Commentary by Rev. Michael VandenBerg
For most of us, Memorial Day is a day off work, a day with family and a day to inaugurate the summer festivities.
It is also a day to remember those who have gone before us — laying the groundwork, breaking new trails, securing the old and paying for all of it, sometimes with their very lives. Jesus once said, “Greater love has no man than to lay down his life for his friends.” These men and women of valor that we memorialize bought us the freedoms we now enjoy with their very lives.
Often, we take for granted the freedoms that we enjoy because we have gotten so used to them we don’t even notice when we abuse them. Shutting down the freedom of speech and the free exchange of thought that so many died to secure doesn’t memorialize, but denigrates.
The freedom of religion that was so fundamental to the founding of our nation that they enshrined it as the very first amendment to our constitution. In it are the freedoms we enjoy that prohibit the government from making any law with regard to or relating to an establishment of religion, or hampering the free exercise of religion. It doesn’t allow the government to curtail the freedom of speech, or interfere with the freedom of the press. It also keeps the government from interfering with the right to peaceably assemble.
These freedoms that have made America such a great place to live have done so at a great cost. Freedom, as they say, is not free but must be fought for and earned with each passing generation.
If we allow the government to tell people of faith where they can and cannot exercise that faith, it won’t be long before all will lose the freedom to believe. If we curtail the right to freedom of speech to one person, no matter how offensive it is to us, it won’t be long before no one will have that right. And if we allow the government to tell its citizens where and when they can peaceably meet, then they will soon control all assembling.
Perhaps it is time for us to cease memorializing our past and start remembering it. Perhaps it is time to remember the freedoms and their cost instead of simply the warriors and their loss. On Veterans Day in November, much of the rest of the English-speaking world is called to remember. For them it is Remembrance Day, a day for taking inventory of the freedoms we seek to preserve and not simply those who fought to preserve them. I know my father who fought in Korea, my uncle who fought in WWII, my great uncle who fought in WWI and my friends who fought in places like Vietnam, Cambodia, Afghanistan and Iraq would rather we remember the freedoms they fought so hard to preserve and not simply their contributions in preserving them.
The Apostle James told the followers of Jesus, “Humble yourselves before the Lord, and he will lift you up.” If we want to be free, if we want to be great, if we want to be just, then be humble before God and remember.
