05/25/2026
Memory is a gift from God. We love to retell the stories that we love most about our lives and our family or nation.
We build what we call memorials as monuments to the past. We choose to set up meaningful tokens of memory for events and persons who have impacted our lives.
Here we are on Memorial Day weekend celebrating the church's birthday while remembering those in our nation's history who lay down their lives for the American ideal of freedom.
This time of year, is one where two different holidays converge. While we are celebrating Memorial Day on the American calendar, the church calendar invites us to remember another momentous event. Today is Pentecost Sunday, the day we celebrate the birthday of the church. Memorial Day began as Decoration Day following the Civil War as Americans remembered those who had died and laid flowers at their graves. Following WWI, this day began to evolve into what we know today as Memorial Day. Today we honor those who have laid down their lives for the ideal of freedom. We will take a moment to reflect, pray, offer thanks to God, and enjoy the freedom of living in a place where it is acknowledged that all men and women are created equal and that the Creator has given us certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We owe our gratitude to God and to those women and men who lay down their lives to protect that freedom that our great nation acknowledges we have been given by God. - Excerpt of a sermon by Joshua Blackmon, 2023
