We Have Much to Remember
Dr. Roger W. Thomas, Preaching Minister
First Christian Church, Vandalia, MO
Introduction: Memorial Day grew out of the human need to remember where we have been. Only then can we figure out where we are going. The cherished memories of a nation, a town, a church, or a family provide the values and dream that one generation passes on to the next. Forgetting means dropping the torch. We have much to remember!
All of this was on the mind of President Abraham Lincoln on November 19, 1863 as he made his way to the Pennsylvania battlefield. He feared that he might be the last president of the United States. The country teetered on the brink of self-destruction. The ceremony that afternoon would dedicate the site of the cemetery for the over forty thousand soldiers killed at Gettysburg in the three-day battle the previous July. Lincoln’s remarks provided the seedbed for what would become Memorial Day.
“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” he began. Less than two minutes later, he concluded, “The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here (referring to the sacrifice of the soldiers). It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us--that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion--that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.”
Over the next few years, many communities set aside special days to honor the fallen soldiers of the Civil War. Some services were held with little fan fare. Others involved marching bands and speeches. All included decorating soldier’s graves with flowers and flags. Most towns referred to the event as Decoration Day. After World War I the day expanded to honor the American heroes of all wars. Gradually the custom of decorating the graves of relatives and friends became a part of the day. Eventually the official name was changed to Memorial Day. Originally, the day always fell on May 30. In 1971 congress moved the date to the last Monday in May.
Why Memorial Day? Because we don’t want to forget. But we know we do. Memorial Day is one generation’s attempt to help the next generation to remember the lives, the legacies, and the lessons of those upon whose shoulders we stand. We want to remember men and women who paid for our freedom with their blood. We have much to remember.
We need to remember that freedom is never free. The poet immortalized those sentiments in these lines.
“I heard the sound of taps one night,
When everything was still.
I listened to the bugler play
And felt a sudden chill.
I wondered just how many times
That taps had meant "Amen"
When a flag had draped a coffin of a brother or a friend.
I thought of all the children,
Of the mothers and the wives,
Of fathers, sons and husbands
With interrupted lives.
I thought about a graveyard
at the bottom of the sea
Of unmarked graves in Arlington.....
No -- Freedom isn’t free!!”
(Freedom Isn’t Free, Author: Unknown)
We have much to remember!
We need to remember the freedom-loving patriots who birthed this nation almost two hundred thirty years ago. Consider the fifty-seven men who signed the Declaration of Independence. Those men were not wild-eyed, rabble-rousing ruffians. Most were soft-spoken men of means and education. Twenty-five were lawyers or judges. Nine were farmers or plantation owners. Eleven were merchants. The patriot group also included physicians, educators, and a musician, a printer and one minister. Several were sons of pastors. They had security, but they valued liberty more. Despite the danger, they defiantly penned their names beneath the words: "For the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of the Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other, our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.”
Everyone paid a price for our liberty. The British captured and brutally tortured five as traitors. Nine died from wounds or hardships they suffering fighting in the War for Independence. Two lost their sons in the Continental Army. Two had sons captured. At least a dozen had homes pillaged. (SOURCE: "John Shepler’s Writing in a Positive Light. Citation: http://www.execpc. com/~shepler /memorialday .html; information also found in numerous other anonymous pieces.)
We have much to remember.
Every generation of Americans has heroes who defended freedom and laid down their lives for their friends. On Memorial Day 2004, the nation dedicated the new WWII Memorial in Washington. The monument stands as a long overdue tribute to the more than sixteen and half million solders that served in WWII. Today less than five million remain. Their number decreases at the rate of over 1,000 a day. Imagine our world if these brave men and women had not paid the price of liberty. Imagine a world dominated by the Nazis or their heirs. To those of you present today we salute you.
We have much to remember.
The same holds true for our Korea and Vietnam vets. In both cases, American soldiers stood between tyranny and liberty. Was it important? To answer that simply look at the differences between North and South Korea today. Only the willfully blind can fail to see what happens when tyranny rules. Many of us can remember the conflicted days toward the end of the Vietnam War. Fewer remember the devastation, persecution and slaughter that flowed through South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos when the American troops withdrew. The tyranny continues to this day in much of Southeast Asia.
We have much to remember!
