Jesus and the Soldier (Memorial Day)

I Kings 8:22-23, 41-43

Luke 7:1-10

War correspondent and author Sebastian Junger has written a new book, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging.  It’s a book about soldiers, about what they experience during war, and what they experience when they return home.  After months of combat, Junger writes, during which “soldiers all but ignore differences of race, religion and politics within their platoon,” they return to the United States to find “a society that is basically at war with itself. People speak with incredible contempt about — depending on their views — the rich, the poor, the educated, the foreign-born, the president or the entire U.S. government.”

According to Junger, this makes re-entry into civilian life extremely difficult.  Our soldiers experience something jarring and disappointing when they leave behind the togetherness of the battlefield and return home to a divided and mean-spirited society.  “Today’s veterans often come home to find that, although they’re willing to die for their country,” he writes, “they’re not sure how to live for it.”

 

It’s Memorial Day weekend.  And this weekend feels hybrid in a way.  On one hand it feels like a pivot out of the school year and into summer.  But it’s more than that.  It’s also a weekend to remember our loved ones and to visit cemeteries.

More specifically, Memorial Day is a time to remember and honor those who have served in the military.  That’s why we have a special ceremony at US National Cemetery tomorrow morning.  And given this attention to soldiers, it’s fitting that in our gospel reading, Jesus engages with a high-ranking Roman soldier, a “Centurion.”

But now let me be a little provocative.  We owe our veterans, those who’ve died and those still living, our deepest gratitude.  But I think we owe them more than just a pat on the back, a “thanks for your service,” a parade or ceremony.  Our Memorial Day celebrations, if we’re not careful, might cover over a more fundamental disregard and disrespect for our service people and their families.

If we have the national budget to send our troops into harms’ way around the world, then we should find the budget resources to provide excellent care to them when they return home.  The care our veterans receive at VA hospitals should be the very best.  And this isn’t always the case.  The problem is about national priorities.  It’s not about the level of care on the local level.  We’re fortunate to have several people who work in our local VA clinics, and each of them care deeply about their work: Sherman Sisco, Debbie McCoy, Dana McKenney, Whendi Martin, and Leah Lewis.

The health and well-being of our returning veterans is nothing short of a national crisis.  It’s a crisis for the veterans themselves, who exhibit extremely high rates of depression and suicide, joblessness, disability, alcohol and drug abuse, and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.  But it’s also a crisis for the rest of us - for American society.  We should provide our veterans with excellent care.  But we should also strive to become a society of kindness and compassion and respect that’s worth defending in the first place.

In our gospel story today, Jesus engages with a soldier.  He agrees to heal the servant of a Roman soldier.  Now obviously, Jesus was part of an oppressed group whose territory was occupied by a violent political regime.  He didn’t agree with Rome’s military objectives. 

And yet Jesus responds to the situation in a way that reminds us that even high ranking Roman soldiers aren’t one-dimensional.  They are, like all of us, complex.  This Centurion is an outsider, more than that, an enemy, in the Jewish story.  He’s a slave owner.  (We are not quite sure whether he values his slave out of genuine friendship or because the slave was economically valuable).  Despite all that, he was sympathetic and supportive of the Jews in Capernaum.  He funded the building of their synagogue.  He has heard of Jesus, and he sends Jewish friends to solicit Jesus’ help for his slave, who is gravely ill.

This is a strange story.  On one level, it is a healing story.  Jesus heals the servant of the Centurion.  And yet that healing comes at the very end of the story, almost as an afterthought.  The story itself seems to be about the faith of the Roman soldier, the faith of a non-Jew, an outsider.  Jesus is surprised to find faith in such an unlikely person.

This is a healing story that raises a large and important question.  How wide is God’s mercy?  Who gets included in the family of God gathered by Jesus Christ?  What kinds of people, what kinds of different ethnic groups, nationalities, and religions can expect to be on the receiving end of God’s favor? 

Most religious people – the Jews in the gospel story, and now us Christians hearing the story – most religious people bring rather narrow assumptions to these kinds of questions.  And yet Luke’s gospel challenges those assumptions.

As readers of Luke’s gospel, we should have seen this coming.  In Jesus’ first recorded sermon, preached in his hometown synagogue in Nazareth (Luke 4), he angered the crowds by arguing that God’s mercy is wider than we expect.  Of all the stories in the Jewish Bible that he could have told, he chooses two stories where God blesses and heals people who aren’t Jewish.  Elijah, during a severe famine, walked past many good Israelite widows to help a non-Jewish widow in Zarephath.  Elisha didn’t heal any Jewish lepers.  He only healed Naaman, a Syrian soldier.

