May 29-30, 2010
Holy Trinity C
Romans 5:1-5
Salem Lutheran Church
Sycamore, Illinois
I have to say, I've always loved this piece of Romans. The part where it speaks of suffering producing endurance and endurance producing character and character producing hope. It's poetic. It rolls off the tongue. It's easy to memorize. I carry it with me, I even cling to it sometimes, for it seeks to make sense of what might otherwise be entirely senseless. Things like pain and suffering and loss. But I can't say I've always found this to be true, can you? That suffering always ends in hope?
I was young when I first became aware of it… the kind of suffering that Paul points to in our second lesson for today. My cousin, Michael, had been killed in Viet Nam. He was twenty years old. I didn't know him really, as I was only four when he first went to fight. To me and my sisters, he's only an image in old family photographs. A framed portrait of him in his dress uniform that sits on a shelf at my aunt's house. So I went on line this week to see what I could learn about him on a site devoted to the Viet Nam War Memorial in Washington, D.C. The brief listing of information about him is this:
Lance Corporal E3 Marine Corps Regular
Length of service 2 years
Casualty was on May 2, 1967
In QUANG NAM, SOUTH VIETNAM
HOSTILE, GROUND CASUALTY
GUN, SMALL ARMS FIRE
Body was recovered
And then a word about where his name could be found on the wall:
Panel 19E - Line 9
This is what I do remember. The phone call came. And my mother went right away to be at her sister's side. I was six years old and I didn't want to stay at home with the baby sitter who would be watching over us while my dad was at work and so I rode along. I have to say that I probably only remember that trip for the bad weather we drove through that day in May… for the sudden stop my mom had to make and for the fact that I wasn't wearing a seatbelt, for you may remember most people didn't back then. I got my first and last black eye that day… my mom had me pull an undershirt out of my little suitcase to hold against my bleeding mouth. I was mortified… thinking the stain would never come out, not yet knowing the wonders of cold water and bleach. After a quick trip to her childhood doctor to make sure my injuries were as superficial as they first appeared, my mom left me with her aunt who tended my wounds and loved me well. Suffering? To be sure, it hurt. But those wounds would heal … nothing near to the larger loss that was weighing heavy on my family in those heart-wrenching days and in the years that would follow. Like I said, I remember little about the actual time… I don't, for instance, remember the funeral. I do remember my dad saying later that afterwards he had driven downtown and walked into a local bar. And that when asked who he was, he told those gathered there that his nephew had been killed in Viet Nam and he was there for the funeral. And those there had never heard of my cousin Mike, … back in that time when we were failing to honor and keep those who sacrificed so much. Years later my dad said how this made no sense at all to him. As though the suffering were not enough, but that it wasn't even acknowledged by fellow townspeople who had helped send him into harm's way just knocked him over. They did later, thankfully. This summer my family will gather for a family reunion at a park in a shelter named in his memory in that small town in Wisconsin.
No, I don't remember much about the one in our family in my generation who was lost to war. But I do remember the days we set aside to remember him and all the rest. I do remember Memorial Days. Much like the one we celebrate this week-end. The parade in Rochelle would alternate. One year it would end at the Protestant cemetery on the north side of Rochelle. And the next, the festivities would culminate on the south side at the Catholic Cemetery just back of our house. So we would pull up our lawn chairs to the curb and watch the bands go by. And then we'd go into our own back yard where we could listen over the fence as speeches were made and wreaths were laid and taps were played. Again, I was young when one of those year I found myself surprised to turn to look at my mother who stood with tears streaming down her face. Remembering, she told me later, the tearing grief of loved ones who had buried ones so dear lost in war.
And so I wonder now. Does that kind of suffering produce endurance produce character and finally return us to hope that does not disappoint? Sometimes, yes, and I am ever so grateful when the promise is kept in all of its fullness. But sometimes not, too. Sometimes it seems suffering threatens to just break us down and leaves us grasping and empty, leaving wounds that won't heal, stains that will never come out. So it is so very good, it seems to me then, that the resounding promise we hear today doesn't really rest in what happens within us, but rather in the one whose suffering and death resulted for us in the ultimate hope. In Jesus. And it is in those times when we can't make sense of it. It is in those times when suffering have no good end in sight that you and I find we must rest only and always on God's love… that wonderful love that Paul promises will be poured into our empty, hurting hearts. And no doubt it's true that you and I can only fully experience God's amazing love when nothing else makes sense. And not of course, only the pain from losses we remember this holiday week-end. But all those losses that come in life. All that suffering and pain which in so many ways threaten to break us and break us down. Then and always then we rest in that love that's poured into us through Jesus that promises never to let us go.
So this Memorial Day we remember those who suffered and died for something larger than themselves. For larger ideals like freedom. And for smaller, but no less important ones like the one fighting next to them on the field of battle. We trust and hope that their sacrifice and the ongoing ache their families carry in their hearts is not in vain. And that God will somehow bring hope out of heartbreak. And that they will know God's own love poured into their hearts in amazing ways.
So even while I wonder, even when at times I struggle with this, I have to say, that I do still love Paul's words. For sometimes I have known them to be so. At other times I can only trust that God will somehow make it so. And in those in-between times when the suffering seems to be moving in slow motion and it's hard to see our way to hope, we just pour it all into Jesus' out-stretched arms, trusting that God's own love will be poured into our hearts even now. Amen.
