Trying to preach on something like forgiveness is a real preacher-trap. It’s one of those words, like love and truth and sweetness, that can so easily get reduced to the level of Hallmark cards.

There’s a story about President Cal Coolidge that comes to mind. He was called ‘Silent Cal’ because he spoke little and seldom. He returned home from church one day and his wife said, ‘How was church?’

‘Fine.’

‘What did the preacher talk about?’

‘Sin.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He’s against it.’

Forgiveness is one of those topics and I have this fear that some of you are going to go home today and someone will ask you what did preacher talk about and you’ll say forgiveness, and he’s for it. So if you want to cut to the chase and get a Cliff Notes version of the sermon, that’s it. It’s about forgiveness and I’m for it.

But forgiveness is not only a tricky thing, it’s a word and a concept that is more foreign to most of our worlds than we seem to be aware of. And before going too far into forgiveness, I need to say the point in life is not learning how to forgive everyone you know over and over, day after day. The point in life is learning to associate with the kind of people and to have the kind of relationships that you don’t have to forgive over and over, day after day.

Still, we mess up — or in religious jargon, we sin. I’m going to be using more religious jargon this morning than I usually do, and it’s worth talking about why. This word forgiveness seems to come primarily from Western religion and almost nowhere else. It’s not a Buddhist concept. The notion in Buddhism that you need to be forgiven shows that you’re suffering under an illusion that you need to be freed from. But in Western religion, it’s pretty powerful stuff.

It’s like the concept of sin. The word sin, which I think is really a good word, comes from an ancient Hebrew term that was actually an archery term. It meant ‘to miss the mark.’ So when we use it in religion, it means that we’ve missed the mark in a bigger way. We’ve missed the mark in that we’ve missed living as the kind of person we should have, establishing relationships at the level that’s worthy of us and worthy of the other person. We’ve missed that kind of mark.

Nevertheless, the problem for an immense number in our society, not just most people here, is how do you find forgiveness when the notion of a Heavenly Father is no longer either coherent or compelling for you? How do you find forgiveness without a forgiver? In the twentieth century, the role of hearing confession and granting absolution for sins, to put it that way, that role was really taken over in our society from religion by psychology. Even ministers and priests went to see their shrinks to get forgiven rather than going to see each other.

It’s an often told story that if you have a problem with alcohol addiction or drug addiction, the last person on earth you want to tell is usually your priest and the last place that you feel comfortable saying that out loud is your church. That’s why people went to twelve step programs and twelve step programs have been called by some the most successful spiritual groups of the twentieth century.

There was a survey done twenty years ago to find out whether people of different religions nevertheless shared similar values. Unitarians were one of the groups that were in this study. And the study was surprising perhaps in a couple of ways. First, it found that we really don’t differ much from other groups in what we believe. We tend to believe in truth and love and justice and compassion and that life is a gift and so on, the whole list. We may put it differently if we don’t put it in traditional jargon, but the values are the same.

Where we did differ though, sort of sadly, was in what we didn’t value that most others did value. For almost every religion in Western religious traditions, forgiveness ranked right up at the top in things that were valued and yearned for. Among Unitarians, it was near the bottom. Now, if in this survey, they had also included the majority of people in this society who don’t attend any church on Sunday, I would guess that the real percentage of people in this society who actually attend church or temple or synagogue regularly is about twenty percent. For fifty years, the surveys have been saying it’s forty percent, but once in awhile other studies come out to say they’re really sort of fudging these numbers and doubling it. So if it’s true that about eighty percent in our society don’t attend church, and I think that’s probably close, if they had asked that eighty percent, I think they also would have found that forgiveness was something that ranked low in their values. I think the reason it ranks low is because for most people the word forgiveness has all kinds of metaphysical and supernatural overtones. It’s been dipped in centuries and centuries of a religious tradition that say forgiveness is something that comes from the grace of God, and I just don’t know what to do with sentences like that anymore.

