 How we remember historical events is complicated. That's because history is complicated. Think for a moment about the Vietnam War. To understand and learn lessons from the complexity of that war, we need to understand the duplicity and the ineptitude of the US government and military leadership, the corruption of the South Vietnamese government, the backdrop of the Cold War, the dynamics of first French and then American colonialism, and the anti-war movement in the United States. Most importantly, we need to grapple with the reality that more than 58,000 American soldiers died there and the many hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese combatants and civilians who also lost their lives. The wall on the Washington Mall is a poignant memorial to the American dead. Now imagine a much, much, much, much larger wall containing all the names of those in Vietnam who died. The Vietnam War cannot be reduced to a single or a few dimensions. Of course, history is often misremembered to advance contemporary causes. The Lost Cause movement that took off in the early 1900s and persists to this day is an excellent example. The movement intentionally misremembers the Civil War to cover and promote segregation and persecution of black Americans. The Lost Cause continues to portray the Civil War as a brave struggle by the outman states that succeeded to preserve states' rights, liberty, and their way of life. Slavery is depicted as something that was incidental to the war, an innocuous institution that actually was good for the enslaved people. All of this, of course, is a vicious, horrible, rotten lie. The Lost Cause is not really about the past. It's about creating a present and a future that continues to devalue and destroy black lives. And every day now we are witnessing Lost Cause 2.0, intentionally misremembering the January 6th insurrection. This is part of a coordinated effort to shred our democracy and return Donald Trump to power through illegitimate means. And it is related to the original Lost Cause. It also seeks to devalue and destroy black lives, and brown lives, and trans lives, and other marginal lives. This misremembering is not really about January 6th. It's about, in many ways, the election coming up in 2022 and especially 2024. This is why the vast majority of Republicans and Congress have worked so diligently to thwart independent investigations of the insurrection. Conversely, remembering history more accurately can be a positive and a sobering force in the here and now. I'm really struck by how World War I is remembered in the UK and forgotten here. I was surprised when I lived in the UK for four months how deep and palpable World War I is in the collective consciousness. This makes sense when you think about the horrendous human cost of the war. One out of 50 people at the start of the war in the UK were killed in the war. In the United States we lost one out of a thousand. So most everyone in the UK knew several soldiers who died in the war. In the United States most people did not personally know anyone who was killed. Its impact on families and towns here faded relatively quickly, especially when compared with the earlier carnage of the Civil War in the United States or the casualty rate that was much higher in World War II. The impact of World War I on UK families hit me really hard when I visited the Rosalind Hill Unitarian Chapel in London. The minister showed me a plaque on the altar listing church members who were killed in World War I. This was not a huge church, but 21 names appear on that plaque. 21. Can you imagine having 21 people at FUS lose their life in a war? So many families in that congregation experience such deep grief. Pointing to the plaque, the minister said, and here's the thing. Eight of these people died on the same day in the same battle. This was because regiments were then geographically organized, so when a regiment was decimated in a battle, the loss was concentrated on a particular locale. Our nation's tribute to military veterans, Veterans Day, takes place on November 11, the same as Remembrance Day in the UK. This day commemorates the armistice that ended World War I. If you ask, I suspect many Americans would probably have no idea why Veterans Day is observed on November 11. In the UK, the searing collective memory of World War I is always viscerally right under the surface, everybody knows what that day means. The grief and the angst come above the surface in a grand scale on Remembrance Day. For the month preceding, poppies, evoking the poppy fields of Flanders where so many died, are everywhere. So more than 100 years after the war, everyone in the UK stops whatever they're doing and holds silence for two minutes at 11 a.m. on November 11, the 11 a.m. on the 11th day of the 11th month. That's when the armistice was signed. I was leading a church service at the moment when I was a sabbatical minister in London when that 11 o'clock hour came up. We stopped almost in mid-sentence and all stood in silence. My nephew was at a Tottenham Spurs football game that day. The stadium was full of people getting ready for a Premier League match. The crowd had been rocking at 10.59 and at 11 o'clock went completely silent. Everybody stood silently. My nephew said that you could have heard a pin drop and he had never experienced anything like that. Remembrance Day is such a perfect name for that day in the UK. Remembrance is what it's all about, remembering in a full, complex way. So why does all of this matter? Because the lived national nightmare of World War I is present today in the UK as it makes decisions about war. This collective memory does not prevent the UK from fighting stupid wars, think Falkland wars for example, but it is a palpable part of the calculus. And this feels less and less true in the United States