Hannah Coulter & The Call to Remember & Repent

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Hannah Coulter & The Call To Remember & Repent

John 14:15-21
May 29, 2011

”If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the
Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This
is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees
him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will
be in you.
”I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you. In a little while the
world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also
will live. On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me,
and I in you. They 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.”

Preaching on memorial day weekend is difficult for two reasons, the first
being usually poor attendance because people are taking a much needed
vacation, and when there are not a lot of people in the room, the energy
sometimes becomes a bit drained, but the second, and certainly more
importantly, is the balancing act a preacher must engage in, trying to find a
balance between the important work of honoring those who gave their lives
for this country, and, on the other hand, calling us humans to repent that
such an offering of human life ever had to take place at all. There is a
tension that I don’t think is ever resolved for us pastors, especially those of
us who don’t just ignore all of our nation’s holidays, so that we don’t have
to deal with that tension, the tension between being citizens of both the
church and a nation. For some, it’s an effective strategy, and I’ve heard
preachers argue that we ought to stick solely with the church’s calendar, the
church’s weekly rhythms, rather than to tend too much to our country’s
rhythm’s, because the church’s calendar is far more ancient, far more holy, in
many ways, than any nation’s calendar, and thus we, the church, can avoid
being hijacked by the culture, something that seems to happen to us so
often, much to the shame of the church. The church sometimes becomes
nothing more than an instrument of the state, a tool with which enforce it’s
agenda, for good or ill, and the church becomes neutered, silenced, and
unable to speak up against the actions of the state when its conscience is
violated.

And yet, as much as I understand that position, as much as I sometimes
agree with it, and have seen the church co-opted by the state, in order to
silence dissension about this or than particular policy, this or that war, I think
it’s a bit too simplistic because it ignores the real world in which the church
lives in, the particular country in which it has its roots, and the people that
form its heart in a particular place, and so I think we ought to sit with the
tension of these sort of holidays, these important holidays that remind us
the human cost of war, of our wars, and the cause for which so many gave
their lives. And I’ll tell you the other reason that I feel I can’t ignore this
holiday is because of people like our own Joyce Tutton, and the deep grief
with which she often meets days like this, Memorial Day, where we honor
those who fought for this country, and honor those gave their lives because
of their deep love this place, this particular place, the United States of
America. Joyce reminds me by her grief that we are talking about sons,
someone’s son, who is not here, and whose life was shortened much too
early.

And yet, as much as we tend to romanticize the motives of our soldiers, the
patriotism that often fueled that first rush to war, I think most soldiers will
likely tell you that in the midst of war itself, the motives change somewhat,
as the reality of what is taking place takes hold. I’ve been reading a book
called Upon The Altar of The Nation: A Moral History of the Civil War, which
details the arguments between and within the Union and Confederacy over
the morality of the war, and how it should be fought, and what struck me
very early on the book was the national fervor for war, this lust on both
sides early on in the conflict to get into battle, and to provide opportunities
for young men to show forth their courage. War fever swept both sides (36)
and it seemed as people couldn’t wait to get to devil’s work of killing others,
something you often see in the first heady days at the beginning of a war, a
conflict. I’ll never forget a scene from a movie set in Nazi Germany whose
name I cannot now recall in which all the people had roared to their feet in a
beer garden at the prospect of the upcoming war with the allies, all but one
rose to their feet, and the one who didn’t was an old man who had likely
experienced the first world war, and who knew, who really knew, I suspect,
what these young, brash men and woman didn’t know, that they were
welcoming, celebrating even, the coming of hell on earth.