There are a lot of other places that you don’t find the word forgiveness and some of these are very surprising to me as I was doing my homework for this sermon. If you look in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, you won’t find an entry for forgiveness. Seems odd. If you look in the Dictionary of the History of Ideas, you won’t find an entry for forgiveness. Seems odd, that’s been an idea for a long time, I think. Even if you look in the Encyclopedia of Religions, the sixteen volume encyclopedia that’s sort of the standard work for all world religions, you don’t find and entry for forgiveness. You find and entry for , and for all kinds of animal sacrifices bizarre practices, but not forgiveness.

Now that’s odd. Where you do find forgiveness is in a thesaurus, but even there it says that it means things like to excuse, to absolve, to let someone get away with, to bury the hatchet. It’s all about us. Where you also find an entry for forgiveness is in the Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible. I have all these reference books, I think my secret religion believes in salvation by bibliography. I don’t get to look at them very often, so I’m glad to have a word like this to look up, it makes me feel I was justified in buying those things all those years ago.

In the Interpreter’s Dictionary in the Bible, there’s a very long article on forgiveness. And the person writing the article is saying that estrangement and reconciliation or sin and repentance and forgiveness are what the whole bible is about.

Now those are more religious words so I have to unpack them or you’re going to think we’ve gone into Disney World and I don’t want you to think that. When the bible talks about the fundamental human problem being one of estrangement from God, don’t think in terms of a big critter in the sky. Think in terms of the people who wrote these stories saying that the fundamental human problem is that we are estranged from the center of life, the source of life, those things that make life feel more real, more true and more full. The word God is a symbolic shorthand way of saying that. And a shorthand way of relating to that. But don’t turn them into Hallmark cards.

What’s different about forgiveness in the bible and in western religions is that forgiveness isn’t about us. Forgiveness is part of a relationship that we have with life, with God, whichever terms you’re comfortable putting it in. Sin means that we have missed the mark in trying to live up to what we think is most true, most noble, what we know is demanded of us. Repentance means we’re trying to find a way to say this and somewhere to say it, and someone to whom to say, ‘Look, I missed the mark, can I be made whole again?’ Life isn’t about being perfect, it’s about trying to become whole. And forgiveness is part of a process that lets us restore a wholeness that we’ve lost when we’ve missed the mark.

The fact that you can’t find forgiveness an entry in major reference encyclopedias of the twentieth century, either for philosophy, the history of ideas, or religion is a measure of the fact that our whole world has changed in the last couple hundred years. We’ve lost that easy access to a sense that there is somewhere we can go to say, ‘I sinned, I messed up, I missed the mark. Can’t somebody forgive me? Can’t this somehow be made whole again?’

There’s a poem written about 160 years ago that I like here. I think usually our poets are aware of these things before most of the rest of us are. I want to read you this poem, it’s one you may not have heard before. A poem by Thomas Hood, a man about whom I know almost nothing, except that he lived from 1798 to 1845. And he lived during the time in the nineteenth century when we were losing touch with the mythic world, the older world, the stories, the Father in Heaven that we could talk to about things like forgiveness. It’s a nostalgic poem and a romantic poem, but see if you can’t identify with some of the feelings, at least at the end of it.

The name of the poem is ‘I Remember, I Remember’

I remember, I remember the house where I was born,

The little window where the sun came peeping in at morn.

He never came awake too soon nor brought too long a day

But now I often wish the night had borne my breath away.

I remember, I remember the roses, red and white,

The violets and the lily cups, those flowers made of light.

The lilacs where the robin built and where my brother

Set the laburnum on his birthday, that tree is living yet.

I remember, I remember where I used to swing

And I thought the air must rise as fresh to swallows on the wing.

My spirit flew in feathers then, that is so heavy now.

And summer pools could hardly cool the fever on my brow.

I remember, I remember the fir trees, dark and high

I used to think their slender tops would touch against the sky.

It was a childish ignorance, but now it’s little joy

To know I’m farther off from Heaven than when I was a boy.

We’re all farther off from Heaven than when we were children and that’s why a word like forgiveness can’t seem to find its way into our consciousness or even into our reference works anymore. It seems to be part of a world long ago. The problem is that the need for forgiveness comes from within our human condition, so it still remains.

