“First Lieutenant Jimmy
Cross carried letters from a girl named Martha, a junior at Mount Sebastian
College in New Jersey.” So begins the
title story in Tim O’Brien’s book about American soldiers in Vietnam, The Things They Carried. Published 22 years ago, The Things They Carried lists the objects soldiers bring
with them into and away from war, and then uses them to represent both the
soldiers’ own internal burdens and the larger ones we Americans place on
them. The title story begins with a
matter-of-fact list of what might be found on a soldier’s person during the
Vietnam War:
The things they carried were largely determined by necessity.
Among the necessities or near-necessities were P-38 can openers, pocket knives,
heat tabs, wrist watches, dog tags, mosquito repellent, chewing gum, candy,
cigarettes, salt tablets, packets of Kool-Aid, lighters, matches, sewing kits,
Military Payment Certificates, C rations, and two or three canteens of water.
Together, these items weighed between 15 and 20 pounds, depending on a man’s
habits or rate of metabolism. [Tim
O’Brien, The Things They Carried, p.2]
Over the course of The Things They Carried the list expands. As the tale evolves we learn that the
soldiers carry with them more than their personal items, weapons, or
supplies. The list of “the things they
carried” grows to include all sorts of meanings: their own hopes and fears, the history and
ideals of the nation they represent, the unresolved conflicts of the people
back home. As we move more deeply into
the narrative, the soldiers are seen to carry not only their own burdens. They carry along with them the burdens of an
entire people as well.
Today, November 11, is
Veterans Day. Though it’s not a church holiday, Veterans Day is an important
occasion in our national life. Even
though veterans and the wars they fought were not part of the recent electoral
discussion, I’ve been thinking a lot about veterans this fall. Late last month,
the great George McGovern, presidential candidate and decorated World War II
bomber pilot, died, and many obituaries reprinted his most memorable quote,
said at the height of the Vietnam War: “I'm
fed up to the ears with old men
dreaming up wars for young men to die in.”
In today’s Gospel, Jesus
also appears fed up with those who place burdens on others they’re not willing
to take up themselves. Listen to him
again:
"Beware
of the scribes, who like to walk around in long robes, and to be greeted with
respect in the marketplaces, and to have the best seats in the synagogues and
places of honor at banquets! They devour widows' houses and for the sake of
appearance say long prayers. They will receive the greater condemnation."
[Mark 12: 38-40]
Jesus is “fed up to the ears” with religious functionaries
dreaming up obligations for others. The
scribes—religious bureaucrats of Jesus’s day—live off the sacrifices of
others. In that sense they are like the
old folks who send young soldiers into battles they’re not willing to fight
themselves.
The longer I live, the fewer
soldiers I know. This distance is not
only a function of my age. It is a
result of my social location. We have
just concluded a presidential campaign in which the ongoing war in Afghanistan
was rarely if ever mentioned. Our 21st century wars have been
largely hidden from people like me. The
wars we fight today are wars that we and those with our privileges have dreamed
up for others to die in.
We are gathered on Veterans
Day not only to acknowledge our veterans but to express our gratitude for what
they have given us. But how best do we do that? One way to express our thanks
for those who have served in our recent and ongoing wars is to try to
understand the reality of what they face on a daily basis. I have recently finished reading a powerful
new novel about the war in Iraq. It’s
called The Yellow Birds, and it’s by Kevin
Powers, an Iraq war veteran. The Yellow Birds
is a great novel on its own terms, and it’s also an important way for people
like me to understand a combat experience that carries challenges most of us
never think of. All war is hard, but contemporary soldiers are being asked to
do things we haven’t asked them to do before.
As New Yorker writer George Packer explains,
The nature of [the Iraq] war is particularly hard on the psyche because
of the complete opposites that have to be held together in one person’s head. A soldier said to me, “You cannot turn on and
off the switch in these guys. It’s just
tearing them apart to have to be nation builders and good guys and walk through
villages and sit and drink tea and fighters
who have to go out and shoot people and protect themselves. What we need is two armies, one army of tea
drinkers and one army of shooters.”
[George Packer, “The New Yorker
Out Loud” Podcast, October 29, 2012]
In recent wars, our soldiers have had to serve as both
nation-builders and fighters. They have
to drink tea with people they may also need to shoot. The resulting internal
conflict can be soul-destroying. As
Bartle, the machine-gunner narrator of The Yellow Birds
says,
I feel like I’m being eaten from the inside out and I can’t tell anyone
what’s going on because everyone is so grateful to me all the time and I’ll
feel like I’m ungrateful or something.
Or like I’ll give away that I don’t deserve anyone’s gratitude and
really they should all hate me for what I’ve done but everyone loves me for it
and it’s driving me crazy. [The Yellow Birds,
p. 144]
As Christians, as people of faith, how do we make sense of
the burdens borne by the modern soldier? When we think about the things they
carry, about the burdens we place on the men and women who go to war on our
behalf, we should think as well about someone else who carried a burden for us,
about another young man who walked up a hill carrying not a rifle but a cross.
I am not trying to turn soldiers and veterans into Christ figures. I realize that they’re real, complicated
people like you and me. But I am suggesting that they are important to us
because, as they symbolize both our aspirations and our pains, they remind us
of someone else. As Christians, we know
something about sacramental sacrifice. As Christians we know what it is to
project our dreams and our enmities onto another. As Christians, we know on
Good Friday what going to the cross cost Jesus, and as his followers we know after
Easter what it means to live life in gratitude for the sacrifice made by
another. “Surely he has borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows.” [Isaiah
53.4] “All we like sheep have gone astray. We have turned everyone to his own
way. And the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” [Isaiah 53.6] As Christians we find life’s purpose as
thanksgiving for the gift for us of Jesus’s life on the cross. As Americans we can never be too far away
from the knowledge that we can live our lives in peace because soldiers from
Valley Forge to Gettysburg, to the Somme and D-Day, to Pork Chop Hill and the
Tet Offensive to Kuwait, Iraq, and Afghanistan have been willing to take up a
burden on our behalf.
Today’s Gospel takes place as Jesus teaches in the Temple,
and in it Jesus follows his attack on the scribes by pointing to a widow—the
poorest of the poor in his day—as she quietly makes an offering of two copper
coins, “all she had to live on”. The
widow’s quiet, sacrificial offering shames the pretensions of those who make a
show of their flamboyant benevolence. At
the center of Jesus’s teaching there is always a dual call to outward
compassion and inward humility. He calls
us, by example, to be both generous and humble, to be less like the scribes and
more like the widow, because that’s the way God is. In loving us in Christ, God
offers us “all she had to live on”.
As we gather around Jesus’s table on this Sunday, we’re
invited by God to know ourselves as people loved not because of our outward
appearance but because of who we authentically are. In knowing ourselves that
way, we are asked to be less like the scribes and more like the widow. As we gather around Jesus’s table on Veterans
Day, let us do so giving thanks for the men and women who have served our
country not only by carrying our burdens and living into new and challenging
ways of fighting our wars. Let us give
thanks that in their lives and service we glimpse an image of what it means to
offer everything you have to live on so that someone else might thrive. We cannot all replicate that offering. But we can all acknowledge it and respond by
helping our soldiers and veterans shoulder the things they carry. Amen.
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