I was raised at the time when families still had a regular pattern of eating together at the kitchen or dining table. Growing up we ate together in the evenings and in my earlier childhood my mother still, kept to the custom of a roast Sunday lunch, although this was something that began to fall by the wayside as my sisters and I grew older. Yet, the experience of family meals forms a significant template in my upbringing.

It was important for my mother that her children had good table manners and knew how to use a knife and fork properly so that we would neither shame her nor ourselves in public.  Recognizing differences in national custom – for instance- in British table etiquette we use both knife and fork together, placing the knife to one side only to invert the fork and transfer it to the right hand for foods that require scooping rather than spearing. But I notice among Americans the knife is only used for cutting and then placed aside to use the fork alone. 

In the lexicon of tongue-in-cheek Episcopalian jokes there’s the one about the rabbi, the RC priest and the Episcopal priest confessing dietary transgressions. The rabbi can’t resist the smell of fried bacon. The RC priest secretly eats meat on Friday. But the Episcopalian confesses having been mortified when he inadvertently found himself using his salad fork while eating his entree.

To this day I can’t resist casting my eye around restaurants to note how oddly some people manipulate their eating utensils. Al and I took on the heavy responsibility of ensuring our granddaughter would know how to avoid public shame at the dinner table. Among many other injunctions was the oft repeated grandfatherly exhortation: Claire, remember spoon to the mouth not mouth to the spoon!

These are the strange associations that come to mind as I hear Luke’s account of Jesus’ behavior at the dinner party of an important Pharisee. Luke reports that

as Jesus was going to the house of a leading Pharisees to eat a meal on the sabbath, they were watching him closely.

It seems that at these dinner parties, Jesus was subjected to close surveillance. As someone who always feels my table manners are under scrutiny, I know the feeling. However, here the close surveillance seems to have been two-way. With a critical eye Jesus was also watching the host and other guests closely – noticing how the dinner party was used as an occasion to reflect and reinforce the inequalities built into wider social values. 

Luke is the writer who gives us the clearest picture of the importance of table fellowship in Jesus’ ministry. For Jesus, eating together was never about the food or the wine – it was not about what you ate, but who you ate with. Who we eat with and who we would not be seen dead eating with, reveals much about our social values. Social values lay at the heart of Paul’s accusation against the Corinthians, among whom the Eucharist had degenerated into an occasion that reinforced factionalism and the importance of wealth and prestige. In 1 Cor 11:21-22 he writes:

So then, when you come together, it is not the Lord’s Supper you eat, for when you are eating, some of you go ahead with your own private suppers. As a result, one person remains hungry, and another gets drunk. Don’t you have homes to eat and drink in? Or do you despise the church of God by humiliating those who have nothing? What shall I say to you? Shall I praise you? Certainly not in this matter!

Worship table manners are a distinguishing characteristic of Episcopalian life. For well over 100 years now, the Episcopal Church has tortured itself with its ambivalence to social status. While the church of the privileged struggled hard to expand inclusion and to champion the processes of social and political reform in American society, it nevertheless secretly, and at times not so secretly, re enforced the boundaries of its elite exclusivity. Today, all Episcopal Churches display the sign: The Episcopal Church welcomes you! At one level the message is sincere. At another level there’s an unstated proviso – hidden in the need to make such a bold proclamation in the first place. The Episcopal Church welcomes you –as long as you are one of us.

There’s nothing like complex table manners to communicate social inclusion and reenforce social exclusion. The message is – only those who know the rules of the table will feel comfortable eating together. That the eucharist lies at the heart of Episcopal-Anglican worship of God is one of our strengths.

Jesus was welcome to break bread in Pharisee homes. It seems likely that his own religious formation owed much to the network of Pharisee scribes responsible for the education of village boys.

