Did President Obama Make a Sacrilege of Memorial Day?

It is a sobering experience to visit Hiroshima. I first visited there in the summer of 1967—and have never forgotten that first visit even though I have been there several times since.

President Obama visited Hiroshima last week. It was his first time and the first time for a sitting POTUS to do so.

In his remarks on May 27, the President stated, “We come to mourn the dead, including over 100,000 Japanese men, women and children; thousands of Korean; a dozen Americans held prisoner.”

“We stand here, in the middle of this city, and force ourselves to imagine the moment the bomb fell,” the President went on to say. “We listen to a silent cry. We remember all the innocents killed across the arc of that terrible war, and the wars that came before, and the wars that would follow.” 

While it was said repeatedly that the President’s remarks were not an apology, at least there was acknowledgement of the fact that many, many innocent Japanese and even many non-Japanese people were killed by the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in August 1945.

Earlier, on Wednesday of last week, hours after arriving in Japan for a Group of Seven summit President Obama said that he would “honor all those who were lost in World War II.”

Some people were outraged by that statement. I heard one talk-radio host say that he was incensed that the President wanted to honor all who died in WWII, for many of those were our (American) enemies, and he was glad they were killed.

And to the chagrin of U.S. ultra-nationalists, the President shared a vision of the equal worth and dignity of everyone. He even had the audacity to expand the words “All men are created equal” in the U.S. Declaration of Independence to include all people around the world.

“The irreducible worth of every person, the insistence that every life is precious; the radical and necessary notion that we are part of a single human family–that is the story that we all must tell,” the President declared.

Today is Memorial Day in the U.S. This federal holiday originated as Decoration Day in 1868, soon after the Civil War. Gradually the name morphed into Memorial Day and the observance was extended to honor all Americans who died while in the military service.

But can we further extend our compassion on Memorial Day to include people from all countries who died in military service—and especially to the civilians who died in all countries because of military action?

Does such inclusion make a sacrilege of Memorial Day in the U.S.?

That, though, is the kind of emphasis I want on this Memorial Day. Certainly I want to be sympathetic toward those who lost loved ones while in military service. Just as the President did in Hiroshima, however, I also want to be sympathetic toward all who lost loved ones, especially those who were non-combatants, at the hands of enemy soldiers.

And, yes, I want to be sympathetic toward those whose loved ones died while in military service for other countries. Most of them were fighting because of being conscripted or because of being psychologically coerced (brainwashed) into thinking they were doing the right thing.

Those soldiers, too, were human beings, created and loved by God, and their deaths were tragic also.

At Hiroshima, the President emphasized that “we must reimagine our connection to one another as members of one human race.”

Isn’t this Memorial Day a good time for us to acknowledge that connection?

Doing the Truth

Yesterday, May 24, was celebrated in many Christian churches as Pentecost Sunday. The first Christian celebration of Pentecost, fifty days after Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection, is often, for good reason, called “the birthday of the church.”

Two years ago, on May 19, 2013, I had the privilege of preaching on Pentecost Sunday at the Hirao Baptist Church in Fukuoka, Japan. My blog article posted the following day was about that day and that sermon.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to preach on Pentecost Sunday once again. That was at the Dearborn Christian Church (DCC), in a little town about 40 minutes northwest of where I live. It was a good experience worshipping there again in their well-taken-care-of 19th-century sanctuary.

The title of my sermon was “The Spirit of Truth,” based on the Bible reading that morning, which included John 16:13. There Jesus stated that “when he, the Spirit of truth, comes, he will guide you into all the truth” (NIV).

I went from that verse to emphasize that truth is something that is done. That assertion is based on John 3:21, which I read from the new Common English Bible (rather than from the NIV, the pew Bible at DCC): “Whoever does the truth comes to the light.”

Doing the truth: what an important concept!

It may not have been the first time I was impressed with the meaning of those words, but long ago I read “Doing the Truth,” one of Paul Tillich’s sermons included in his 1948 book “The Shaking of the Foundations.”

Tillich began his sermon by referring to the words “does the truth” in John 3:21 as being “a very surprising combination of words.” Consequently, many English versions of the Bible do not translate them that way. The NIV says, “whoever lives by the truth.”

