I’ve never heard a sermon on empire.  Certainly never a sermon on America as empire.  Genealogy rises to mythic proportions, and phrases, slogans, and chants become air that suffocates.

It’s Memorial Day.

We’re supposed to remember the people who have died for us.  And I know it’s considered improper to talk about death and sacrifice and America in the context of empire.  Especially on today, of all days.

But why?  Does it tarnish the memory of individual people who served to discuss the larger themes of service, death, and violence?  If we can’t ever talk about it because we have ancestors who were courageous, who lived and died for something they believed in, then when can we talk about it?

Because the service and the death won’t end.

So.  As a mostly pacifist person, who has to have a post on Memorial Day on a book about empire, I guess I’ll talk about it.

*****

America the empire.  Pax Americana.  I benefit greatly from it.  I appreciate those benefits, even as I learn more and more that simply being born a citizen does not guarantee you will benefit from it.

But in church in America- in the ones I’m from, often there was an American flag and a Christian flag, and sometimes we would say pledges to both.

I’m still surrounded by this fear that America is being destroyed one agenda at a time.  But……….so what?  Why was I taught to fear the downfall of a civil politic?

Empires “want us to believe that the future holds no more than a heightened realization of imperial hopes and dreams.”

Lines on a map.  Borders that can’t actually be seen.  There’s a road sign gap between leaving one state and entering another.  As kids, in the car, we’d raise our feet and yell, ‘black line, black line!’

What makes you loyal to one empire or another is simply what side of the black line you were born on.

America the Beautiful.
My Country ‘Tis of Thee.
I Pledge Allegiance.

to a flag.

I was taught we had to take back every star and every stripe. So we learn American history, as if one knowledge absolves us of our lack in another.  And it’s Memorial Day.  When we remember people who died for our freedom, yes.  But we forget it’s under empire that they were sent to kill.

 “But if the rulers and authorities, regimes and empires that so oppress us are to be defeated, they must be defeated not by further violence but by sacrificial love.”

*****

My son loves the Military Channel, and I’m conflicted.

“Mom, why is it the Germans start all the World Wars?”
“Well, they weren’t treated fairly after the first one……”

And so we discuss.  We talk about the effects of weapons and bombs and what they are designed to do.  But he could probably tell you the make and model of every tank, airplane, or gun ever designed.

I’m conflicted.  But aren’t we all?  Isn’t that what we remember today?

Conflicts?

And some of the deaths they cause?  And who among us wouldn’t want our soldiers back to life, and their soldiers resurrected?

We see this picture and we grieve.  We instinctively know this is not right.

We’ve lost our imagination as a throng of hundreds of millions.  Swallowed up by empire and the fear of conversation.  But we have this calling we can return to.  We can awake from this drunken stupor we’re lounging in.  Drink a cup of coffee and take an advil.

“…the exiles are living out of the vision and hope of Genesis, for the good of the empire itself.  This is a call to be God’s people by bringing shalom and healing in places of brokenness and despair.  And what could be more broken and more in need of healing than the place of oppression, the heart of the empire?”

Drink deep from the waters of love.  Let’s learn what sacrifice really means.  What working – and dying – for the good of the empire really means.

preach liberty to the captives

– Isaiah 61:1
The Orthodox Study Bible

Let’s have a Memorial Day where we honor people like Alufunzi Ziwa, Cesar Chavez, the unknown Coptic Christians, Fannie Lou Hamer, Sister Barbara Yakovleva, Óscar Romero, the seven monks, Richard Twiss, Maria Skobtsova, or Kateri Tekakwitha.

That’s worth having a party for.

 

This post is a reflection on the book Colossians Remixed by Brian Walsh and Sylvia Keesmaat.  It’s our #transitlounge book for May.  Link up your posts!

 

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