In my way of thinking, forgiveness connects naturally with another religious concept. It’s an idea from the Jewish tradition and it’s the concept of atonement. The Jews have a day of atonement called Yom Kippur every year. This year it was the end of September, the 27th , I think. It’s quite an interesting holiday, but the word atonement is what’s most interesting to me. At the end of the day of atonement, Jews are all supposed to go out and do a good deed for someone else as soon as they can. So the notion of atonement ends with reestablishing connections with others.

The word atonement is wonderful. It’s the only English word, I believe, that became a theological concept. And the meaning of the word is in it’s spelling. If you look it up, the word means ‘at -one-ment’. It means just what it says. It’s the sense of being at one again as part of a relationship from which we’ve become estranged, that got breached, that somehow now has been made whole again. And the thanks for this is something we express by going out and doing something good for others.

Jewish thought is usually very down to earth and non-supernatural. You see this way of thinking in some of the Jewish writings and some of the psalms, especially the 90th Psalm, one of my favorites. The 90th Psalm begins with words about how God has been our dwelling place forever and ever and ever, but now God is gone, long gone and not around our lives and there’s the hope in the psalm that God will return again — not so God can fix things, but so we can be inspired to fix things. And the end lines in the 90th Psalm are the key to this. The psalm ends with the words, ‘Let the favor of our God be upon us, and establish the work of our hands upon us. Yea the work of our hands establish thou it.’

It’s easy to see why so many people would still go to God to find forgiveness. And for those people for whom that language works, I envy them. It doesn’t work for me. But mostly the kind of atonement we need, and mostly the kind of forgiveness we need is the work of our hands. And we’ve often forgotten how to do it. Because it involves reestablishing a connection to a bigger relationship that once gave life and that got broken because somebody, maybe us, missed the mark.

I have a story about the kind of forgiveness and the kind of atonement that’s much closer to the kind that most of us need in life. The story was told to me as a true story. I don’t know whether it’s true or not, but it’s one of those myths that are always true whether they ever happened or not.

It’s a story about a nurse named Sue who one night, in a blustery winter evening in January, went down to check on her patients and she checked on the man down in 712. He’d had a mild heart attack earlier. And she checked on him and all of his vital signs were fine, and everything seemed to be stable. But as she turned to leave his room, he suddenly grabbed his sheets so tight that his knuckles turned white and he raised up in bed and he said, ‘Please, you must call my daughter and you must call her now.’ He said, ‘It’s urgent.’ And she said, ‘Well, sir, you seem to be doing fine.’ He said, ‘You don’t understand. She’s the only child I have and you must call her now, it’s urgent.’ And she noticed that his breathing was now quite labored and quite irregular. He said that the daughter’s name and number were in his records and the nurse said she would call her. As the nurse turned to leave, the man said, ‘Nurse, do you have a piece of paper?’ And she looked in pockets and found a yellow scrap of paper so she gave it to him and went to call the daughter.

She expected the daughter to concerned about her father’s health but she didn’t expect the daughter to become nearly hysterical. The daughter was screaming, ‘No, this can’t be true, he just can’t die.’ And the nurse said, ‘Well, we don’t know and he seems fine although his breathing is a little labored and he wants you to come right away.’ And the daughter said, ‘You don’t understand.’ She said, ‘We’ve lived in the same town for thirty years.’ And she said, ‘I haven’t seen him for a year. And the last time I saw him, we had a terrible fight. I screamed at him, ‘I hate you, I wish you would die’, and I slammed the door. He just can’t die!’

After this call, the nurse went back to check on the man who’d become now a part of her world. And she found him very still. She checked his pulse and there was none. She did CPR while she was waiting for the emergency team to arrive. But the team was too late. And no matter what they did, they realized that the man had died. One by one, the emergency team left the room, someone finally turned off the gurgling oxygen machine.

