Love and Remembrance

“Imagine there’s no countries / It isn’t hard to do

Nothing to kill or die for / And no religion, too

Imagine all the people / Living life in peace”

• “Imagine”, John Lennon (1971)

To be honest, this song has always annoyed me. The tune is great, and I love the sentiment, but this line reveals the central problem. A world with nothing to kill for sounds like Heaven, but a world with nothing to die for sounds like Hell.

I could live without religious structures: institutions, doctrines, and practices. I think they help, but I also understand the dangers. I could live without the structures, but I could not live without worship. The word comes from “worth-ship” and relates to what we value most.

Christians worship love. Christ is identified with love. Christ commands us to love (both God and neighbor). And we believe that love is the greatest virtue. I would die for love.

A lovely sentiment, but still abstract. The rubber meets the road once we ask whom we love and what that love looks like. Abstract love is a tenet of most religions. It is an easy banner to wave for anyone with an ethical system but no formal structures to hang their hat on. Most people can say with Lennon “All you need is love.”

What does that mean, though? Peter, Paul and Mary famously quipped, “And when the Beatles tell you they’ve got a word ‘love’ to sell you, they mean exactly what they say.” The hard work of ethics – and, perhaps the core work of religious structures – is figuring out how to love.

Today is Remembrance Sunday in the UK, a time for remembering those who served their country (in the UK and throughout the commonwealth) in wartime. The official Gospel reading in the Church of England includes John 15:13: “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”

The Gospel reading annoys me for the same reason that “Imagine” does. To take up arms for one’s country, and die, and to lay down one’s life for one’s friends are not the same thing. Both involve a willingness to die for others, but only one requires a willingness to kill. Both are acts of love, but the difference forces us to ask who is loved and what that love looks like.

The highest love of Christianity is indiscriminate. Love for friend becomes love of neighbor. And love of neighbor becomes love for all. Christian pacifists, like myself, believe that nothing is worth killing for. Other Christians think that it can be an act of love to kill one for the sake of many or to kill the guilty for the sake of the innocent. They have reasons to prioritize love of one person over another. A thornier question, for me at least, arises when we ask whether you might kill someone out of love for them. Is there such a thing as a mercy killing, when there is no other way to treat someone’s pain? And so, all of us struggle with our institutions, doctrines, and practices to work out the meaning of “love” not only with our lips but with our lives. And with our deaths.

It is not enough to say, “they died for their country.” We must remember why and how and what their sacrifice accomplished. Nor is it enough to say that killing is wrong. Love calls for action and we must always remember those who acted, even while we seek out better ways to act and better ways to love. Love requires wisdom and reflection and working together to make tough decisions.

This week I will be meditating on what I worship, on what true love looks like, and how that played out in the life and death of those we remember.

May God grant to the living, grace; to the departed, rest; to the church and to the world, peace and concord; and to us sinners, eternal life. Amen.