Finally, I talked about “the fruit of the Spirit” as listed in Galatians 5:22-23a, suggesting that those nine products of the Spirit of truth are indicative of what we do, or should do, rather than just feelings or attitudes.

As needs to be recognized always, Christian love is not just a warm feeling toward people we like. Rather, it is seeking to do things that will be most helpful to our neighbors in need, even those we do not like. That was part of MLKing’s point in his powerful book “Strength to Love.”

It is harder to link joy to action, but the third fruit, peace, is easier. The fruit produced by the Spirit of truth is not just an inner feeling of tranquility, although that might be a part of it. Since Jesus said blessed are the peacemakers, the peace that is a fruit of the Spirit is peace made between individuals, families, “tribes,” and nations.

That brings us to think about Memorial Day, which USAmericans celebrate today.

What started soon after the Civil War as Decoration Day, that is, a time to decorate with flowers the graves of those who died in that terrible conflict, and gradually came to known as Memorial Day has now been a federal holiday celebrated on the last Monday of May since 1971.

It is hard to remember the war dead without glorifying war to a certain extent—which is something I do not want to do. So let’s focus on the need to work for peace in order that there will be fewer war dead in the future—in our country and all countries.

I hope you Americans will have a Happy Memorial Day—and that we all will increasingly do the truth, which importantly includes striving to make peace.

An Odd Person to Remember on Memorial Day

Monday, May 27, was Memorial Day in the U.S. Since 1971 the observance of the holiday to honor especially those who have died in military service has been held on the last Monday in May.

For many years prior to that, though, Memorial Day was observed on May 30, and that is still said to be the “traditional date” for holiday.

It is somewhat ironic, then, that Mitsuo Fuchida, the Japanese pilot who led the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 died (in 1976 at the age of 73) on May 30.

On the very day that many people across the U.S. were honoring loved ones or friends who had been killed by Japanese bombs and bullets 35 years earlier, the life of the man who led the attack on that “day of infamy,” as President Roosevelt called it, came to an end from complications of diabetes.

But as I wrote on this blog last December, Fuchida’s life was greatly changed after he received a Christian tract from a Baptist missionary in October 1948.

That missionary was Timothy Pietsch, and I just learned earlier this month that his son Kelsey, when he was only five or six years old, would often go with his father and stand on a Jeep singing “Jesus Loves Me” in Japanese as his father passed out tracts.

They don’t know, of course, which day it was that Fuchida received the tract that was instrumental in changing his life.

Kelsey Pietsch’s mother was the only daughter of C. K. (Charles Kelsey) and Maude Dozier, a newly-wed couple who went as missionaries to Japan in 1906. Ten years later C. K. Dozier led in establishing what in Japan is called a “mission school.”

That school, which had only 104 junior high boys when it was opened in 1916, is now Seinan Gakuin, an educational institution that is comprised of a nursery school, kindergarten, elementary school, junior-senior high school, university, and graduate schools (including a law school). Altogether there are well over 10,000 students.

On May 15 of each year, Seinan Gakuin celebrates Founders Day, which I was able to attend this year. Kelsey Pietsch, the founder’s grandson who is now a pastor in California, was also there and was one of the speakers.

In his remarks, Pietsch briefly told the story of his father’s connection to Mitsuo Fuchida, and after the ceremony he showed me a picture of Fuchida and the Pietsch family in front of their home in Tokyo.

As some of you may remember, when I wrote about Fuchida last December, I introduced the book about him, published in 1990 under the title “God’s Samurai: Lead Pilot at Pearl Harbor.”

Mitsuo Fuchida in 1959

The author, Gordon W. Prange who was professor of history at the University of Maryland, called Fuchida “God’s samurai,” for after becoming a Christian, Fuchida soon began giving his testimony and later sailed with Timothy Pietsch to the United States where he spent several months, speaking in numerous churches and even being interviewed by Billy Graham.

So during this Memorial Day week as we honor those Americans who died in military service, maybe it is not so odd, after all, also to remember Mitsuo Fuchida, the Japanese war pilot turned Christian evangelist who happened to die on May 30.