Reflection
By Tim Brown
War stories I
enough. In the summer heat we fire off exploding balls of light into the
night. We wave flags, sing patriotic songs and march in proces- sions. All fine things, of course. We celebrate independence, free- dom, victories of battle. But if there’s one challenge I can lift up on these days, it’s that we shouldn’t mistake the hells of war for anything other than that. Exploding balls of light can cloud that fact sometimes. Jesus’ call to “love your enemy” is in stark contrast to the call
to war. It doesn’t mean that we, as Christians, shun all Americana, abstain from the parades and don’t enlist in the military. No. It just
knew my grandfather was a gunner on a B-25 Mitchell in World War II. I knew he was shot down in the Pacific theater over occu- pied China and crawled through a jungle. But, like many from his generation, he never told me anything about the war in much detail, save for one story about his best friend who was killed in action. My grandfather told me about being discharged and coming back to Florida. He found his friend’s home and rang the doorbell to give condolences to the mother. She opened the screen door, saw him through tears streaming down her face and slapped him, say- ing, “Why wasn’t it you who died?” That was the only war story my grandfather told me. It was
means that when I sing “O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave,” I don’t imagine for one second that I’m singing about the same freedom Martin Luther talks about in On the Freedom of a Christian.
Luther says we are free because we are bound. We are bound to
Christ. We are bound to our neighbors, both dead and alive. And we are bound to our enemies too. As poet Wendell Berry
noted, “they are a fellow sharer in the life of God.” To see that is to see the freedom God invites us into. It’s a scandalizing thought, really. We are free because we are
bound to the story of God. But it’s one of the reasons I think my grandfather never wanted to talk about the war. He was bound to his friend, who died. He was bound to the other side, though he fought against them.
But primarily he was bound to a Christ whose message of peace and self- giving love silenced most war stories in deference for the one who hung on a cross that we might truly live.
Author bio: Brown is pastor of Luther Memo- rial Church of Chicago.
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