The anti-Pharisee polemic of the gospel writers is indicative of a later worsening of relations between church and synagogue. Therefore, it comes as a surprise for us to learn that at the time of his ministry, Jesus and the Pharisees were natural if at times contentious, allies. Among the competing factions of Sadducees, Essenes, Zealots, and Herodians that contended for power under the Roman occupation – the Pharisees and Jesus broadly shared a religious and political worldview. Jesus was welcome at their tables because – at one level he was almost one of them. He knew the rules of good Pharisee table etiquette. What made the Pharisees nervous however, was that Jesus knowing the rules was as likely to break them as to follow them.

The Talmud saying goes: two Jews, three opinions. Family disagreements are often the fiercest around the dinner table. That Jesus ate with Pharisees and that they welcomed him to their tables reveals that more was shared between them than divided them.

For the Pharisees, table fellowship was a way to maintain ritual-spiritual exclusivity. In a tainted world of secular and political accommodation and compromise, the exclusivity of table fellowship offered a place to share the hope for the coming of God’s kingdom. Table fellowship was where they disputed with one another about textual interpretation, and Jesus seems to have entered into this process with gusto.

What aroused Pharisee suspicion of Jesus was that for him, table fellowship expressed the open-ended inclusive invitation at the heart of the kingdom’s coming. For Jesus, God’s kingdom was not something to prepare for through guarding one’s spiritual identity as a member of a pure Israel. It was rather an invitation to welcome a wider inclusion. The kingdom’s coming demanded embracing the prophetic dream of God’s inclusion of all-in sundry within the scope of Israel’s salvation.

Despite all they shared, the central point of contention between Jesus and the Pharisees revolves around the issues of who’s welcome and who is not. It’s not just who is included and who is not but what are the terms for inclusion? Who will and who will not get an invitation to dinner? This is a universal tension – resurfacing again and again throughout religious history. It remains a tension we are still contending with today.

Jesus’ message to his fellow diners is that humility rather than certainty; a tolerance for diversity rather than a need for uniformity is what should shape our attitudes to table fellowship with one another and with God.

Jesus encourages us to take our seat at the bottom of the table, where we will find ourselves sitting beside persons who are not like us and whose table manners may well not come up to our standards, but with whom we have the potential to be surprised by the richness of new connection.

We now find ourselves in a society where eating together around the common table with family or friends is an increasingly unfamiliar experience. In a world of fast food instantly consumed on the run as it were – table fellowship withers as eating becomes an individual activity performed while attending to the endlessness of other demands. Despite the many alures of social networking, table fellowship is not among them.

For Christians and especially for Episcopalians, the Eucharist is the primary expression of our need for table fellowship with one another. Luke’s story about Jesus at the dinner party of a notable Pharisee spotlights the issue of who do we eat with and who do we never eat with? To become a community where Eucharistic table fellowship becomes the place where connection is forged, brokenness is healed, and all are invited to participate in God’s rich blessings, regardless of the state of their table manners, requires more from us than placing a sign outside proclaiming an invitation to dine in the vaguest of terms. For the way we celebrate may be saying more than we care to admit about the who it is we want to invite.

If all of this has your head spinning, then maybe we should return to basics and value what many of us still know how to do best. Before inviting others to Jesus, we should invite them to dinner first.

In Dobbs v’s Jackson the Supreme Court enshrines a specific moral and religious worldview, that a supposedly biblical and reactionary understanding of Christianity can be imposed upon wider society. Of course this is not stated, but is concealed behind the legal fig leaf of Originalism – an approach to the Constitution that mirrors a literalist reading of the Bible.

The overturning of Roe comes at the end of a week in which the Supreme Court also declared that state law cannot restrict second amendment rights, and that conservative religious schools are entitled to state money to support their exclusionary agendas – thus preserving the gravy train of public funds. The reversal of Roe v’s Wade is the third ruling in a week that makes clear the direction of the conservative Justices in future rulings.

I want to offer one fruitful line of response – namely the renewal of a progressive and inclusionary understanding of Christian discipleship among Christians of the mainstream – a term covering liberal and progressive interpretations of the teachings of Jesus.

There is a phrase: every-person ministry. Every-person ministry means the fitness of a Christian community for God’s purposes depends on the investment of each person in its life of discipleship.