In a book that my good friend Ed Middleton reminded me of this week, a
book of fiction called Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry, the writer tells the
story of Hannah’s grief over the death of her husband Nathan, and in the
midst of her grief, she decides to explore a part of his life he was never
willing to share, which was his time fighting in World War II on the island of
Okinawa. Nathan had never spoken of that time, as many soldiers choose
not to do when they come back from the horrors of war, but Hannah feels a
drive, a need, to know what her husband had gone through at that most
bloody battle with the Japanese, and so she begins to read of the first hand
accounts of those who fought that battle, trying to get a sense of what her
beloved Nathan had experienced those many years ago, and how it had
effected him, changed him, because she knew that the Nathan who had gone
to fight on Okinawa was not the same Nathan who had returned to her arms
after the war. After Hannah imagines the horrors that her Nathan went
through on a daily basis in that battle, she continues with these words:

You performed the cruelties that were required and sometimes cruelties
that were not, and what would your folks have thought?

You fought for days without knowing where you were, when the known
world consisted of what you could see, the few friends fighting on either side
of you, and the unknown enemy in front. You were lost in an enormous
fact.   The ones of you who were lost in it may never quite have found your
way out of it, and nobody outside it would ever quite understand it. How far
from home were you? How far beyond the political slogans?   You were one
of an army of young men fighting to stay alive, and you were fighting an
army of young men who finally were fighting only to die. They had to be
killed, almost every one of them.

You knew the terrible loneliness of the thought that your life was worth
nothing. You were expendable. You were being spent. Your folks could not
have imagined what you were going through, you could not want them to
know, you would never tell them.

What saved it from utter meaninglessness and madness and ruin was the
love between you and your friends fighting beside you. For them, you did
what you had to do to try to stay alive, to try to keep them alive. For them,
you did heroic acts that you did not know were heroic.
What saved it were the medical corpsmen and stretch-bearers who went out
again and again into the fields of fire to bring away the wounded, who
brought something angelic into that Hell of misery and hurt and destruction
and death.

What saved it was the enormous pity that seemed to accumulate in the air
over it. (170-171)

After the fever for war is over with, like that fever that gripped the nation
before the Civil War, after young men’s desire for the chance to become
heroes on the fields of battle, what you often hear from some of them, many
of them, after they have tasted the bitter dish of war, is that, in the end,
what they wanted more than anything was to stay alive, and go back home
to their Hannah’s, to their loved ones, to their families and friends. On days
like Memorial Days, we remember how many didn’t get their wish, and that
we should grieve deeply, especially as people of faith, because, certainly we
have failed so often to be a people who lived out Christ’s commandments,
especially the last one Jesus gives in the Gospel of John, where he tells them
to love one another, as he has loved them (John 13:34). Our text today has
Jesus in that upper room, giving his disciples his last words, his dying words,
if you will, after he washes the feet of his disciples, and in doing so showing
them a new way of being, a way of service to others, in contrast to the world’
s desire to be served by others. But how will this be possible, how will Jesus’
disciples accomplish this seemingly impossible task, this commandment to
love one another, and perhaps even more impossible task, to love even our
enemies, the ones who wish us harm, the unknown and sometimes known
enemies in front of us, as Wendell Berry has written here. How do we love
the ones who wish us harm, who do us harm, in this world, or how do we
even love the ones that are easy to love, and do it well?

According to Christ, it is possible because he sends himself to us as an
Advocate, the God within us, the Spirit of himself. He speaks in the third
person here of God’s spirit, but in John, they are almost seen as one and the
same because of what theologians refer to as the high Christology in the
Gospel of John, an elevated understanding of who the Christ is—“in the
beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was
God,” and so forth. You can do the impossible, the outrageous, the
ridiculous, because I am in you through this Spirit, Christ seems to be saying
to them—you can follow my commandments, you can do these things I tell
you, because I will be beside you, within you, advocating for you,
empowering you to do what would seem impossible to do on your own. The
only way that love won’t rule our lives and rule the world is if we decide that
it won’t, by our decision, by our moment to moment decisions to say “no” to
love, and “yes” to bitterness and despair and rage and hate.

