The following is the text of the address I gave this morning at the annual Memorial Day celebration in Warsaw, Indiana. The address was given at a cemetery dotted with 5,000 American flags which decorated the graves of those who died in the wars dating back to the Civil War.

My fellow citizens:

This is a special day, an important day. Throughout America, flags will be lovingly placed on graves in cemeteries. The red, white, and blue will fly in every town and city. Throughout America many speakers will rise to speak of the sacrifice and the valor of those whose memory we honor. We remember they gave their lives so that others might live. And so on this day especially we proclaim that “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” (John 15:13 NRSV)

As I stand here surrounded by the graves of those who paid the ultimate sacrifice, I am well aware that the most important thing for us to do today is simply to be silent, to listen, to hear their witness. Do you hear the sounds of their silence? Do you hear the profound word they speak to us this day? As President Lincoln taught us at Gettysburg in 1863, "the dead have spoken more eloquently for themselves than any of the living ever could," and so our task on this day is really not to add to their testimony but to renew our resolve to carry on their work. He said:

It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they. ... so nobly advanced... that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain.

As I contemplate the importance of our gathering to remember those who gave their lives in war, I am struck by Lincoln’s words - “that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain.” To say that someone died in vain is to say that their death was emptied of meaning. And Lincoln reminds us that we have the possibility of rendering meaningless the sacrifices and valor of those we honor on this day. We have their unfinished work to do, and if we fail to continue that work, it will be our generation that declared that they died in vain.

Now that’s a sobering thought. And it begs the question: what is the unfinished work to which these graves summon us? What is it that we might fail to do that would cause these dead to have died in vain?

According to Lincoln, our dead died for a noble cause: “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom.” As a Christian preacher, I applaud President Lincoln’s choice of words. I am thrilled whenever any President channels St. Paul and makes the connection between the ‘new birth’ and freedom. And as a former submarine officer, I have little doubt that he’s right. Indeed, I think all of us who served in the military would be quick to explain our reason for doing so in similar terms. I believe the dead we honor today died for the same reason that we served - so that the Stars and Stripes will continue to stand for “one nation, under God, indivisible, with justice and liberty for all.” If our nation ever fails to stand for these things, then it seems to me that President Lincoln, and all the generations who gave so much for us, would say that we failed to continue the work passed on to us - these dead would indeed have died in vain.

As we wrestle with that responsibility, I invite your attention to President Lincoln’s insight that we have continuing work to do, and that that work consists of renewing freedom.

I am cautious in putting it this way because I am afraid that, if President Lincoln were to tell Americans today that our work consists of renewing freedom, there would be many who would misunderstand his meaning. For we Americans have become confused about what freedom means in the last fifty years. Too many have bought into the Great American Gospel of Free Will and think that freedom is our ultimate goal, the greatest good. They think that freedom means being able to choose anything you will, that freedom is about being able to fulfill our every desire. But freedom is not an end, but a means to something much greater. Freedom is about being able to will what God wills, to desire what God desires. So perfect freedom is about deliverance - deliverance from all things that prevent us from being who God calls us to be. So when we veterans served in the armed forces and when our fellow citizens sacrificed their lives for our freedom, it was not for something as cheap and shallow as the possibility of a society without boundaries, but rather so that the boundaries of our society would be rightly ordered so that every man and woman has the possibility of being whom God called them to be.

And that kind of freedom requires constant work and vigilance.

Thurgood Marshall, the first black American to serve as a Supreme Court Justice, would often make this point by criticizing the U.S. Constitution. Talk about taking on sacred cows! He called it an imperfect document. And the evidence he gave for that claim was that the Constitution counted every black American as three fifths of a man, and it gave neither them nor any females the right to vote. The Civil War could have been avoided in 1787 but the founders - in spite of the hard work of great men like Benjamin Franklin, were unable to abolish slavery in framing the Constitution. They left the hard work of deliverance from bondage to another generation, and that’s how we ended up gathering here today to honor the dead, as Lincoln honored them in 1863.

When we think of freedom as deliverance from bondage that enables us to be the people who God calls us to be, it helps us get an idea of what is meant when we say that our nation is to be a place of liberty and justice for all. For the idea of freedom as deliverance from bondage brings to mind the story of Moses and Pharaoh and the deliverance of the Hebrews from bondage in Egypt. God delivered them from bondage so that they could be a people who would teach the world what it means to live in holy friendship with God and each other. And the place in which they were to do that was the Promised Land. We must never forget that being delivered from bondage - that the gift of freedom - is inseparable from life in the Promised Land; indeed it’s inseparable from having a fair share in the Promised Land. Every Hebrew family was to have an inheritance in the Promised Land so that all shared in the abundance that God provided. Only by sharing in that abundance with their neighbors in love could every man and woman be who God called them to be. Freedom, it turns out, has a lot to do with having food in our bellies.

Reflecting on the importance of our sharing in the fruits of the Promised Land brings into the light the connection between liberty and justice for all for which we say our nation must stand if the dead shall not have died in vain. For if we become a nation in which each family must build their own barn and rebuild it by themselves when life knocks it down, if we become a nation in which it’s each man for himself in an all-against-all contest for the fruits of the Promised Land, if we become a nation where it is ever acceptable to us for some among us to be trapped in the despair of poverty and violence, if we become a nation in which freedom means that our neighbor has no claim upon us except a duty of indifference, then, my fellow citizens, I fear that history will judge that, in our time, on our watch, we decided that these dead shall have died in vain.

My friends, these dead we honor today did not volunteer to die. They simply answered the call when it became necessary to defend the freedom that is the intersection of liberty and justice for all. And how it must it have been their prayer that none of their children or any of us down to the fourth generation would have to bear the tragic costs of war visited upon them.

So as we decorate their graves on this day, let us pledge that their lives and deaths shall not have been in vain. Let us pledge that we will be one nation, under God, ever working towards that new birth of freedom.

And as we celebrate the lives and legacies of those we have lost but not forgotten, may their graves be question marks for us. May their silent witness resound with the question asked by our National Anthem: “O! say does that star-spangled banner yet wave, O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?” That is the question that you and I and every generation must answer.
Thank you