Render unto God, Part II

Frederick Buechner, in an article entitled, Journey to Wholeness, tells about how in a segment of the Ken Burns series on the Civil War that public television showed ten or so years ago, there were a number of scenes of the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg in 1913.

The old men came back one summer day, Confederate and Union veterans both, to commemorate the occasion, and there were many ancient movies of them as they moved around jerkily through the grainy, lightstruck film, eating, listening to speeches, talking over old times and swapping stories.

The most moving part of it to me was the reenactment of Pickett's Charge. There were no pictures of it as far as I can remember, but the sound track described it in the words of somebody who had actually been there at the time it was reenacted. The old Union soldiers took their places among the rocks on Seminary Ridge, the old Confederate soldiers took theirs on the farmland below, and after a while the Confederates started to move forward across the broad, flat field where half a century earlier so many of them had died. "We could see not rifles and bayonets," the eyewitness account said, "but canes and crutches" as they made their slow advance toward the ridge with the more able-bodied ones helping the disabled ones to maintain their place in the ranks.

As the Confederate troops got near the Union line, they broke into one long, defiant rebel yell, and then something remarkable took place. "A moan, a sigh, a gigantic gasp of disbelief rose from the men on Seminary Ridge" is the way the eyewitness described it. Then at that point, unable to restrain themselves, the Yankees burst from behind the stone wall and flung themselves upon their former enemies. Only this time, unlike fifty years earlier, they did not do battle with them. Instead they threw their arms around them. Some in blue uniforms and some in grey, the old men embraced one another and wept.

If only the old men had seen in 1863 what, for a moment, they glimpsed in 1913. Half a century later, they saw that the great battle had been a great madness. The men who were advancing toward them across the field of Gettysburg were not enemies. They were human beings like themselves, with the same dreams, needs, hopes, the same wives and children waiting for them to come home, if they were lucky enough to come home at all. What they saw was that, beneath all the fear and hostility and misunderstanding that divide human beings in this broken world, all humankind is one. What they saw was that we were, all of us, created not to do battle with each other but to love each other, and it was not just a truth they saw. For a few moments, it was a truth they lived. It was a truth they became.

If only the old men had seen in 1863 what, for a moment, they glimpsed in 1913.

For a brief time, the old war veterans were able to fling aside their allegiances to the powers of this world, to the powers that had held them for so long, and see, and live, in a new realm, under a new allegiance.

And that is the realm where Jesus calls us to live, a realm where all are broken brothers and sisters in need of wholeness, in need of forgiveness and grace, a realm where swords are beaten into plowshares and soldiers throw down their arms. A realm where Caesar's claims, when in conflict with God's, have no hold over us whatsoever.

We're not there, of course, not by a long shot. But the vision is there, and the call is there: Give back to God what belongs to God. And of course, the question is there.

What does that mean for you and for me today, this week? What do we owe God? And how do we pay it back?
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by Pastor Cindy, who is a threat to all the right folk for all the right reasons