The contours of discipleship vary from person to person. God not only calls us as we currently are but also as the persons, we have the potential to grow into becoming. What that looks like is a matter of individual temperament, individual gifts, passions, and concerns – these are the lenses through which God’s call is illuminated in each of us.

But in most churches of the mainstream membership rather than discipleship characterizes our relationship to Christian community.

Members are concerned with supporting the organization to which they belong:

• Members see themselves as supporting the clergy and others to whom they look to perform the ministry.
• The demands of membership are intentionally kept low so as not to discourage people from joining, and to encourage people to remain by asking little of them.
• Members notoriously vote with their pocketbooks and ultimately with their feet when they don’t get what they want or feel their specific needs are not being met.

Disciples see themselves as active participants in the Church’s ministry and not just supporters of the organization:

• Disciples are invested in their relationship with God.
• For them building a strong church is the most effective way of making a difference in the wider world with which they feel deeply involved.
• Disciples are spiritually fed by lives of prayer, study, and reflection.
• They experience deep gratitude for the good things they enjoy, seeing them not as things to own, but hold in trust.
• Disciples express their sense of gratitude in generous lives of service and a passion for justice.

One Christian is no Christian according to the early church father, Tertullian. By this he means Christian identity is a group not and individual thing. We respond to our call through loving God and loving the people among whom we live out our lives, moment-by-moment, day-by-day, one breath at a time. In short, as Christians, we respond to God through participation in lives of discipleship within Christian community.

A Christian community ideally is a pilgrim community – a community on a journey towards the greater realization of the kingdom of God. The relationship between individual disciples and the community of disciples is one of mutual strengthening. As disciples we are strengthened through participation in the pilgrim community. The community is in return, strengthened by our participation as individual disciples. If you think being present for the breaking of the bread or being active in the work for justice represented by communities like St Martin’s is a matter of personal option, think again. We are now seeing the deep consequences of failing to appreciate the extent to which the community is weakened by our lack of or lukewarm participation in the life of discipleship of a pilgrim community.

Pilgrim communities are spiritual communities that encourage, equip, and sustain us to work together to become the change we long to experience in the world around us. I think we are all gripped with a sense of the urgency for change. The thing about gripping – if we grip or are gripped too tightly – the result is paralysis.

In reversing Roe, for the first time the Supreme Court has taken away an established constitutional right from millions of Americans – on the spurious justification that the right is not spelled out in the Constitution. On this basis there seems no reason to trust they do not intend to further roll back constitutional rights the Court has extended for same gender marriage and sexual identity equalities. Afterall, as has been already demonstrated, their word is hardly their bond.

The Methodist Pastor David Barnhart writes:

The unborn are a convenient group to advocate for. They never make demands of you; they are morally uncomplicated, unlike the incarcerated, addicted, or the chronically poor; they don’t resent your condescension or complain that you are not politically correct; unlike widows, they don’t ask you to question patriarchy; unlike orphans, they don’t need money, education, or childcare; unlike aliens, they don’t bring all that racial, cultural, and religious baggage that you dislike; they allow you to feel good about yourself without any work at creating or maintaining relationships; and when they are born, you can forget about them because they cease to be unborn. … They are in short, the perfect people to love if you want to claim you love Jesus, but actually dislike people who breathe. Prisoners? Immigrants? The sick? The poor? Widows? Orphans? All the groups that are specifically mentioned in the Bible.

Jesus said: Follow me. The response he got was straight out of the mainstream Christian playbook. Lord, let me first go and bury my father – in other words sorry Lord I’m really busy. Jesus said: Let the dead bury their own; but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God. But what he heard was: I will follow you, Lord; but let me first say goodbye to those at home. To which Jesus gave and instruction: No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God!

Jesus makes his meaning plain: No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God. Every person ministry requires the participation and energy of everyone. There is no room for those who stand on the sidelines expecting others to do the work. No use huffing a puffing about the audacity of the religious right if you are not going to do the work needed to preserve and defend a more authentic Christian vision.