The nurse was the last to leave the man’s room and she saw in the hallway one of the doctors talking to a very upset young woman who had to be the daughter. The nurse went out and brought the daughter in to her father’s room. And the daughter cried almost uncontrollably. And then she grabbed the sheet that had covered her father and used it to wipe her eyes and cried more. When she did this the nurse saw the yellow piece of paper that she had given the man. And she picked it up and looked at it and handed it to the daughter. What the man had written on the yellow piece of paper before he died was, ‘I love you. I forgive you. I hope you forgive me. I know you don’t hate me.’ And it was signed Daddy.

That’s forgiveness. And it happened by reestablishing a relationship that had been broken because two people had missed the mark. Maybe the daughter could have found that kind of forgiveness and at-one-ment on her own in years to come without that piece of paper, through thought or through therapy or through time. But I doubt that it would ever have had the power that it had from her father. And isn’t it sad that the forgiveness and the atonement only went one direction? Isn’t it sad that the daughter never got the chance to say those words to her father before he died?

I’m reminded of one last piece of religious wisdom that’s little known and worth sharing. It comes from the Lord’s Prayer. As many of you know, I’ve been involved with The Jesus Seminar for over a decade. That seminar has done a lot of good things. One of the things that it’s done is in clarifying the Lord’s Prayer and translating it. We’re clear that as the prayer as written Jesus never said it, for a variety of reasons, one of them being the whole notion of speaking on behalf of a group of people that he didn’t do anywhere. He would never have said ‘Our Father’. He would talk about life or truth or the need to establish a more authentic relationship with God, but he never spoke for a group of people or acted as though he were their minister.

But three lines in the Lord’s Prayer are, we think, true to what the man Jesus cared about and would have said. One is the line ‘thy kingdom come.’ Jesus taught about his notion of the kingdom of God, and wanted it to become established on earth. A second line is ‘give us this day our daily bread.’ Jesus and his followers begged for their meals, and we believe he would have asked for just the day’s bread. The third line is the one that is almost always mistranslated. We’ve learned it as ‘forgive us our sins, as we forgive the sins of others,’ and that’s kind of a nice line. But the word ‘as’ needs to be translated better. Read rightly, the sentence should read ‘Forgive us our sins to the extent that we forgive the sins of others.’ To the extent that we forgive the sins of others. Very different!

We need to take this out of mythic language. This isn’t about someone talking to a God in some dramatic way. That’s not what sacred writings are really about. This is an insight into the facts of life. And the insight is that we seem to find forgiveness to the extent that we are able to grant it to others. So finally it is the work of our hands we seek to establish, though it is work we always struggle to learn just how to do, because it is hard for us.

Let us try to seek this kind of forgiveness before we run out of time, before we have to grasp at little scraps of paper to write the messages we can’t find the courage to say out loud here and now. Let us confess our sins for missing the mark, and repent of them, and seek the forgiveness that reconnects us with our larger relationships. The work of our hands, all of our hands. Here. Now. Let us seek it before it is too late. Amen.

This is the season when we start hearing endless harangues about the ‘real’ meanings of these holidays. I’m not sure there’s only one meaning, though it’s easy to lose patience with all the hokey meanings that get glued to these holidays. A few days ago I received in the mail from a woodworking place here in town the announcement that they have a Thanksgiving sale on drill bits. So you can use Thanksgiving as sort of a warm-up for the biggest commercial season of the year which is coming up immediately following. Thanksgiving can also be and is usually taken as a time of an annual reckoning when we count our blessings. When we look around and realize that the friends, the families, the life that we have is much more blessing than curse, that we’re lucky to have it and the appropriate response is to give thanks for it. This is good, even better than drill bits.

But I want to take this to another level this morning. This is the fifth in a five part series of sermons, though I think I’ll add a sixth part to the five part series next week, just to keep it confusing. But this is the fifth in a five part series of sermons on stages of grieving something that has died for us. It’s used in a lot of ways, but I’ve been using it primarily to talk about old religious beliefs that may once have served us, that may have been familiar, but that no longer give us life. Things that even if you could say you believe them — which in many cases you can’t — you still wouldn’t have any idea what possible sense they make. It’s an old habit and it may be a rut, but it’s your rut, and you’re not sure how to get out of it. There’s a that was developed by Elizabeth Kubler Ross about thirty years ago for dealing with the stages that people go through in dealing with the loss of something. And these are the stages we have been using and applying to religion.

