Please click the link to watch Rev. Cynthia Snavely’s video recording of this sermon.
I asked that those of you who wished to do so send me pictures and comments about the people in them for this Sunday, as we remember not just our military dead, but all our beloved dead. Interestingly, everyone who sent a picture sent one of a parent or both parents. I suppose that should not be surprising. For most of us, these are the people whom we knew from the very beginning of our lives. Although even those of us who did not really know a parent were likely told about them. My father’s father died a few months before my father was born, but my father had pictures of him, and I know my grandmother told him some things about him.
The very first thing I can remember involved my parents. I fell out of bed. It was early morning, and my parents were eating breakfast in the kitchen. My father began work at 6 just a few minutes down the road from where we lived, so maybe it was 5:30. I remember it was still dark. They were eating salami sandwiches on buttered toast. They picked the peppercorns out of some salami and made me a sandwich before I was put back to bed.
Perhaps when I am older, and maybe losing my memory, some little boy will bring me a sandwich, and I will again remember that early morning salami sandwich of my childhood. In our Time for All Ages story, except for remembering when she met Wilfred Gordon McDonald Partridge all the things Miss Nancy Alison Delcourt Cooper remembers are from her childhood (from Storyline Online – Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge).
I remember my father being up early on Memorial Day, cutting peonies from the flowerbeds around the house to take to cemeteries. He was taking them to the graves of his parents and my mother’s grandparents.
I remember Memorial Day parades of my childhood, my brother waiting excitedly for the end when the firetrucks would come by.
I remember Memorial Day in Beaver Meadows, Pennsylvania at the very beginning of my ministry. All four of the town’s clergy would ride in the parade. There was a poppy queen and a poppy king, the mayor, the VFW, the American Legion, the Girl Scout troop, and the high school band. The parade ended at a memorial park where one of the clergy would say a prayer, the band would play the national anthem and taps, one high school student would read or recite Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and another would read or recite “In Flanders Field the Poppies Grow,” the mayor would give a speech, and the Girl Scouts would sing “Let There Be Peace on Earth.”
Last Friday the Bridgewater Patch posted an article by Megan Verhelst that began, “The remains of a New Jersey soldier who died while fighting in World War II have been identified nearly 80 years after his death.
“The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency announced last month that U.S. Army Pvt. Roman Cherubini, 22, of Bridgeton, was accounted for on Dec. 16, 2024.”
The article noted, “Although the exact circumstances of his death were not recorded, the U.S. War Department declared Cherubini killed in action on June 16, 1944.”
Above the article was a clipping from a newspaper with a picture of Roman and his twin brother in uniform. The caption read, “Private First Class Roman Cherubini and Private Raymond Cherubini are twin brothers, both of whom entered service with the National Guards. Roman, stationed at Fort Leonard Wood, was recently home on furlough and said that Bridgeton looked ‘swell’ to him. Raymond, stationed in Arizona, is married to the former Mary Muning, of California, and has a nine-month-old son. He is looking forward to coming back to his hometown after the war. The twins would like to hear from their friends, who may obtain their addresses from their sister, Mrs. Anita Patitucci, of 407 South Avenue, this city,” (from WWII Soldier From NJ Identified Nearly 80 Years After His Death | Across New Jersey, NJ Patch).
After eighty years, I assume Roman’s brother and sister are now also dead. Who from the family will claim his body? What stories about him are still told in the family? How is he remembered?
I went to a Somerset Ministers’ meeting this week. One of the things passed out was a poster about programs commemorating Paul Robeson at Raritan Community College this June. Robeson is remembered by enough people to have a Wikipedia page that declares he was “an American bass-baritone concert artist, actor, professional football player, and activist who became famous both for his cultural accomplishments and for his political stances,” (from Paul Robeson – Wikipedia). Robeson has a connection here, as his father was the minister of St. Thomas A.M.E. Zion Church here in Somerville, and he attended Somerville High School (Paul Robeson – Wikipedia). What does someone need to do to be remembered not just by one’s family, but by a nation or even a world?
Unitarian Universalist minister Kathleen McTigue has this reading in the back of our hymnal:
“In the struggles we choose for ourselves,
in the ways we move forward in our lives
and bring our world forward with us,
“It is right to remember the names of those
who gave us strength in this choice of living.
It is right to name the power of hard lives well-lived.
“We share a history with those lives.
We belong to the same motion.
“They too were strengthened by what had gone before.
They too were drawn on by the vision of what might come to be.
“Those who lived before us,
who struggled for justice and suffered injustice before us,
have not melted into the dust,
and have not disappeared.
“They are with us still.
The lives they lived hold us steady.
“Their words remind us and call us back to ourselves.
Their courage and love evoke our own.
“We, the living, carry them with us:
we are their voices, their hands and their hearts.
“We take them with us,
and with them choose the deeper path of living.”
Memories can warm our hearts, but they can also embolden them.
People have sometimes asked me if I come from a family of ministers, and I used to always say no. But then a few years ago, I reconsidered that answer. My great-aunt Ethel was supposed to be either ordained or licensed to preach in the Evangelical United Brethren Church. The story I was told is that the day of the event she was called and told that it would not happen. She was married and had a child, and the church would not be able to move her about as they wanted.
She did not give up on preaching. I remember her guest-preaching in the church I grew up in. She was a regular speaker for the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. My father had two cousins, Mary and Irene, both of whom were missionaries, one in Alaska and the other somewhere in Africa. Their pictures were on a mission bulletin board in the church where I grew up. Sometimes they would come home and speak at a Sunday service about their work, and a special collection would be taken up for the cause. So, do I come from a family of ministers? Maybe so. I don’t know that I would have considered ministry without their examples.
And would I be brave enough to go to marches and rallies and write to my political representatives, or visit their offices without the example of all those Unitarians, Universalists, and Unitarian Universalists who worked for abolition, women’s suffrage, prison reform, civil rights and so much more? Dorothea Dix, Clara Barton, Julia Ward Howe, Theodore Parker, Whitney Young, James Reeb, Viola Liuzzo. Many of you can name others, I am sure.
There is another reading in the back of our hymnal, which is attributed there as from Roland Gittlesohn, adapted, but when I went to look it up online, it is attributed to Rabbi Sylvan Kamens and Rabbi Jack Riemer.
“In the rising of the sun and in its going down, we remember them.
In the blowing of the wind and in the chill of winter, we remember them.
In the opening of buds and in the rebirth of spring, we remember them.
In the blueness of the sky and in the warmth of summer, we remember them.
In the rustling of leaves and in the beauty of autumn, we remember them.
In the beginning of the year and when it ends, we remember them.
When we are weary and in need of strength, we remember them.
When we are lost and sick at heart, we remember them.
When we have joys we yearn to share, we remember them.
So long as we live, they too shall live, for they are now a part of us, as we remember them.”
And in that is their memory blessed.
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