This week is the Army-Navy game,
the football rivalry between the Cadets of the United States Military Academy
at West Point, and the Midshipmen of the United States Naval Academy at
Annapolis. As a graduate of West Point,
this game brings back a lot of fond memories.
There is an intense pride for those who have attended a service academy
that spans generations. At Army-Navy
tailgates you will find a comradery that spans generations. At such events you may find cadets still in
their late teens, just entering manhood, and at the same event you may find
grizzled former graduates using walkers and canes, veterans of our foreign wars,
and everything in-between.
The thing that binds these men
and women is the tradition of having been part of the Long Gray Line, the name
we give to those who have been formed by the tradition and discipline that has
permeated the West Point culture for over two hundred years. We take pride in the fact that despite over
two centuries of history, we still wear the charcoal gray uniforms that
distinguish the West Point cadet. On
entering, we still go through the West Point version of basic training known as
“Beast Barracks” and endure rigorous military training each summer when other
college students are home on vacation.
We are still taught using the Thayer Method, instituted by the school’s
first Superintendent, Sylvanus Thayer. We
share the experience of 19-20 hour days trying to balance the rigorous
academics and athletics required of all cadets with our military training and
duties. Walking through a Company formation
in one of the quads, you will still find the freshman cadets, known as “PIebes”
reciting pieces of Cadet knowledge such as the Alma Mater, Schofield’s
Definition of Discipline, and The Corps to the exacting eyes and ears of the Upper Class Cadets.
We are formed in these ways in order to instill an ethos that is
enshrined in the school motto, “Duty, Honor, Country.” We take pride that from class to class, and
generation to generation, West Point Cadets have been formed in the same way
spanning all the way back to our founding.
This is the Long Gray Line.
The essence of the Long Gray Line
is a sense of history that is best summed up in a motto held by the History
Department. Much of the history we teach
was made by the people we taught. There
is much truth to this. It is this
formation and shared experience that can be credited for producing men such as
Winfield Scott, Ulysses S. Grant, Robert E. Lee, BlackJack John Pershing,
Dwight D. Eisenhower, Omar Bradley, George S. Patton, Douglas MacArthur, Norman
Schwartzkopf, and others. It is also the
legacy of men that most of you may never know, men such as Steve Frank, Leif
Nott, and Joe Lusk who gave their lives for their country. But we remember, because we are of the Long
Gray Line and we draw our strength from this ethos and those who lived and died
by it before us. It would be unthinkable
in that community to bring shame upon the name of our Alma Mater and the men
who went before us.
Meditating on this reminded me of
a passage in Hebrews that brings to light a similar aspect about the nature of
Christianity.
The epistle to the Hebrews is a
passionate plea to Jewish believers who were considering leaving the faith to
return to the Second Temple Judaism.
Rather than worship Jesus as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of
the world, they were returning to the system of animal sacrifices which the
Jewish community still thought made them righteous before God.
The author of Hebrews takes great
pain to remind his audience of the great promises made to the Hebrew nation in
the past. He reminds them that God
promised to lead them into a place of rest.
He reminds them that because they were sinful, God instituted a holy
priesthood after the line of Aaron to stand before God and intercede on behalf
of them to make them righteous. However,
he demonstrates that this promise was not fully complete, and that this
priesthood could not bring the perfect righteousness required to allow
them to stand in God’s presence.
However, in the fullness of time,
God the Father sent his Son to be born as a man so that he might live among
them, and suffer with them, and to die for them. This Son, Jesus the Christ, would offer his
own life as the perfect sacrifice to atone for sin, once for all time. Through this sacrifice Jesus became our great
high priest, the perfect fulfillment of the priesthood to intercede on our
behalf for all time before God the Father, so that we might enter His rest and
be with Him.
After laying this all out, the
author of Hebrews appeals to all the great men and women of faith from the past, to whom
God gave these great promises. Men such
as Noah, Abraham, Moses, Rahab, Gideon, Samson, David, and the prophets. He appeals to the unnamed who faced hardship
and suffering, torture and death, because they believed that God would bring to
completion what He had promised, and that He would do so through His Son. Though they did not see the fulfillment of these promises with their own eyes, they believed that God would bring them to completion.
The author then comes to this
passage:
“Therefore, since we are
surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every
weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run the race with endurance
the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of
our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising
the shame, and is seated at the right hand of God.” – Hebrews 12:1-2
We too come from a long line of
faithful men and women that span from generation to generation. Our community is built on Christ, the author
of our salvation. Our community is built
on the knowledge of the fulfillment of the promises that God gave to our
Fathers in Jesus. It is this faith that
was passed to the great Church fathers of the past such as Peter, Clement,
Ignatius, Athenasius, and Augustine. It
is the faith that sustained men such as Aquinas, Francis, and Benedict. It is the faith that our own tradition handed
down to us in Luther, Chemnitz, Walther, and Bonhoeffer. It is the faith handed down by people who may
never have their names written in a book such as my grandparents and my own
mother and father. It is this faith that
has become our own treasured possession spanning back generations upon
generations.
Today though, I look at the
numbers of Churches that are shuttering their doors, and I ask just as the
author of the Epistle to the Hebrews did, are we being faithful to those who
came before us? Are we faithfully
holding on to the promises that were fulfilled in Christ? And are we passing them down to our children
and proclaiming it to a world that needs redemption? Do we meet as the body of Christ so that we
might hear these promises proclaimed to the benefit of us and our neighbor, and
partake of the body and blood of Christ?
It is unthinkable that we might bring shame to them who went before us
by neglecting the gospel that has been handed down to us.
Let us rejoice, just as the
author of Hebrews did. “Let us draw near
[to God] with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts
sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure
water. Let us hold fast the confession
of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful. And let us consider how to stir up one another
to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of
some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing
near.”
Let us not only rejoice in these
promises privately, but do so in the community of faith, the community which
came before us and will come after us.
Let us teach this gospel to our children and proclaim it to the world in
need of Christ. Let us be a part of the
long line of the faithful who went before us, and to prove ourselves faithful
to those destined to come after us so that there is no break in the great
line.
May God give us joy in the
fulfillment of His promises in His Son, Jesus Christ. May the Holy Spirit work in us, giving us
faith and making us faithful and steadfast to continue living in the
promises.
One last thing: Go Army, Beat Navy!
“Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself
likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the
one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who
through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery.”