The first thing we do when we’re threatened with the loss of something important and life-giving and from which we have derived our identity is to pretend that nothing really happened. That’s the stage of denial, otherwise known as ‘the ostrich school’ of response. When denial doesn’t work, we can get angry about it. You can see two-year-olds throwing these tantrums where they are trying to use anger to control everyone around them to do things their way: two-year-olds of any age. We have all done it. When anger doesn’t work, we try to make a deal. We try to keep what we can of the old ways so that we don’t have to make the major change that is still scary. So we make a deal, we play at Bargaining.

There are a lot of deals going on in religion where people who have outgrown beliefs of their past, whatever their beliefs were, still go through the motions and still pretend that they really believe things that they have no idea how to make any sense at all of because they want so much to remain a part of the world that once gave them life. And they make a deal and the deal seems to feed them. Some deals are good deals as long as you don’t lose yourself in them. But a lot of times the deals don’t work.

And then you come to the fourth stage which is really the most frightening of the bunch. Elizabeth Kubler Ross called it depression but it was severely under-named. It’s at least a despair and it’s sort of a terrified despair at that. This is what happens when you realize that you have lost a world. You have lost who you were and how you thought things were and you don’t have a story to live within and you don’t know who you are and if you don’t know who you are and what your story is you literally don’t know how to go on. Our stories are our road maps through life.

I told you a story three weeks ago from some of the works of Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen about this kind of despair, this kind of losing a world and how severe it is. There’s nothing romantic about it. This isn’t Hallmark greeting card stuff. It was a story about a young college athlete, quite a football star in California, who had his right leg amputated above the knee because of cancer, and who didn’t want to go on, he lost his entire life. His life had been big man on campus, fast cars, fast women and the rest of it, and it was over for him. That’s the despair of losing a world. He would never be again who he had been until then. Never. And you’ve got two choices, you accept a different kind of life that you never thought you would have accepted just a year earlier, or you don’t go on.

So the acceptance that comes isn’t something light and fluffy. The kind of acceptance involved in this stage means that you’re accepting an identity for yourself and an identity for life that you would not have found acceptable a year ago. This doesn’t mean that you’re defining yourself at a lower level at all. It’s usually at a higher level. It does mean that you’re defining yourself at a deeper level.

I like the Thanksgiving story as one of the most powerful, classic stories of at least the last two stages, though all of the stages were involved in this. I think it’s a classic story not only for Americans, but for the human condition and one we should know and know well. And we should tell ourselves this story at least once a year. I also like the story of the pilgrims and the first Thanksgiving because when you learn more about them you realize there’s a lot about the pilgrims you can not respect or like.

Now we see them dolled up on posters and matching gray costumes with big, white collars cooking a twenty six-pound Butterball turkey and making happy with the Indians. We see the pilgrims wrapped in the American flag. Many fundamentalists will talk about the vision of the country’s founders that we have lost; they don’t mean the founders. Those are the people in the eighteenth century who gave us the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. When fundamentalists look back nostalgically for the image of a nation made in their image, they mean the pilgrims. And one of the things we can be thankful for every Thanksgiving is that we don’t live in the kind of country the pilgrims wanted! The pilgrims were what today we would call fundamentalists. And the social agenda, and I’ve said this before, the social agenda of fundamentalisms are the same worldwide regardless of their religion. We saw it in the Taliban, we saw in that amazingly unguarded interview between Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. And we can see it 380 years ago in the story of the pilgrims.

So let me tell you about the pilgrims. They started in England, but they left England because they didn’t have the freedom to believe what they wanted to believe. Now so far they sound like our kind of people. We’re all about religious freedom and freedom of belief and will go to great lengths to make sure that people have them whether their beliefs agree with ours or not.