Some in recent years have questioned the younger generation. Many have wondered if our young have the right stuff to carry on the legacy of the “greatest generation” that stopped the tide of Fascism and toppled the Iron Curtain. The events in Afghanistan and Iraq have silenced many of the doubters. We have all watched the War in Iraq take place before our very eyes. Unlike any war before, we have been able to get up close and personal with the daily deeds of the soldiers in the front. It has been amazing. Some of it, we probably would have been better off not seeing, but some of it has been very good to witness.
I’ll never forget listening to the embedded reporters talking about and interviewing the young soldiers, many of the men and women still in their late teens and early twenties. I recall one reporter who was interviewing a couple of nineteen and twenty-year old soldiers during a pause in the action just before the invasion of Baghdad. He asked them all the normal questions about their experiences, how their training had prepared them for action, and about their loved ones back home. As the reporter drew the interview to a close, he offered to use the video phone to connect one of the soldiers to his family back home so he could talk to his loved ones live. When he made the offer, the two soldiers looked at one another with surprise and big smiles. They whispered to one another and then one of them spoke up, “If it’s all the same, we would like to go get our sergeant major and let him make the call. His wife is having a baby and he hasn’t been able to talk to her. Could he have the phone call?”
When one of them ran to get the older officer, the camera turned to the reporter. He was wiping tears from his eyes and barely able to speak. All he could say was “Where do they find young people like this?” We have much to remember.
Today we pay tribute to those who defended freedom and paid the ultimate price. We have much to remember! Someone has rightly observed, “It is the soldier not the reporter who has given us freedom of the press. The soldier not the poet gave us the freedom of speech. The soldier, not the politician, has guaranteed our freedom to vote, to assemble, and even the freedom to disagree.”
In other lands and other times, those freedoms haven’t always existed.
We have much to remember.
The movie “Saving Private Ryan” illustrates part of what we must remember. You will recall that the film is set in France during World War II just after the D-Day and the fierce battle at Normandy. A force of 176,000 Allied soldiers had stormed the German fortifications. Thousands had been gunned down in the process. Captain John Miller, the character played by Tom Hanks, survives the landing at Omaha beach only to receive a new and even deadly assignment. The defense department receives notice that a Midwestern family has four sons serving in the war, three of whom have been killed. Their fourth son is in France. The military makes the decision that no mother should suffer the tragedy of losing four sons to war, so they send a team after this last son, Private James Ryan.
The team must overcome countless obstacles, not to mention the enemy, in their search for Private Ryan. Along the way, members of their team are wounded and killed. They begin to ask why the life of this one private should be deemed more important than the lives being sacrificed to bring him home. Why is his welfare held in higher regard than theirs? Tom Hanks is the leader of the outfit in search of Ryan. He does his best to maintain the focus of his men, telling them that it’s not their place to question, but rather to accept their mission and carry out their orders. Their duty is to their country, and their country has asked this of them.
Finally, they locate Ryan. They tell him that they have orders to retrieve him and get him home, but Ryan doesn’t want to leave his unit. Ryan’s unit has orders to keep a group of German tanks from crossing a bridge, until adequate air support can arrive. If they can’t hold off the tanks, then they’re to blow up the bridge. Ryan’s honor and sense of duty to his unit would not allow him to walk away from an encounter that could cost his comrades their lives. He didn’t feel justified in leaving for freedom and safety and leaving them to fight.
Ryan convinces Hanks and his outfit to stay and fight, promising to leave with them after the battle. Captain Miller agrees, but only if Ryan will stay out of harm’s way, so he can make it back home. A bloody battle ensues in which many lives are lost. Miller’s entire outfit is killed, but they save Private Ryan. There’s a gripping scene at the end, in which Hanks is dying. Ryan comes to help, but the Tom Hanks character tells him to go on. Captain Miller calls Private Ryan back. He looks up at him and with his last breathe says to Private Ryan, “Earn this.”
There is a real sense in which we can never truly earn the freedom that we enjoy because others have sacrificed so much for us. We cannot earn it, but we can determine to never forget.
We have much to remember!
***Dr. Roger W. Thomas is the preaching minister at First Christian Church, 205 W. Park St., Vandalia, MO 63382 and an adjunct professor of Bible and Preaching at Central Christian College of the Bible, 911 E. Urbandale, Moberly, MO. He is a graduate of Lincoln Christian College (BA) and Lincoln Christian Seminary (MA, MDiv), and Northern Baptist Theological Seminary (DMin).
