Memorial Day Reflection
from our
Conference Minister

Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them. Whoever does not love me does not keep my words; and the word that you hear is not mine, but is from the Father who sent me.
— John 14:23

If you have ever walked through rows of white crosses, or stood by a bronze plaque etched with the names of the fallen, you may know that silence has an echo. The hush of reverence, the weight of memory, the ache of all that might have been for young lives lost. These speak as loud as “Taps” or the rifle volley that startles a Memorial Day sky.

Then we come to church, and the lectionary offers us Jesus at a table speaking about love and peace. “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives.”

Memorial Day is tangled with the grief of loss and a longing for peace. We remember the men and women who did not come home. And we hear Jesus offering a home that cannot be destroyed.

He doesn’t tell the disciples that nothing bad will happen. He doesn’t promise safe space or easy answers. He promises a presence. “We will come to them and make our home with them.” That’s what love does — it moves in. It abides.

That is what I crave amid my memories of war — the quiet conviction that love will move into dark places and refuse to leave. That God’s peace is not an escape from the world’s pain, but a deeper way of living in it — with courage, with kindness, and with the kind of hope that seems other worldly. Because it is.

That hope reassures me that I am not alone with my memories. Not only of the sacrifices, but of the hearts behind them. I honor the valor, and grieve the cost. And above all, I welcome the peace that Christ still offers — not as the world gives — but as heaven dares to, in the midst of our sorrows and in spite of them.

May we be people who carry the peace of Christ into a world still trembling with war.

And may you and I never forget that love — God’s love —has made its home within us.

Peace,
Pastor Bill
The Rev. Bill Worley,
Conference Minister

Reprinted from the Friday, May 23, 2025, “Next Week in the PSEC”; the weekly E-Newsletter of our Pennsylvania Southeast Conference of the United Church of Christ.

We invite you to join us on Sunday, May 25 during our 10:15am worship service, during which we will be sharing in a Memorial Day prayer.