From England the pilgrims went to Holland because Holland in the early seventeenth century was a wildly pluralistic kind of country, much closer to the United States of today than England was. And they certainly had freedom of belief in Holland. You could believe anything you liked in Holland but no belief was going to take precedence. And that’s when one of the dark sides of the pilgrims was shown because while they wanted freedom to believe their things, they did not want the freedom for anyone else to believe things that were wrong. And they were lucky enough to know what was right.

So when the pilgrims left Holland to come to this country, they left it ironically because it had far too much freedom of belief. More than they wanted in the new country. They came here to civilize the Indians after they got here, to civilize the wilderness, and to Christianize America and to establish a country where there was freedom only to believe what they believed. And if you know your early American history, you know that is exactly how our colonies began.

Our colonies were on the verge of perpetuating the religious warfare that tore Europe apart and the only thing that prevented it was finally the founders setting up a Constitution with a Bill of Rights including a first amendment. The pilgrims would have absolutely detested the United States of America and its Bill of Rights and they would not have permitted it. So we need to know that about them. Don’t just wrap them in an American flag, they would have hated it.

Nevertheless, they showed a courage and a perseverance that are absolutely astonishing. And we have a lot to learn from them. I don’t know how many worlds they lost. They lost a whole world in England. They lost their families, they lost their grandparents, great grandparents, they lost uncounted generations of history that they would never see again. Imagine how this feels, to leave England to go to Holland willing to lose an entire world, to redefine life and start again in Holland and then they lose it again because the world is much bigger than their beliefs can allow. And they lose a second world. And they came here to start a third one.

Originally, they started out in two ships, but one of them wasn’t seaworthy. So they returned and all of them came in just the one ship, the Mayflower. There were 102 pilgrims who came here in 1620. They arrived in Massachusetts to face an absolutely record breaking, brutal, deadly winter. They come to the New World and the world knows them not and loves them not. During that winter — these are numbers I think we should all know — out of the 102 pilgrims that came, during their first winter, 47 died. Almost half. If you think of winter as four months in Massachusetts, that means that they lost about three people a week, all winter long. How long could you do this? Without losing your own will to live? Without losing your own spirit? The courage and the perseverance of these tough pilgrims is something that we need to make a part of us.

In spring, they planted crops, the crops had to be near the graves of 47 of their people, graves they dug in frozen earth during the winter when they weren’t hunting for food to stay alive themselves. They planted crops, they hunted for food and according to all the stories I’ve read, they made friends with the Indians that were here. The Indians were apparently very friendly towards the pilgrims at first. Maybe if the Indians could see 300 years into the future, they wouldn’t have been so friendly, but they were friendly in 1621. And in the fall of 1621, as was their custom from England, they had a Harvest Home Festival. It was a very old English festival, when the harvest comes in, you have a big Harvest Home Festival. And the pilgrims re-instituted that here, it’s what we now call the first Thanksgiving. It was quite an event. The records seem to say that this thing went on three days. Three days of eating and merriment. And the menu was pretty spectacular for the first Thanksgiving, it still sounds good. They had venison stew cooked over an open fire. They had spit roasted wild turkeys stuffed with cornbread, sweet corn baked in its husks, and pumpkin baked in a bag and flavored with maple syrup. After dinner, according to legend, Chief Masasoit’s brother disappeared into the woods and returned with a bushel of popcorn, which the pilgrims had never before tasted.

Perhaps, in life, all’s well that ends well. But this didn’t end well without great loss, great pain, and great resolve. Thanksgiving isn’t a holiday for people who have never lost anything. Without the loss, you can still have the turkey but it doesn’t have the meaning, or the victory, that it had for these first pilgrims.

t first, they must have tried denial. When the first one of them died the previous fall, and then the second and third, they must still have thought that might be all, that the rest of them would make it. We have no records of their anger, and in their style of religion it doesn’t seem likely they would have expressed it — at least not towards God. But inside, how could they avoid anger at the loss of so much and so many? I wonder what were the bargains they offered God in their private prayers? ‘Just spare our family God, and we will work even harder for your glory.’ Then, ‘at least spare our children,’ and ‘spare something, spare someone, anyone.’ In return, they would convert — whom, the Indians?

