Jesus understood human amnesia. He understood the human propensity for living out of recent and shallow memory, rather than long and deep memory. He knew that we would forget many things. And so it was that he spent his last days explaining things to his disciples and rehearsing his teachings. He went over them again and again. Finally, upon the very eve of his departure, the eve of his death, he promised this: “I will send you the Holy Spirit…” Why? “…to remind you of all that I have said to you.”

This morning I want to tell you a story about forgetting.

A few years ago a news item was carried over the wires,  blogged over the net, printed, and aired. The item involved religion, the military and first amendment freedoms.

It was in the summer of 2005 that the media widely reported charges leveled against the US Air Force Academy. The Academy was accused of, “systematic and pervasive religious bias and intolerance at the highest levels of the Academy command structure.”[2]

Here are four of the allegations:

1)        during basic training, cadets who declined to go to chapel

after dinner were organized into a ‘Heathen Flight’ and marched back to their dormitories;

2)   the Air Force’s ‘Chaplain of the Year’ urged cadets to proselytize among their

classmates or ‘burn in the fires of hell;’

3)      that mandatory cadet meetings often began with explicitly Christian prayers;

4)      that numerous faculty members introduced themselves to their classes as born-again Christians and encouraged students to become born-again during the ensuing term.

These are important matters and the Air Force Academy was rightly chastised for permitting and promoting egregious, discriminatory behavior. In reporting on this story, the press focused solely on the issues of first amendment freedoms, proselytizing and religious discrimination. 

What was strikingly absent from the debate, however, was any surprise at all that the Air Force Academy is filled with Christians. Why? Because today the involvement of Christians in the US military is taken as a given. It is assumed. Most Americans and most American Christians see no conflict whatsoever between Christian faith and taking up arms.

This was not always so. The historians of the early centuries of the Christian Church testify to the fact that early Christians refused to bear arms against their enemies. Early Christian leaders like Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian and Hippolytus described the followers of Jesus as peace-making, peace-keeping individuals.

Early Christians adhered to the rigorous ethic of the Sermon on the Mount: turn the other cheek, love your enemy, do not kill, bless those who persecute you and blessed are the peacemakers. Theirs was a tenacious and courageous commitment that gave witness to an alternative to the ways of violence.

These early Christians made no attempt to force the state to give up violence or war.

They simply made their own witness to peace within an otherwise violent culture.

Lactantius, a Christian whose life bridged the 3^rd and 4^th centuries, described Christians as "those who are ignorant of wars, who preserve concord with all, who are friends even to their enemies, who love all men as brothers, who know how to curb anger and soften with quiet moderation every madness of the mind."[3]

So universal and persistent was this witness that Rome regarded the early Christians as pacifists. Because of their peculiar religious beliefs, they were deemed unfit for warfare. Many became martyrs in the cause of peace.

For example, in 295 Saint Maximilian was executed for refusing to join the Roman army.

He said this: “I cannot serve in the military; I cannot do wrong; I am a Christian.” [4]

Saint Martin of Tours was an officer in the Roman army when he converted to Christianity. He told the emperor that he could no longer fight; Why? It went against his religion. He was charged with cowardice and jailed. To prove his courage, he volunteered to go unarmed to the front of the troops.[5]

For the better part of three centuries the followers of the Prince of Peace practiced a radical discipleship that refused to participate in the violence of the state.

Today, on the other hand, we take it for granted that Christians will serve as fighter pilots, sailors on war ships and soldiers wielding automatic weapons.

Somewhere between the first three centuries of the Christian Church and today, it became normative for Christians in the US to take up arms.

There is a story that points to the beginning of this shift. The story is set in the 4^th century and features a Germanic warrior people, the Franks. Some Franks converted early to Christ. But it was said that when Frankish warriors entered the rivers of baptism, ready to confess Christ as their Lord and Savior, they held out from the waters, their weapon-arm … the arm with which they wielded spears, lances, swords and axes … the arm with which they took life. They held their weapon-arm aloft, out of the waters of baptism, so that they would not have to give up their warring ways.

The life of the Christian Church requires deep memory: a memory that reaches back, way back to before the Pilgrims; back to before the Protestant Reformation; back to before the divide that separated the Eastern Church from the Western Church; back to before the baptism of the Franks; back to before the time of Constantine (before Church and Empire ran off together and eloped) … a memory that goes way back to those earliest followers of Jesus.

The film clip we will see immediately following the service invites us to deep memory. It invites us to engage in a living conversation between those early centuries and the 21^st; between the earliest followers of Jesus, and we who, however haltingly, try to follow him in this time.

We are shaped and we are misshaped by a culture of violence: violent video games, violent TV, violent movies. But these are as nothing compared with the violence of the state. Yet, we are schooled to believe that violence is normative and that wars are necessary, even noble.  In the presence of war and of warriors, we have learned to justify actions once deemed heinous: incarcerations without charge or hearing, hiding the bodies of our war dead from public view, the tragedy of over four million displaced persons and refugees, uncounted civilian deaths, the justification of torture. We have learned to accept a national perspective that American lives are worth more than the lives of those of other countries.

Honestly, is it so surprising that children are shooting each other in our cities? Were you so surprised when, on Friday, we heard news of another deadly campus shooting spree?[6]

Once upon a time the Christian community offered a respite from violence … and more than a respite: a defiance of it, and an alternative way of living together on this earth.

Here, in this house of God, we are invited to deep memory: the long-ago memory of a nascent and brave community, those earliest followers of the Prince of Peace… they who were closest to him, who sat at his feet, who heard what he said with their own ears, who thrilled to the hope he inspired of an alternative vision of human community.

Jesus knew we would forget. He understood about human amnesia. He anticipated our human propensity for shallow memory, rather than deep memory. So he promised to remind us. “I will send you the Holy Spirit to remind you of all that I have said to you. Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives.”

In the presence of our forebears – in the presence of that great, courageous cloud of witnesses – we stand reminded.

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John 14.15-31

19In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live. 20On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. 21They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me; and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them.’

25 ‘I have said these things to you while I am still with you. 26But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you. 27Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid. 28You heard me say to you, “I am going away, and I am coming to you.” If you loved me, you would rejoice that I am going to the Father, because the Father is greater than I. 29And now I have told you this before it occurs, so that when it does occur, you may believe. 30I will no longer talk much with you, for the ruler of this world is coming. He has no power over me; 31but I do as the Father has commanded me, so that the world may know that I love the Father.

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[1] I am indebted to “Preaching Lenten Repentance to Church and Nation: Deep Memory and the Catechesis of Repentance”, by David B. Miller, Journal for Preachers. Lent 2008, p. 25f

[2] “Air Force to Probe Religious Climate at Colorado Academy,” By Alan Cooperman, The Washington Post, Wed, May 4, 2005, Page A3

[3] Divine Institutes, Book V. Justice, by Lactantius ; First Apology of Justin Martyr, ch. 39;

[4] "Maximilian". Catholic Encyclopedia. (1913). New York: Robert Appleton Company.

[5] Kurlansky, Mark (2006). Nonviolence: twenty-five lessons from the history of a dangerous idea. Pp 26-27.

[6] A former student opened fire in a large classroom of Northern Illinois University, killing eight, before shooting himself.