The Weight of Remembering

Message for Memorial Day 2026

Recorded at Milan Christian Church

Transcript

Loving War Stories Yet Staying Humble

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I'll preface this message. It's always dangerous when I preface them. But before we get to the end of it, in case anybody's wondering, if there's a John movie, John Wayne movie on, I will stop what I'm doing and I watch it. And that goes along with Jimmy Stewart. If it's a Western, I'm in. It's a war movie, I'm probably in. I'm patriotic as the next guy. Halfway between Benjamin Franklin and Kid Rock. That's where you find me. But what I've never done is wear the flag of this nation. I've never held a weapon of any kind. I grew up in a time when hostilities were done differently. And I went a different route. But I've always been drawn by stories.

Three Men Who Shaped My Memory

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And so I dedicate this message to three men who shaped and taught and gave me an appreciation. Those three men, first one, this guy named Joe McCrae. And Joe was from New York. On his 94th birthday, I had to go visit him at the emergency room because he had fallen and broken his wrist. And I come in, it's early morning. He goes, John, I can't believe I made you come in. Real thick accent, real gregarious. And I can't believe you had to come in here for my stupid old man. I'm like, well, I didn't wonder which happy birthday. How'd this happen? Well, I was on the treadmill at the Y and I fell off. I went, You're 94. You fell off, broke your wrist at the treadmill. I will come and pray with you wherever you're at. But see, Joe had this story. Joe grew up in the boroughs of New York. And he watched as the world went to war. He remembered World War I. He watched as the world entered World War II, and he was frustrated with the fact that the United States was not involved because he was from Scotland. He saw his homeland being bombed. And so the first chance that Joe got, he joined the Scottish Army. And he fought in Europe. And he'd be the first to tell you that he wore the kilt all the time. I love Joe. Joe was a dear friend. Joe's friends who joined with him did not come home from World War II. And every Christmas, Joe would drink a glass of scotch. Good scotch. And he would do it to honor his brothers and the men that followed and fell beside him.

Joe McCrae And A Christmas Toast

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And towards the end of his life, he came down with stomach cancer and he couldn't do it anymore. And that brought tears to his eyes. So I asked Joe if I could carry on the tradition for him. So just in case you're wondering, or if you want to be upset with me on this, I want you to know that I drink a glass of scotch every Christmas morning in honor of Joe and his brothers and his friends. And I've added names to that. The other name is a guy named Vern Vanderburgh, who was a dear friend of my mom's family. To the extent that when my aunt was crippled with it, terrible scoliosis, and my grandfather was working in the railroads and wasn't always there, Vern would literally pick Gail up, carry her to the doctor's appointments, and take care of her. Verne served in World War II. He was in the Navy at Pearl Harbor when the attack came. And he would talk about his memories up to a moment. And then right before he passed away, he shared with me, he said, I have not had a good night's sleep since 1941. Because somewhere during the night, Joe would not Joe Vern would hear the bullets hitting the wrought iron railings of the ship above him as he was underneath. My last favorite one. Kim's grandpa Jim. James Barnes, who was life and joy and all these things, who started the war in Africa, right? In the this the warm place. Or in the cold place, that's what it was. And he just got married and hadn't even got to live with grandma for any stretch of time before he was sent to war. And she's at home in Greensburg working at the dress factory, right? And one day she gets a package, and it was all of grandpa's gym's clothes. No letter, no explanation, just his clothes. And I don't know how long that dear woman went with the idea that her husband was dead. He wasn't. They were moving him from one front to the other. Or more stories came up. And Jim would talk to a point until he couldn't. He would remember the horrors that he'd seen. He'd remembered the friends that he had lost. He'd remembered the things that were taken from his youth. And he carried that all the way up to the last days of his life. And preaching about the gospel of Jesus Christ today. Doing the best that I can to tie it in to the memories of these three men who mean the absolute world to me. I'm going to try to do the best that I can. But some weekends carry more weight than other weekends do. This isn't Veterans Day, which is important and which we should celebrate, where we thank all who have given their time and their life and their dedication to protecting us and serving. Memorial Day is for us to remember that we've lost. We've lost people that we've loved. And to some, Memorial Day just means the unofficial start of summer. Cookouts, ball games, time off, maybe a lake, maybe a grill, maybe a race. Guess you guys didn't get tickets either, huh? Okay. Or maybe a chance