In probably the most widely known story Jesus tells (Luke 10), a man is beaten and robbed and left for dead.  Two religious insiders, two Jews, walk around him.  The third guy, a hated foreigner, a Samaritan – or to put it in language we can hear – a Muslim, is the compassionate one who behaves like God by stopping and helping.

Jesus never makes it easy for us to settle comfortably in our own little circles. If you think that being Christian, or being American, makes you one of God’s favorites, you might want to read Luke’s gospel again.

Jesus gives us these difficult instructions in his sermon: “Love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back.  Then your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked” (Luke 6:35).

For people who believe that God is hateful and retaliatory . . . for people who believe that God is angry with God’s enemies and plans harm for them, it has always been difficult to understand Jesus’ teaching about loving our enemies.  Why should I love my enemies, do good to them, and sacrifice my well-being for them, when God doesn’t act that way towards God’s enemies?  If an angry God damns his enemies to Hell, why can’t I tell my enemies to go to hell too?

But that’s not what Jesus teaches about God.  Jesus teaches us to love our enemies, to bless them and work for their good, precisely because that’s what God does.  According to Jesus, God’s behavior is the foundation for a new way of life.  And God is “kind to the ungrateful and the wicked.”  Put differently, God is kind to all the people we hate.

Now if God loves even the people we hate, then there must be more to them than we realized.  Their lives must be richer, more complex, more shot through with mystery and depth, than we typically imagine.  Jesus is teaching us to reconsider our prejudices, our racial biases, our ignorant superiority towards other parts of the world and toward other religions.

And this good news really can free us.  We tend to trap people in only one dimension of who they are.  We hold people to that one thing they said that time.  We paint people with the shame of the mistakes they once made.  But Jesus invites us into a new way of life, the way of God’s kindness.  All people, even your enemies, are more complex than the caricature you carry around in your head.  They are more mysterious than that.  So are you.  And so am I. 

It has been my experience that there are really two steps or stages to conversion.  Both of them are hard.  The first step is to discover that you are loved by God.  Not just some parts of you but all of you.  The second step doesn’t always follow immediately.  It often takes awhile.  The second step is the discovery that God loves everyone else just as intensely and with the same delight with which God loves you.  At this second stage, the whole world cracks open into a new light.  All the previous boundaries and categories become unstuck.

When that happens, I can be a patriotic American without the smug and selfish superiority and violent nationalism that often passes for patriotism.  I can be grateful as I remember those who fought and died for our country, without elevating that feeling above what all other peoples of the world must feel about their own regions and nations. 

I want to return to Sebastian Junger’s work.  Lots of people are asking: what’s wrong with our veterans?  What has happened to them that they are so broken that they can’t assimilate?  Why are they so traumatized that they can’t reintegrate into civilian rhythms of family and work?

Many of you have experienced this in a very personal way.  Two of Stephanie’s cousins did multiple Army tours in the Middle East.  They both struggled tremendously when they finished with active duty.  One ended up taking his own life.  The other continues to struggle with deep pain and confusion about who he is and where he belongs.  I do not pretend to know all that they dealt with.  But I do think that it would make a difference if they returned to a society that was inclusive, kind, and generous.

Junger’s book asks the question this way: Why is the rate of PTSD for American soldiers returning home twenty times greater than that of Israeli soldiers?  It’s not what happens during war, Junger argues.  It’s what happens when soldiers return home.

He argues that the problem isn’t our veterans.  It’s us.  We’re the problem.  The real issue is that they risk their lives for an ideal and then return to a society that’s divisive, greedy, selfish, and hateful.  What we desperately need is a new common life.  A new breed of kindness.  An ability to disagree with civility.  And an economy that’s good for everyone, including labor, not just owners and shareholders. 

Jesus teaches us to find common ground with people different from us.  He teaches us to respect the dignity and mystery of all people, no matter their beliefs or background, their color, religion, or nationality.  It is a complex thing to be one of God’s creatures.  And it is a complex thing to learn to love like God loves, showing kindness to our enemies.  But in that invitation lies our best future.  May God heal our sickness, like Jesus healed the Centurion’s servant.  Amen.