I want to continue with Berry’s fiction here, where Hannah Coulter reflects on
what it means to love a soldier:

To read of that battle [Okinawa] when you love a man who was in it, that is
hard going. I read in wonder, believing and sickened.   I read weeping.
Because I didn’t know exactly what had happened to Nathan, it all seemed
to have happened to him.

You can’t give yourself over to love for somebody without giving yourself
over to suffering. You can’t give yourself to love for a soldier without giving
yourself to his suffering in war. It is this body of our suffering that Christ
was born into, to suffer it Himself and to fill it with light, so that beyond the
suffering we can imagine Easter morning and the peace of God on little
earthly homelands such as Port William and the farming villages of
Okinawa.

But Christ’s living unto death in this body of our suffering did not end the
suffering.   He asked us to end it, but we have not ended it. We suffer the
old suffering over and over again. Eventually, in loving, you see that you
have given yourself over to the knowledge of suffering in a state of war that
is always going on. And you wake in the night to the thought of the hurt
and the helpless, the scorned and the cheated, the burnt, the bombed, the
shot, the imprisoned, the beaten, the tortured, the maimed, the spit upon,
the shit upon.   (171)

He asked us to end it, but we have not ended it, Berry has Hannah say in
this story.   He commanded us to love one another, and yet we have not
loved another. And we do so because we do not listen to the Spirit of the
Christ within us who gives us the ability to do the impossible, which is to love
the unlovely, the mean, the cruel, those impossible to love, it seems. God
has given us the choice, and given the other side a choice, and we both have
so often refused the choice of peace, over and over again. And that is what
we need to repent of on this Memorial Day, that our sin in choosing against
the Advocate within us, the Advocate for love that is within us, that our sin
has caused the death of so many and far too soon. In the front of our
bulletin today, we have a young woman laying on the grave of her loved one—
was it her husband, boyfriend, partner, father, friend, that has pulled to the
earth in a moment of deep grief? Whoever it was, we human beings need to
repent simply for the fact that such a grief exists in this world because we
have failed to follow our Lord’s command to love one another.

For those of us who did not have to give of ourselves in the ways that so
many of our young men, and now women did, the ones we remember on this
day, it ought to make us aware of the good gift life really is in this place, and
what it really means to treasure what these young men, young woman
wanted so desperately to get home to—this place, these people, this gift.
And still, the ones who do come home, well, like Nathan Coulter, they are
never the same, though they, more than any of us, know what a gift life
really is.

I conclude today’s sermon with Hannah’s words, as she remembers Nathan
coming home at the end of the war:

Like any storm, it finally ended. Like any fire, it burnt itself out. Like all the
living, those doomed to die finally were dead. I imagined the quiet coming
again over the burnt and blasted land. I imagined a green slope somewhere
undestroyed where a fresh, untainted breeze blew in from the sea. I
imagined Nathan coming there alone and sitting down, facing home,
knowing that he had lived and would live, the quiet coming over him, rest
coming to him. And I imagined Port William, the town, the farmsteads, the
fields and the woods, the river valley and the long, slow river, taking shape
again in his mind.

And so I came to know, as I had not known before, what this place of ours
had been and meant to him. I knew, as I had not known before, what I had
meant to him. Our life in our place had been a benediction to him, but he
had seen it always within a circle of fire that might have closed upon it.

He was a rock to me, but now I knew that he had been shaken. Okinawa
shook him, and he was shaken for life, and deep in the night he needed to
touch me. I didn’t know the reason then, but now I know that some old
nightmare of the war had come back to him and frightened him awake.
And ever so quietly, ever so gently, so as not to wake me, he would touch
me. I would pretend to sleep on, so as not to disturb him with the thought
that he wakened me. It was not a lover’s touch.   As I knew partly then but
know completely now, he needed to know that he was here and I was here
with him, that he had come from the world of war, again, to this.
Reassured, he would sleep again, and I too would sleep.

Now, I remember, now I seem to dream again, that sleep of ours, helpless
and dark, precious and brief, somehow allowed within the encircling fire.
(172-173)