At some time during that cruel winter, though, despair had to settle in. My God, almost half of them were dead, there was no reason to think the other half wouldn’t follow them the next winter. If this was the land God had chosen for them, he certainly had a perverted way of showing them its bounty! We don’t know the depth or style of despair these pilgrims went through. What would you feel, losing half your people, uncertain whether the rest of you might soon join them? I’ve never had as many good reasons to feel despair as they did. They had at least 47 good reasons for giving up, another 55 reasons to keep holding on, but it had to feel like a close call, don’t you think?

What they were being offered, finally, wasn’t what they had wanted or hoped for at all. Little glory, limited joy, many grave markers, many searing memories, a long long way from their homeland, their relatives — everything and everyone. What did they get? Life, and even then only for half of them. Life, food, the chance to survive another year, and the chance to do something else. Something that still stuns us by its audacity, its unlikeliness, its irony. Right there, right in the middle of the fields of suffering and death, in the heart of this new land which had still not decided whether it would let them live, right there with some new friends, they stopped, they celebrated, they threw a party, and they gave thanks.

I like to think that just that simple act of giving thanks offered them freedom and courage to go on, and began the healing of wounds they would wear like battle scars forever. Just their ability to accept the gift of life — however it was to be offered to them — and to accept it with praise and gratitude, just that. I like to think that offered the most and the best healing and blessing they were going to find. I like to think that just that simple act of giving thanks blessed them, and blessed those who followed them.

I know it works for us.

We love war stories. We always have. We still make WWII movies, 56 years after the war ended. And one of them (Saving Private Ryan) won several Oscars a few years ago, and almost won Best Picture. The Rambo movies tried singlehandedly to rewrite the history of the Vietnam War, letting us win it.

I think there is a select group of war movies that should be required viewing for people in our society who have never been in a war, to get some small feel of the bloody and seductive power war has always had — at least for most men. On that list, I would include Saving Private Ryan, Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter, as well as some powerful anti-war movies like The Americanization of Emily, Gallipoli and All Quiet on the Western Front.

The great combat general George Patton once famously remarked that next to war, all other human achievements shrink to insignificance. I’d hate to see history’s greatest artists, diplomats and geniuses dismissed by this modern incarnation of the god Ares, but for sheer power and excitement, Patton is probably right. Every veteran I have known still defines their war time as the defining experience of their life — as I also do. It isn’t kosher to say it, but I wouldn’t trade anything in the world for my 53 weeks in Vietnam — and almost every veteran of every war will understand.

We love war stories. The oldest story we have preserved in Western Civilization is a war story — Homer’s Iliad, probably written down 2800 years ago: the story of the Trojan war of three millennia ago.

Our notion of the hero goes back to those stories, too. For the Greeka, a ‘hero’ was half way between humans and gods: someone of nearly superhuman personal courage and skill in the service of some higher ideal the Greeks admired.

That’s the key. It isn’t just courage, it’s a selfless courage in the service of a higher ideal. Heroes fight for others. So do the soldiers we admire. When they fight for small or selfish ideals, we never think of them as heroic:

Mafia fights have often been bloody, and required some courage to pull off. But the slaughter was tribal, in the service of one family’s greed, usually involving profits from prostitution, drugs or gambling, nothing nobler. So we may be fascinated by stories of the Godfathers, but we don’t regard them as heroes. We don’t have holidays to celebrate them.

Mercenaries, soldiers for hire, also risk their lives. But we think of them as opportunists with way too much testosterone, not heroes.

And violent atrocities during war are never regarded as heroic. Many of us remember Lt. Calley and the Mai Lai massacres of the Viet Nam War, where his platoon slaughtered an entire Vietnamese village of men, women, children and babies. He was court-martialed, not given a ticker-tape parade.