Vern And The Night Pearl Harbor Stayed

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to just catch your breath. And none of that is wrong. But before Memorial Day became a long weekend, it was a day of memory. It was a day to stop. It was a day to acknowledge that some freedoms we enjoy came at a tremendous cost. A day to remember men and women who did not come home. And for followers of Jesus, that matters, but it also requires wisdom. Because Christians should be able to honor sacrifice without worshiping war or the nation. We should be able to give thanks for courage without confusing military service with the gospel. We should be able to love our country without making our country our kingdom. So today it's not a political message. It is not a patriotic rally. It is a sermon about America. It's not a sermon about America being the hope of the world. The hope of the world is Jesus Christ. But because we followed Jesus, we should know how to remember well. We should know how to grieve honestly. And we should know how to give honor where honor is due. And we should know how to point beyond every grave, every battlefield, every folded flag, and every broken heart. We should be able to point beyond that to the kingdom where death does not get the final word. One of the most powerful memorial moments in Scripture comes from David. Before David becomes king over all of Israel, he receives news that Saul and Jonathan had died in battle. So Saul had been Israel's first king. Jonathan was David's closest friend. And David does something when he hears the news, something deeply human and deeply holy. He grieves. Lament matters. David does not rush past the pain. He does not spiritualize it away. He does not say, well, everything happens for a reason. He doesn't have somebody come up to him and go, God needed a flower in his garden or another angel. And if I hear you say that, I will lovingly correct you. But make no mistake, I will correct you. He doesn't say any of that. He doesn't say, well, everything happens for a reason and moves on. He doesn't say, pull yourself up for the bootstraps. It's a new life. He laments. He gives sorrow room to breathe. And that matters because sometimes we don't know what to do with grief. We try to explain it. We try to fix it. We try to clean it up. We try to make it sound more spiritual than it feels. But scripture gives us permission to grieve. In fact, Scripture teaches us how to grieve. Paul writes in Romans 12, 15, he says, mourn with those who mourn. Not lecture those who mourn, not correct those who mourn, not rush those who mourn on to that next phase, but to mourn with those who are mourning. And Memorial Day, at its best, is a national act of lament. Just real quick, it's not on the notes. Raise your hand if you've ever been to the ND500. Good, good. Okay. Were you there early enough to see all the pre-race stuff, which is my absolute favorite part? I fall asleep during the race, to be honest with you. But the first part of

Memorial Day As A Day Of Lament

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it, really cool. But there's a moment where a hundred thousand people are quiet. It's when they honor those. And it's amazing in that big of a space to see that. And that's what Memorial Day is supposed to be. It is a national act of lament. It is a day when we admit that in these Hollywoodized versions of war and conflict that we see, and I'm the biggest duck in the puddle, guys. I played any guys in here dumb enough to play Dirt Claude Ward when you're growing up. Yeah, yeah. And seeing this is why we have no business saying that women are less than us because we're stupid. But we had this superheroized version of what war is. And Memorial Day is a day that we have to realize that real people died, and real people received real news. Real families, real parents lost sons and daughters, real spouses had their futures ripped away. Real children grew up with an empty chair at the table. And the Christian response to that is not shallow celebration, it is reverent grief. David says three times in this lament, how the mighty have fallen. You realize that's where that phrase came from? From David. How the mighty have fallen. He says it three times. And when he says it, this is not triumphalism. That is not propaganda. That is grief. There is something faithful about telling the truth in the presence of lost. They might have fallen. The mighty have fallen, the brave have fallen, the beloved have fallen, and we remember. And this is especially powerful because Saul had made David's life miserable. Let me put it another way. Saul made David's life hell. Saul hated David, Saul hunted him, Saul envied him, Saul tried to kill him. And if David wanted to be bitter, he had reason to be bitter. But when Saul dies, David does not use the moment to settle a score. He honors what can be honored. In 2 Samuel 1.23, David says, Saul and Jonathan, in life they were loved and admired, and in death they were not parted. David refuses to flatten Saul into the worst things that Saul ever did. We've lost the ability to do that. If we don't like you and you pass, we'll give lip service to honoring you, and then we'll spend the next three paragraphs trashing you and explaining why it's probably not that bad of an idea that you're not here anymore. We've lost, I'm not everybody, probably not anybody in here, but you've seen that, right? Saul had every reason to have his reputation ripped to shreds by the guy that he was trying to destroy his life in David, but David refused. David refused to define Saul as his worst attributes. And that is maturity. And that is holiness, and that is a kind of grace, and that's why David's known as a man after