Christian community can be a force for good, but as we see Christian community can also be a facade for more pernicious doctrine and a defense of the indefensible. A lot hangs on what the exact nature of being organized involves and the goal for which we organize. Is the rallying cry back to the future or is it working for a future different than the past?  

Jesus has a habit of cutting to the quick by employing more than a little hyperbole. His words in Luke 9 need to be heard in the context of urgency. Jesus has turned his face towards the road to Jerusalem. This is the road of discipleship and if we are willing to travel with Jesus on this road, we will learn what it means to move beyond the commitments of membership to embrace the urgency of discipleship.

On the discipleship road to Jerusalem the first lesson we learn is that there is no time to lose; there is no room any longer for hesitation. The second lesson of discipleship is that there is no yesterday and no tomorrow – only today. Whoever puts a hand to the plow and looks back is lost. Imagine what we might achieve if we really take this to heart.

Once again, the assertion of patriarchy – the fear-fueled maintenance of gender inequality – casts its dark shadow across the bodies of America’s women – trans as well as cisi gendered – with clear implications for members of the LGBTQ community and other minorities who do not identified in the text of the Constitution.

No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God. Plowing season has been thrust upon us – the urgency of the moment is upon us. Can there be no better time to get our hands dirty.

This past week Al and I have been glued to a drama streamed on Prime pay to view set at the height of the Cold War and concerns Russia’s return in 1956 of the Porkkala Peninsula to Finland – a peninsular that Finland had been forced to lease to Russia along with ceding the province of Karelia as part of the peace treaty that ended what the Finns refer to as the Continuation War – the second Finno-Russian war from 1941-44 – actually a sub-theatre of the larger conflict between Nazi Germany and Russia after 1940.

With the Russia-Ukraine war very much in our minds today – Shadow Lines offers a glimpse into the perpetual struggle of Russia’s European neighbors against its neo-colonialist and imperialist designs. Shadow Lines give us a glimpse not only into Finnish-Russian relations at the height of the Cold War but also into the tensions between pro-Western and pro-Soviet factions within the Finnish political establishment – playing out against the background of Moscow’s own internal tensions with the rise of Khrushchev and the defeat of the Stalinist faction led by Molotov.

In Shadow Lines there is depicted a brief homosexual affair between an American CIA agent and the nephew of the head of the Finnish Security Service. It’s a very short interlude – yet it captures the spark of hope that comes in a moment when perhaps for the first time it’s possible for these men to imagine liberation from the crippling isolation resulting from the oppression and persecution that characterized societal attitudes towards the love that dare not speak its name. This is 1956, and of course the affair is doomed. It no sooner sparks then it’s over. To provide more detail would simply be to spoil your viewing experience.

On June 19, 1865, the Black dockworkers in Galveston, Texas, first heard the news of Lincoln’s Emancipation order. Chris Manjapra writing in the Tahlequah Daily Press notes: The arrival of Union troops in Galveston brought the promise of freedom for the enslaved. There were speeches, sermons, and shared meals, mostly at Black churches, the safest places to have such celebrations. The perils of unjust laws and racist social customs were still great in Texas for the 250,000 enslaved Black people there, but the celebrations known as Juneteenth were said to have gone on for seven straight days.

By a quirk of the local calendar, in Providence this year, Gay Pride and Juneteenth celebrations fall on the same weekend. Two themes link the gay interlude in Shadow Lines and Juneteenth. The first is the theme of hope that is sparked in the oppressed in a moment of epiphany when the dark clouds of persecution part to allow a glimpse of rainbow of liberation to seep through. The second is the illusory nature of the first flush of promise. Like all epiphanies it’s no sooner here than it’s gone. The persecution of gay men not only continued but increased in ferocity as the 1950’s progressed.  The shocking white collusion against black liberty known as the era of Reconstruction maintained the literal if not the legal enslavement of African Americans until the challenge of the black led Civil Rights movement in the middle of the 20th-century.

