want to share just one more of mine, today, to really try and prime this pump and get you going telling your own. Besides, this is a great Memorial Day story, true to the heart and spirit of this day of remembrance and healing.

My dad was a bombardier in the Army Air Corps in WW II and flew missions over southern France and Italy, where he was shot down and for which he was later awarded the Purple Heart. Twenty some years after all that, I went to France, to Marseille in the south, as an exchange student and lived for a year with a French family. I learned that the father of that family had, during the war, been very active in the French Resistance. A couple years later, my parents came and met my host family and they developed lifelong friendships.

One day as my father and French father were "talking"-neither spoke all that much of the other's language but they found a way to really communicate-something of a real Pentecost kind of experience-they started sharing war stories. And they discovered the most incredible thing. On the day that my father had flown a mission over Marseille to bomb the harbor and knock out the possibility of German naval maneuvers there, with strict orders to absolutely avoid bombing the big church, Notre Dame de la Garde, that is the most famous landmark and the heart of Marseille-that same day, my French host father had been part of the Resistance radio communications network directing the raid from the ground.

Twenty years later these two actually met and shared their memories of that fateful day. I'll just say that the champagne flowed that night in a real celebration. A few days later, they drove out towards Toulon along the Mediterranean coast, where there is a memorial to the Allied air and naval operations in the Mediterranean. As it turned out, the only other visitor that day happened to be a German tourist, come to pay respects as well. My dad said it was the strangest feeling to end up all there together, French, American, German. The Allies and the enemy. Now at peace. Now remembering their dead, together, and praying their private prayers for healing and understanding.

Many wars have been fought since that one, and more threaten to erupt at any moment. Our president reminds us frequently that we are even now a nation at war, though it doesn't feel like it to most of us. But our hearts will be stirred and our memories relived later this week when, as a nation, we will visit in a final sort of way the sacred burial place we have come to know as Ground Zero, where so many lives and so many dreams and hopes were lost. On Thursday the search for remains at the site will end. There will be a ceremony to mark this transition. A few minutes before 10:30 a.m., fire department bells will ring. An honor guard made up of uniformed officers, Ground Zero workers and families of the dead will carry an empty stretcher representing the hundreds of bodies never recovered from the site. It will be draped with an American flag and carried up a ramp that runs from the floor of the site to the street. Then, the final I-beam left there at the site, also covered with a flag, will be taken up the same ramp and out. "Taps" will play, and "America the Beautiful."

In making this announcement last week, [New York City] Mayor Bloomberg said, "We will not forget those who were lost. At the same time, we have an obligation to those left behind to continue the rebuilding that has already started. And we will fulfill both those obligations."

As individuals, as families, as people in all kinds of relationships, as a nation, Memorial Day offers a time to remember. We need to remember and to mourn. We need to remember and to honor. We need to remember and to heal. We need to remember and to celebrate, even as the future begins to take its shape from the stories and the experiences that are our memories.

As people of faith, our past and present and future are held together in the great sweep of God's love. This is no more apparent to us, perhaps, than on Trinity Sunday, when we give praise to God, who creates, redeems and sustains our lives.

Our God embraces our memories and can envision our future. Our God, Creator, was with us "in the beginning" and will be with us until the end of time. Our God, Redeemer, is ready to heal us and our broken hearts even when we don't think it's possible any more. Our God, Sustainer, will be able to create newness of life out of every situation of death humans can inflict on one another.

Our God can even take the suffering and trauma of war and terror, and out of the ashes, bind up broken hearts, reform a nation and cause enemies to live as friends. Our God can cause reasons for hope to spring up from our memories, as beautiful flowers of promise.

Thanks be to God, who was and is and evermore shall be, one God, now and forever. Amen.

NOTES

1. New York Times, May 17, 2002.
2. The Origins of Memorial Day:
www.va.gov
www.usis.usemb.se/holidays
www.usmemorialday.org

© Patricia E. Farris, 2002. Permission is given for brief quotation with attribution. All other rights reserved.