David’s Grief And The Gift Of Lament

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God's own heart. And that matters for Memorial Day as well. Honoring sacrifice does not require pretending that every war was simple. It does not require pretending every national decision was right, righteous. Can we disagree? I'm not good, this is not a political thing. We disagree. We've made mistakes as a nation. Can we just say that? Can we just do that? Okay. Good. Good. It does not require pretending that history is clean and uncomplicated. History is made by fallen men and women who are sinners, and if they do not have the love of the Spirit of Christ in them, they will make rash and dumb decisions sometime. This is where you say amen in the message, okay? Just so I know that we're all on the same page. It does not require that we pretend that history is clean and uncomplicated. Christians do not need to turn memory into mythology. We can tell the truth and we can still be grateful. We can say this world is complicated. We can say that this world is broken. We can say that this world has sin in it. We can say that nations are complicated, that war is tragic, that human motives are mixed, but courage is still courage of Joe leaving the United States to go to the homeland, the birth, the home, birth, wait, the place where he was born in Scotland, and to not know anything about Scotland, but to wear that uniform because he saw people and he saw evil going through. We can celebrate that. We can celebrate Vern running up to the top deck of that ship that he heard the bullets bouncing off the deck to pull injured seamen and friends and classmates out of harm's way. And that stayed with him his entire life. We can celebrate the courage that Jim Barnes shown as he talked about watching planes fly into smokestacks of ships that held his brothers and his friends. Courage is still courage. Sacrifice is still sacrifice, and the love of neighbor is still the love of neighbor. Jesus said this in John 15, 13. He said, Greater love has no man than this, than to lay down his life for one's friends. Now, Jesus is ultimately talking about his own sacrifice. He's not giving us a generic slogan for every cause, but he is telling us something true about love. There is a kind of love that gives itself away. A kind of love that steps into danger for the sake of another. A kind of love that says, My life is not the only life that matters. And when we see that kind of sacrifice, we can honor it. When we see that kind of sacrifice, we should honor it. And when we see that kind of sacrifice for our own humanity and our own holiness, we must honor it. But not because soldiers are saviors, only Jesus is savior. Not because death in war redeems the world. Only the cross redeems the world. But because self-giving love is worth honoring whenever and wherever we see it. So today, Memorial Day should make us grateful. Grateful for people who bore burdens many of us will never fully understand. Grateful for families who gave more than most of us can imagine. But Christian gratitude should always be humble. Because we are not gathered to glorify war. We are gathered to remember the cost of it. This is where Christians need to be careful. There's a kind of patriotism that is simply gratitude. That can be good. But there's another kind of patriotism that can become worship. And that is dangerous. The Bible never gives the church permission to confuse any earthly nation with the kingdom of God. Not in Israel's day, not Rome in Paul's day, not America in our day. Nations rise and fall. Empires come and go. Flags change, borders move, leaders change. Goes back to this. I think I shared this last week that there was a scene from when President Trump was meeting the president of China, and President Trump was talking about the upcoming 250, which is a big deal. That's a big deal. 250 years of independence. But we lose sight of the fact that that's like a drop in the bucket for some of these other nations, and the president of China turns to a tree that was in his garden and tells President Trump this tree is 300 years old. So we're just pups at this. Flags change. Borders move, leaders change, but the kingdom of God remains. In Philippians 3.20, Paul says, our citizenship is in heaven. And that does not mean earthly citizenship is meaningless. It means earthly citizenship is secondary. We are first Christians, believers, disciples, followers of Christ, prince and princesses and heirs to the kingdom of heaven. That is what we are first. We are Americans second. Our first allegiance is not to a flag. Our first allegiance is to a king. And his name is Jesus. So, yes, Christians can be thankful for their country. Christians can serve their country. Christians can pray for their country. Christians can honor those who died in the service to their country. But we must never