The era of agitation for change beginning in the late 1960’s gave birth to two great emancipation movements – Gay Liberation and the black led Civil Rights. Looking back over 50 years we can see the huge inroads these protest movements made into institutional and societal oppression and persecution of LGBTQ  and African Americans. Yet, we are living in a period when the forces of reaction are once again rallying to roll back the gains of the civil rights era not only for the African American and LGBTQ communities, but also for women, for the movement for Women’s Rights was also a fruit of the larger civil rights struggle.

Pride is the official term that came to identify the movement for what was then known as gay liberation. Although not an officially adopted title for the black and women’s liberation movements, pride – the experience of claiming the full stature of one’s God given human dignity – is the underlying motivation in all three liberation movements. Although the gaining of civil and legal rights is paramount in making inroads into societal attitudes of discrimination and oppression – at the heart of the liberation struggle lies the experience of pride, as in, the experience of a profound reordering of an internal sense of self.

LGBTQ persons, African Americans, and women are emblematic communities of representation for all communities of race, ethnicity, and religious affiliation who once again find themselves in the cross hairs -literally as well as metaphorically – of domestic terrorism – both individual and organization led.

The convergence of Pride Weekend and Juneteenth celebrations in Providence this weekend is a coincidental reminder that at the heart of this weekend’s celebrations of gay and black pride there has never been a more vital need to continue to demonstrate and to protest the forces of reaction whose trademark is domination implemented through violence.

At the end of the N.T. reading for Pentecost 2, we find prophetic words from the Apostle Paul. Paul was not always prophetic. Paul was a man who understood well the societal and political limitations of preaching a message of liberation for all in a world violently conditioned by male patriarchy and economically dependent on a culture of slavery. More often than not – his social message is veiled as a result. But every so often the power of the Holy Spirit overwhelms him as it does in chapter 3 of his letter to the Galatians where he proclaims that within the community of the baptised there is no longer the oppression rooted in gender inequality, racial superiority, and the economic subordination of one human being to another. For all are made one in Christ. To: no longer male and female, no longer Jew or Greek, no longer slave or free, had Paul been writing today he might have been inspired to proclaim the abolition of a fourth category of sexual identity discrimination – neither gay or straight, neither gender fixed or trans-gender.

Paul begins his abolition of discriminations supporting oppression with: For as many of you as were baptised into Christ have clothed yourselves in Christ. Today we baptize two young boys, Giovanni and Masiah into the family of Christ in the world – incorporating them through baptism into the community that strives to seek to be more fit in this world for the purpose God calls it to.

As a preparation to witness Giovanni and Masiah’s baptism, we will be asked to renew our own baptismal promises. In the Baptismal Covenant we will promise to – with God’s help – seek Christ in all persons, loving our neighbor as we love ourselves, striving continually for justice and peace among all people by respecting the dignity of every human being.

As the church, we are the community bearing witness to God’s love for the world. That love is not a sentimental or hippy-dippy kind of feeling. Christian love is always a verb – as in to love – as the living out of love through lives lived striving for the betterment of our world.

On the weekend of Gay Pride and Juneteenth fall together, it is good to be reminded that love as Jesus modeled it – is a social movement with a finely tuned radical agenda – and justice is its name.

The Trinity means a lot to Episcopalian-Anglicans. I mean – who knew? My first sermon at St Martin’s was on Trinity Sunday in 2014. I preach on this anniversary each year with a sense of the poignancy of the Trinity lying at the heart of my love for this community.

Despite its popularity as the dedication for many of Episcopal-Anglican churches – the Trinity is poorly understood if not downright incomprehensible to most of us. Even the Lectionary struggles with suitable readings for The Trinity because – yes you guessed it – there is no explicit mention of The Trinity in the Bible – although John’s Prologue and Genesis 1 hint at it.  We find the clearest statement of the Trinity of God in the Nicene Creed – so in other words – clear as mud to most of us.