We have similar reactions to the military violence of the Nazis, the Salvadoran death squads, the horrible acts of ‘the killing fields’ in Cambodia and so many others. Bullying, brutality and barbarism have never been admired, even though they continue to be imitated. We know the difference between barbarism and heroism, and it is a nearly sacred difference for us.

On Veterans’ Day, we try to remember the nobler, more selfless and heroic acts of men and women who put themselves at the service of orders they believed served the best parts of our country’s history and heritage. Few of our veterans were in actual combat. In the Vietnam War, about 90% of our soldiers were support troops, only about 10% saw actual fighting, and I imagine it’s still about the same. But every one of them made themselves available, and was there to do whatever was asked of them, the clerks and cooks just as much as the infantrymen.

There is something here that is striking and heroic. These are ordinary people who will do what they are told because they trust that their country would not ask them to risk their lives if it weren’t necessary. They trust their captains, their generals, their president. They trust us.

There is an unwritten, unspoken covenant that soldiers make with their countries. It’s a deceptively simple covenant. They say, ‘I’ll risk my life, maybe even lose it, in a cause I can’t fully grasp, in a battle that is part of a larger war I’ll never understand. I’ll do it for you because I am one of you and you have asked me to do it. In return, you must promise me two things. First, you must promise that you will do everything in your power to make sure it is a war that is worth my life. Second, you must promise never to forget. You must promise never to forget me, us, and what we did, because we did it for you. You must promise never to forget.’

Veterans’ Day is one of our annually scheduled times to try not to forget, to keep up our part of this holy, bloody, covenant. But in truth, we mostly do forget, don’t we?

It’s hard, almost contrived, to celebrate Veterans’ Day in a liberal church like this. I took part in a service with another Vietnam veteran in St. Paul a year and a half ago, and when all veterans were asked to stand, only six stood, including the two of us on the stage. Six out of about three hundred. Here in the South, the percentages are higher: we had 12-15 out of the 300 present at our second service. Still, it isn’t a big percentage. If you want to see a bigger percentage of veterans, you’ll probably have to travel east of I-35 to some of the black churches, or up the road to some of the big Catholic churches where there weren’t as many college deferments. But here, and in Episcopal churches and churches on the west side of Austin, we aren’t the warrior class. We get others to fight our wars for us.

And once the wars are over, the veterans become almost invisible — especially the broken ones, who are embarrassments in peacetime. Occasionally, you see a license plate on which a veteran wants to remind you that he or she served, and in which war. Once in awhile, we may be dimly aware that somewhere in almost every major city there is a Veterans’ Administration Hospital, where wounded, broken, disabled vets languish away out of our sight and out of our thoughts.

Even our good wars leave many veterans with wounds that will never completely heal. Our bad wars are much worse.

My veteran friend in St. Paul wrote a book about his experiences in Vietnam, and during his research he discovered that more Vietnam veterans have died of suicide than were killed in the entire war. That’s sixty thousand or more suicides. The fact that this is probably the first time you’ve heard this is one measure of just how invisible veterans are.

With the wisdom of hindsight, we can look back on Vietnam and realize that we didn’t keep our part of the covenant back then. The soldiers never promised it would be a good war, because that’s not their job. That’s the part we were supposed to guarantee. It is our responsibility to insure that it is the right war to be fought in that place at that time, just as it is our job to ask those questions in our present war. The soldiers only promised to serve, to risk and even lose their lives if necessary. We were also supposed to remember them for it. But after the humiliation of defeat in Vietnam, our society blamed the veterans for losing a war that should never have been fought, and many of them — tens of thousands of Vietnam veterans — were undone by it. The effects on their families, children and friends are incalculable.

People who attend liberal churches like this where over 90% of the members hold college degrees are never likely to be well represented in the warrior class. But Veterans’ Day still has a powerful message for us. In fact, it brings challenges which fall more directly to us than to almost any other sector of our society — especially since we are now getting drawn into a new war, whose effects may be with us for a long time.

Our favorite war stor (archive cut off – ed.)