Honor Courage Without Making Myths

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go as far as worshiping our country. Because the cross does not stand beneath the flag. The flag stands beneath the cross. And when churches get that backwards, we can lose our witness. We start confusing political power with spiritual faithfulness. We start acting like the mission of the church is to preserve a nation instead of proclaiming a savior. On Memorial Day, if I think for me, if I rightly understand Memorial Day, it should make us humble. Because every grave reminds us that human power cannot save us. Battlefield reminds us that sin has infected the world. Every folded flag reminds us that freedom is precious. But it is not ultimate. Because every memorial points to the same age. The world is not yet what God created it to be. That should humble us. It should make us less arrogant. It should make us less careless. Less eager to divide, less quick to glorify violence, less willing to treat people made in God's image as enemies to be crushed instead of neighbors to be loved. The Christian posture on Memorial Day is not chest dumping pride. We save that for the 4th of July. Today, it's bowed head, Radage. Somber remembrance. David's lament ends with these words how the mighty have fallen, the weapons of war have perished. That is such a haunting line. The weapons of war have perished. It is grieving the dead, but tucked inside the grief is a longing, a longing for the day when weapons will not be needed, a longing for the day when war will be no more. The longing runs all through scripture. The prophets speak of a day when swords will be beaten into plow chairs and spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not take up sword against nation. People will not train for war anymore. And then Revelation 21:4 gives us the final picture. When it says that Christ the King who returns, he will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain. That is our hope. Not that America or the Europe or the NATO or the Putin or the Iran or whoever you put it in. Not that they finally get everything right. Not that human governments will save us. Not that if we elect the right people or build the right systems or win the right battles, the world will finally be healed. Our hope is that Jesus Christ is making all things new. And one day, one day, every cemetery will be emptied. I don't know how that works, but I really hope that I'm around when I can walk with Jim and Vern and Joe and my dad. For all those that we have grieved who have gone, because the world's not what Christ and God created it to be.

Patriotism Versus Worship Of The Flag

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That Jesus making all things new, that every cemetery emptied, every grave will be undone, every tear will be wiped away, every war will be over, every weapon will be unnecessary, every memorial will give way to resurrection. And that is why Christians remember differently. We do not remember as a people without hope. We remember as people who believe death is real but not final. We remember as people who believe sacrifice matters, but only Jesus saves. And we remember as people who can honor the fallen while worshiping the risen Christ. What do we do on a day like today? We remember. But it's hard to find anybody who's not affected by knowing someone to send off. What they've done for us allows us to do this. Get off my notes for a minute and just remind you that if it wasn't for the men and women who sacrificed and we remember today, that we wouldn't be worshiping together right now. We remember that freedom is costly. But we also remember something deeper. That no nation is eternal. No flag can bear the weight of our worship. No soldier is savior. Jesus alone is king. The one who laid down his life also took it back up again. And that is the hope beneath all our remembering. Grave is not the end. Death does not get the last word. War does not get the last word. Sin does not get the last word. Jesus gets the last word, and his word is resurrection. Today we honor those who gave their lives. We grieve for those who still carry loss, and we give thanks with community with humility. And we lift our eyes to the kingdom. Our eyes to the kingdom where the weapons of war will one day be found useless and perish. And the Prince of Peace will reign forever. That's the best I can do, but I love you. And thank you.

Resurrection Hope And Closing Prayer

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Let's pray. Father God. Let's always keep our eyes on you, the author and perfecter of our faith. Let us keep our hearts open to your teaching and your ways. Remember and honor. Let us always know that you and that we worship for all those men and women who have sacrificed so much. I pray for peace. I pray for rest. I pray for grace and mercy to be on the lives of their loved ones and families. Some way and somehow, in the midst of all the craziness of this weekend, the barbecues and the blown tires, the rain delays. I pray that those families get a glimpse of our gratefulness and our appreciation and our love for them. Lord help us to remember.

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Lord, make sure that we never forget. It's in your name we pray. Amen.