Despite the incredulity of our Jewish and Muslim neighbors, we Christians believe that God is one. It’s just that for us the one God is a divine community and not a solitary being. How do we know that God is community and not solitary? We know it through our experience of God. We know that God is the creator – the source of all that is. We also know that in Jesus, God the Creator entered underneath the tent of creation – showing us that in a human face and in a human life – all that is essential to know about God is revealed to us. We know through the indwelling of the Spirit of God – the Holy Spirit – the divine energy’s infiltration of everything in creation. We are saturated with the inflation of the Holy Spirit, whom the first Christians clearly associated as the Spirit of the risen Christ – empowering them to collaborate with God in the ongoing healing of the world.

Our gospel for Trinity Sunday comes from John 16. At verse 12 we encounter a very significant sentence in which Jesus explains to his disciples that there remains much he does not have time to explain to them. He recognizes that they have already had their worldview blown open – consequently they have no bandwidth for more. But Jesus goes on to make them a promise. He tells them that when the Spirit of truth comes, they will be guided into all truth.

The Bible may not explicitly speak of God as a trinity – a divine community, but Christian experience of God became fundamentally contoured by it. At the heart of their experience of God they were guided into further understanding – a process gathering momentum until by the 4^th-century Christians were ready to give expression to their fundamental experience of God in the Nicene statement.

At the heart of our understanding of God is the mystery of relationship. This relationship has been traditionally referred to in the gendered terms of father, son, and spirit – the spirit carrying the male pronoun he/his. But gender here is a red herring. At the heart of the traditional language of the Trinity is the notion of relationality. Taking relationship to be the essence of Trinitarian language, today we can avoid the gendered overtones by referring to God as lover, beloved, and love-sharer. Relationship not gender is the key characteristic that identifies the Christian experience of God.

The Christian experience of God as divine community whispers to us through the Scriptures where we find in Genesis the extraordinary statement Let US make humanity, in OUR own image. And so, it was – humanity, male and female, fashioned in the divine image.

Our modern development of a psychologically informed understandings of human nature identifies us as relationship seeking beings. From the first moments when the newborn reaches for the mother’s breast – the impulse for connection – relational seeking – can be witnessed. All therapeutic work – regardless of theoretical school has a single aim – to repair our broken experience of relationship by equipping us with more successful skills in future relationship seeking.

We experience love through relationships. Our relationships are nurtured in community beginning with the community of the family and moving outwards from there. No one is an island – as John Donne reminds us – because we are not fashioned in the image of a solitary deity. We are fashioned in the image of a God who enjoys love as the fruit of mutual relationship within community.

In Western art the Trinity has been largely depicted diagrammatically as a triangle or as overlapping or concentric circles without beginning or ending. The eye follows towards the completion of the circle only to find itself back at the beginning.

Western depictions of the Trinitarian nature of God depict the divine unity but miss the essential truth that God is relational and communal. It is to the Eastern Christian Tradition of Orthodoxy with its deeply mystical-devotion to the Trinity that we find the most complete depiction of the essential nature of God. This is a picture not for the mind, but for the heart.

Rublev’s famous depiction of the Trinity as three identical persons, lovingly gazing upon one another reflects the conversation about human creation we hear in the first chapter of Genesis. In Rublev’s icon we see three individuals, but our eye is drawn to their essential oneness – for in the face of each, reflects the faces of the other two. Rublev’s icon is the fruit of his prayerful heart’s enthrallment in the endless mutual gaze of divine love.

Contrary to modern depictions of self-discovery as an internally driven, autonomous process, we discover who we truly are reflected in the gaze of another looking back at us. The newborn experiences itself firstly through finding itself reflected in the mother’s face as she lovingly gazes upon her infant’s face – flooding its developing senses with the hormones of wellbeing.

Jesus tells us that we will continue to be guided into all truth. In 14^th-century Moscow, Andrei Rublev was guided by the Spirit into all truth. His was not a truth of the mind but of revelation of the heart – an enthrallment in the mutual gaze of divine love – leading him to depict each of his three faces absorbing and reflecting one another.