where so much glorifies war and where the privileged elite have essentially outsourced war in the casualties of war to the lower classes. I don't think I know anyone who knew anyone who died in Afghanistan or Iraq. I'm in the privileged elite. President Bush targeted me with his message during the Afghan war that be patriotic, go to Disney World, go buy stuff at the mall. My remembrance of the Afghan and Iraq wars will always be distant and muted. All of this compels me to wonder if a fair draft that spreads the burden of war on all, regardless of income, gender identity, sexual orientation, etc., if that would be a deterrent to war. I believe it probably would be. Well, how we remember is also important to denominations and to congregations. This is why I've talked several times this year with you about the complicated history of Unitarian Universalism in relationship to slavery, to racism, and imperialism. It's easy for us to celebrate Theodore Parker's brave and relentless commitment to abolitionism. We named congregations after the Reverend James Reeve who was killed when he answered Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s call to come to Selma. We remember Unitarians and Universalists who spoke against U.S. imperialism in the Pacific around the turn of the 20th century. But we don't tend to remember all the New England Unitarians who stayed silent about slavery as they got rich off the slave trade. We don't remember Unitarian and Universalist ministers who said no to going to Selma or the congregants who went after their ministers who said yes and heeded Dr. King's call. We don't remember that some Unitarians and Universalists opposed imperialism in the Pacific because they did not want white Americans mixing with brown Hawaiians or Filipinos. We don't remember that many Unitarians and Universalists supported eugenics. We don't remember that numerous Unitarian and Universalist ministers entered and some won American eugenics society sermon contests. We have to remember the fullness and the complexity of our Unitarian Universalist history. We have not historically been completely or arguably mostly on the right side of a lot of stuff in history. Knowing this, owning this is essential to our anti-racism anti-oppression work today. Knowing the fullness of our history enables us to bring some humility to this work and that is a starting place. I want to go a step further and say that we also need to explore seriously the concept of reparations. Our UU faith has harmed black people, indigenous people, and people of color by this shadow side of our history that we have so often ignored. Making reparations includes but is not limited to financial restitution. Making reparations is about reckoning with our collective past, claiming what happened in wrestling with its implications for us today. It's about stopping practices which continue to marginalize and cause harm, practices which continue the legacy of oppression. It's about supporting black, indigenous, and people of color within and beyond Unitarian Universalism who are leading toward a more consistently beloved community. It's about making amends. Ta-Nehisi Coates says it well. What is needed is an airing of family secrets, a settling of old ghosts. What is needed is healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt. What I'm talking about is more than recompense for past injustices, more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What I'm talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal. Such wise words about the deeper meaning of reparations from Coates. To me, this is what Unitarian Universalism as a whole needs to do in the United States. This is what First Unitarian Society in Madison needs to do too. Reckoning with this congregation's past will lead it to spiritual renewal as well as a deeper, fuller, wider commitment to racial justice. So, I encourage you to explore more deeply FUS Minister's Kenneth L. Patton's symbolic resignation from the white race and the response of congregants to this. I expect there was a lot of flack that he received. Explore the enormous impact of FUS member Frederick Jackson Turner's paper, The Significance of the Frontier in American History. He read that paper at a meeting of the American Historical Society during the 1893 Chicago's World Fair. The paper was used or misused by supporters of American imperialism in Hawaii and the Philippines and elsewhere in the Pacific. It was an intellectual underpinning of that imperialist enterprise. The paper celebrated American exceptionalism, which was a foundation of imperialism. The paper also influenced the myth of the rugged, individualistic, western American white man that continues to be a cultural icon. I think FUS could learn and grow a lot if it deeply engaged with the impact of Turner's work on American subjugation of the Philippines. What if you did this work and then entered into a relationship with Philippines, Unitarian Universalists, people who, like all people in the Philippines, continue to be impacted by the legacy of American imperialism? What would reparations as Coates describes reparations look like? How would it impact what FUS becomes? I am intrigued by this. And alas, I have about run out of time here, and so I am just planning some seeds, seeds of reflection. Interim Ministry really is all about planting seeds anyway. I hope these seeds may come to fruition here. As I end the spoken reflection today, I want to return to those poppy-filled fields of Flanders, the final resting place of those souls from Rosalind Chapel in London, and so many more people from so many countries, including our own. How we remember them, all the people who died for war, how we remember matters, how we remember all of our history matters. It shapes who we are today. It shapes who we will become.