Memorial Day

I suppose you show your age in a thousand ways and none of the important ones are the way you look.  My age shows badly when I remember holidays.  For instance, I remember Memorial Day as Decoration Day.

That’s right.  Decoration Day.  Never heard of it?  Well then, I’m guessing you didn’t live in a small town with its only cemetery on a small hill outside of town and you’re probably under 40 or 50 years old.  So let me tell you about Decoration Day.

Decoration Day always came on the last day of May.  It was the day when, early in the morning, an old man named Irving started the day by putting a flag up in his yard and playing “Taps.”  He had served in the First World War and had come  home with a damaged mind from all he had seen.  Today we’d call it Post-Traumatic Stress, but back then, it was just weird Irving.  He was one of the kindest men in town, but he drank way too much and he avoided as many people as he could.  If you were a child, he smiled at you, but grown-ups he couldn’t handle.  He told me once on one of his friendly days that he had terrible nightmares and rarely slept.

Anyhow, that’s how the day started.  By midmorning, we’d picked all the lilacs in the yard along with any early peonies, put them in water-filled cans, loaded them in the car and were headed for the cemetery.  The car smelled heavenly.

We headed first of all for the small cemetery miles away in a little community called Squirrel, which was where my grandparents had settled when they came to America from Germany.  The little burial ground was by a dusty country road, totally neglected, weedy and desolate.  The headstones looked tired and tilted with age, but Mother always knew exactly where she was going. 

About halfway down the center road, she stopped and got out her hoe and rake and went to work.  There was a small headstone there with a tiny lamb on top and it was my job to take some of the water and a rag and try to wash it off.  I loved that lamb and as the dust and dirt came off, the name carved became legible. 

Ernest William Harrigfeld.   Born October 22, 1903.  Died January 18, 1904.

Mom’s little brother.  The tiny boy who only lived a few weeks and died in the bitterly cold winter.  I would always finish cleaning off his name and then walk around the rest of the graves.  There were so many little lambs and angels and graves of little children. They way outnumbered the graves of older people. 

Mom finished hoeing and raking the gravesite and then put a huge can filled with lilacs near his headstone.  She always touched the stone gently and then, gathering up her tools, we left the cemetery.  Not many graves were decorated in that little cemetery, but my mother never forgot the family had someone buried there and on Decoration Day, she honored him.

Then we headed back toward Ashton and the cemetery on the hill.  The grounds were crowded with people who had come to remember and leave flowers.  My grandparents were buried in the far back corner under a huge black headstone with the word “Schaefer” carved on it.  And that’s where Mom brought the lilacs and peonies and with gentle hands, filled the graves of her parents with flowers.

She never talked about them unless you asked specific questions.  Today, I wish I’d asked a lot more.

On the way out of the cemetery, we saw graves that had been decorated by small American flags.  They were the veterans who had gone from a small mountain town in Idaho to fight in a war in a place they had never seen or heard of.  They were the ones who endured the horrors, slogged through the mud and slime, endured the cold and the pain and the loneliness for no other reason than they were called and they responded.  America was their country and it was worth fighting for.

It still is.

A Woman Who Met Christ

I love to read stories about people who meet Christ and come to see Him for Who He is.  I have been told once or twice that I have a little too much imagination at times, but I don’t agree.

Jesus was teaching one day near the temple and drew a great crowd, because his stories were compelling and told with an authority people had never heard.  As he taught, a commotion arose around him and suddenly the crowd parted as two men came through the crowd, dragging a dishelved woman.  I doubt she had much more on than a ragged robe;  she had been caught  while having sex with a man to whom she was not married.  She had probably been part of a trap on the part of the men who dragged her into the crowd.  The men who laid the trap had no interest in her at all;  she was merely a small cog in a plot to discredit Jesus and she had walked into it. 

“Master,”  they said, in great confidence.  “We just caught this woman in the very act of adultery!  The law says she should be stoned to death, but what do you say, wise teacher?”

Now if you’ve got two or three working brain cells, the first question that pops into your mind (at least in the way my suspicious mind works) is where on earth is the man with whom she was caught?  Adultery , like the tango, takes two.  Otherwise, I think it’s probably called something else.

The men were a part of the enemies of Jesus, which included most of the prominent religious leaders of the Jewish nation.  They were desperate to discredit this disturbing man from Galilee who preached  and taught about a God of love and light and threatened the established religion of the day.

The woman lay on the ground in front of the teacher.  She had to be terrified and shamed beyond imagination.  The law did mete the penalty of death by stoning for the sin of adultery.  She could only lay there, waiting for the agony of the first stone to strike her.  But it never came.

Jesus understood what was happening, of course.  I don’t think he could read minds, but he knew the heart of man and the evil it is capable of.  He simply stood quietly for a moment and finally, he stooped and wrote on the ground.

The only other place I can find the finger of God writing is in the Old Testament where He wrote the Law.  Nobody knows for sure what He wrote that day, but I believe He did it again that day.  Whatever it was, the leaders of the crowd that day could read it  clearly.

There wasn’t a sound.  Jesus wrote again and then stood up and said, “He who is without sin may cast the first stone.” 

 He didn’t deny the law;  He simply, in His inimitable way, clarified it. 

“If you have never committed sin yourself, then you are qualified to judge her.  If, on the other hand, you might want to think this through again…”

Those aren’t his exact words, of course.  My interpretation.  The following scene is rather amazing, but the best part is still to come.  The men, one by one, beginning with the older men and moving to the younger ones, began to drop their  stones.  See, they already had their agenda worked out;  they were eager to carry out the law.  There’s nothing quite so satisfying as seeing that all the rules are rigidly enforced.  Unless, of course, we’re the one that got caught.

Silently, the men dropped their ammunition and left the scene.  Oddly, in shame or compassion for the woman, the whole crowd dissapated.  And this, my friends, is where it really gets interesting.

Only two people are left.  The woman, who is still at Jesus’s feet, and the Master Himself.  In what I still consider one of His greatest acts, He says quietly, “Woman, where are your accusers?”

It’s not the question.  It’s the way He speaks to her.  That word ‘Woman’ is the same word He used from the cross when He said to His mother, “Woman, behold your son.”  It was respect, endearment and love.  It was everything this woman had never known and it was the one gift she needed more than anything in the world.  She was a sinner, an adultress, nothing in the world’s eyes.  And He give her a dignity and a sense of love she had never known in her life.

But the most remarkable thing  in this whole story is how she answered Him.  She knew in that moment who He was!  And her answer was simply, “No man, Lord.”

“Men may not condemn me, but the most important question now is, do you, my Lord and God?”

I think at this point, He reached down and lifted her up and smiled as He said, “Neither do I.  Go and sin no more.”

Wow!  What a God we serve!