The mutuality of love ricochets within the divine community before radiating outwards as the energy – the metaphysical -metaphorical raw material for creation. We are made as relationship seeking creatures – discovering our personhood in relationship with others. The Trinity not only whispers to us through the Scriptures but echoes in the DNA of our human nature. What is the whisper? What is the reverb echo?

We continue to mourn events in Uvalde this past week. On Thursday, in E-News I wrote:

I find myself crying out: Oh Lord, will enough be enough? Let change come soon! But this prayer needs to end with the line we say every week in the post communion prayer: ‘And now, Father, send us out to do the work you have given us to do’.

We continue to mourn events in Uvalde this past week.

A sense of outrage has been further stoked this weekend by the juxtaposition of optics. On the one hand, elementary school age children talking of their need to have predetermined hiding places worked out in anticipation of being shot and white men drooling over weapons of battlefield destruction at the NRA conference – held not only in the same week, but in the same state as the Uvalde tragedy.

The Evangelist Matthew writing of Herod’s slaughter of Bethlehem’s newborn sons in the days following Jesus’ birth, quotes directly from the prophet Jeremiah, (31:15):

 “A voice is heard in Ramah, mourning and great weeping, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more.”

Generations of our children continue to be traumatized by the unpredictable risk of being slain in the course of an ordinary school day. When school shootings become almost as common as school plays.

‘When, Oh Lord, will enough be enough?  

When legislators owe a debt of fealty to the NRA in return for lavish campaign funding – enough will never be enough – ensuring that nothing will get done to make our country a safer place for innocent bystanders – safe for children in school, worshippers at prayer, concert goers, and shoppers in the market.

When, Oh Lord, will enough be enough?  

Today is the Sunday of the Memorial Day Weekend and remembering in our theme. The staff have been preoccupied with the enormous task of clearing the offices in preparation for a long overdue renovation. One of the challenges we’ve been grappling with has been how to deal with the accumulation of archival material. It’s everywhere, whole filing cabinets full – the result of decades of shelving the problem by just ignoring it – cramming it into yet more filing draws or removing it to an even more chaotic document dump in a mildewing room under the Great Hall stage.

During my time as rector the debate has continued unresolved between the archeologist-minded and the pragmatists over not only what to save, but how much to save. Do you save everything, or do you make representative selections?  I’m not an archeologist – and so I tend towards the pragmatists – some materials are emblematic of our history and must be preserved for posterity. Let me hasten to add that I’m not speaking of the parish’s official document records – registers, minute books, legal documents which are all in the walk-in safe. The question is – in the draws full of Sunday bulletins, past stewardship materials, and other yearly communication letters dating back decades – how much of this is necessary to save?

The argument will remain unresolved, I suspect. What’s slightly aggravating from the pragmatist angle is that among those who argue for the preservation of everything there is no one prepared to take on the archival task. Like so much else in contemporary parish life, we’re long on opinions of what to do, but short on actual hands prepared to do it!

A deeper reflection on our archival quandary goes to the heart of what it means to remember. How to preserve a continuity of memory begs the question of not just what and how to preserve memories, but what do memories teach us – what lessons are we to draw from memories?

The Memorial Day weekend betokens the promises of summer after the grueling experience of a New England winter. The three-day Memorial Day Weekend is a godsend for many of us, and so I trust that families and friends will find time for well needed recreation.

However, the Memorial Day Weekend evinces national memory – in particular, the memory of the fallen in war – the men and women who gave their lives for the defense of the nation.

In A Hobbit, A Wardrobe, and A Great War Joseph Laconte writing about the tenacity and courage of the ordinary British soldiers who endured the unspeakable horrors in the trenches of the Great War, comments:

Historians still debate the ultimate achievement of these soldiers, and the causes for which they fought. Were they merely fodder for a vast and merciless military machine that ravaged Europe to no good end? Or did they play a vital role in halting ….. aggression and preventing the dominance of a brutal and oppressive juggernaut over the Continent?

