A few weeks ago my family toured the battlefield of Gettysburg National Military Park. About a month beforehand, my 14-year-old son read Killer Angels, a classic novel of the Civil War and he surprised all of us, including our licensed guide, with his knowledge of the events of July 1-3, 1863. I was beaming with pride on the outside, but I was dying just a little on the inside.
Gary Long
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Let me tell you why:
I was raised in the South. You might even call it the Old South. I was taught that my belly button was “where the Yankee shot me.” In North Carolina history class the Civil War was the “War of Northern Aggression” and a blatant attack on states’ rights. Being named “Sherman” made you suspect. Confederate flags were emblems of “heritage, not hate.”
Sometimes you know, sometimes you understand
I long ago assented intellectually that those ideas were wrong, and in many regards flat out evil. Perhaps it was my freshman year at the University of North Carolina that kicked in the corrective process and began the construction of a new world view. All that knowledge heaped up on an impressionable 18-year-old will do that. But we know a whole lot more than we understand, and sometimes it takes a while before knowledge and understanding become the same thing in us.
Knowledge gave way to understanding for me as I toured the Pennsylvania farmland-turned-battlefield. This war, anything but “civil,” left a gouging and permanent scar on our nation. Countless others have chronicled the bloodshed, the financial cost and the subsequent rancor between the North and the South. But deep in the psyche of many Southerners lays the systemically placed feelings of defensiveness, embarrassment and shame. Those feelings are not chosen, nor are they all about losing a war. Those feelings are rooted in something common to all humans, regardless of their relative position to the Mason-Dixon line. Simply put, it is nearly impossible to admit you’re wrong. That you’ve chosen the wrong side. That you’ve committed sin. And that you’ve caused destruction. And, yes, slavery was a moral wrong and the root cause of the war.
Though our memories are short on the hard lessons of history, we are still subject to the same foibles. Our blood thirst is unquenched and we still wage wars. We are still greedy, still fight to preserve our own comfortable ways of life and still enslave others, whether through economic, emotional or sexual abuse. We still hate to admit we’re wrong. And as for me, I can’t stand to say I’m sorry.
Limping toward God
Of the 1,400 or so monuments at Gettysburg, the 2005 Maryland monument is the most moving. Now that I’m a Marylander, I made it a point to seek it out. Now that I’m a Marylander, I take pride in it. The monument is a striking bronze sculpture of two men, perhaps brothers, who symbolize the brothers from a divided Maryland who fought on both sides of the war. They are limping as if injured, from the battlefield. Their eyes are firmly fixed ahead, but neither is able to make it forward without the other.
Not a bad metaphor for the church. Wounded, we limp in on Sunday, wondering if Jesus will patch us up again for another week. Leaning on each other, we approach God, knowing we need to say we’re sorry — to each other and to God — for the things we have done.
There is a more familiar statue of forgiveness for Christians, and that is the cross. Jesus’ work upon the cross shows us there is no need for us to be stuck in the shame of our sin. There is only the requirement that we lift our heads up and admit our mistakes to God.
Only there, before God in confession, can we move past the hot mess of our shame over what we’ve done. And only then, before God in confession, can we stop the long slow dying process, turn toward the light of grace, and grasp ahold of that bright hope that is the kingdom of heaven.
Gary Long (glong@fbcgaithersburg.org) is pastor of First Baptist Church in Gaithersburg, Md.