Laconte locates the origins of J.R.R. Tolkien’s vision for the Hobbits and the role they played in confronting evil in his seminal Lord of the Rings epic. Tolkien the soldier, lived among, and fought alongside very ordinary men plucked from the shires and towns of the British Isles. Laconte observes that the “small people” who fought and suffered in the Great War helped inspire the creation of the unlikely heroes in Tolkien’s greatest imaginative work.

A nation’s collective memory of war is a patchy thing. Some wars we like to remember – others we try to forget. Within the collective consciousness of a nation’s war memories there are conflicting lessons to be learned, and in the case of the repressed memories, relearned.

Laconte’s words are applicable to the men who made up the armies of America’s iconic war, the American Civil War – men plucked from the farms and towns of a nation barely 90 years old. It is said that there is no more brutal conflict than when fellow citizens – brothers, cousins, fathers, and uncles take up arms against one another. As the armies of the Civil War crossed and re-crossed each other in what must at the time have seemed an endless game of tug-of-war for territory and advantage, it was also the women, the children, and the old men who remained at home who bore the brunt of this savage conflict in which they endured the horrors of war in the hope for something better.

Flash forward to 2022 and Laconte’s words can be reapplied to Ukraine’s defense of their desire to exist. Ranged against them are once again the forces of sacred violence shaken well into a heady cocktail of Russian religious and imperialistic dreams. For this is a war that floods our 24/7 newsfeeds with the direct horror of war’s savagery when waged against unarmed civilians – the men, women, and children of countless Ukrainian villages and towns. Yet, despite the daily horrors of war, resistance to scared violence is mobilizing the collective will of ordinary people willing to bear the horrors of war in defense of their hope of a future better than their past.

Ukrainian experience is not unique. Around the globe other peoples are facing the evils of oppressive governments or caught up in the endless cycles of communal and religiously stoked violence. Most telling from our American point of view is to note how the significance of Ukraine’s experience is not being lost on Taiwanese and other SE Asian democracies. But Ukraine differs in this respect. This conflict represents an attempt to destroy the rules based world order – an order which even China is wary of upsetting, preferring instead simply a greater influence within it. It is already creating dire economic and food security consequences for countless millions across the globe. Our support for Ukraine represents our realization that we cannot successfully stand aside.

20+ years of low-level insurgency wars in the Middle East are the result of drawing the wrong lessons from our collective memory of war. To our cost the withdrawal from Afghanistan only cemented the realization that we should not have been there in the first place. Afghanistan is the resurfacing – the Deja Vue experience – of living through something we’ve lived through before. Vietnam, our war memory we’ve tried so hard to forget – and because we had convinced ourselves to forget, became Afghanistan.

Failure to remember is the most dangerous thing a nation can do with its collective memories of war – for what we fail to remember we are destined to endlessly repeat. But drawing the wrong conclusion from among the divergence of war memories is the other danger.

Despite some superficial appearances to the contrary, the Russian invasion of Ukraine is not 1914 again. It is not a European parochial entanglement we can afford to sit out. It’s 1939 again. It is a confrontation with a brutal and oppressive juggernaut in the hands of a regime that has no qualms in employing military power to maximum destructive effect. A regime inspired by the heady mix of religion and imperium – driven not only to subjugate its neighbors but heedless of the huge sacrifice exacted from its own population. A regime for whom enough will never be enough.  We need to access the right memory if we are to avoid drawing the wrong lesson and heading off in the wrong direction.

In A Hobbit, A Wardrobe, And A Great War, Joseph Laconte uncovers the sources of the hugely imaginative writings of J.R.R. Tolkein and C.S Lewis. Both men enjoyed a strong friendship forged by their common experience in the First World War. Their friendship grew out of a mutual need to take the memory of the horror of their experience of war and sublimate it into imaginative works of fiction that hold in tension the horror of war with the hope for something better. Together, Tolkien and Lewis created a transgenerational rediscovery of faith, friendship, and heroism – qualities so much in need today.

Before the memory of the fallen we must stand in silence:

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them. 
For the Fallen, Robert Laurence Binyon

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