In 2006 we all wanted the troops to come home, now the troops are coming home … mission accomplished?  Perhaps not.

 

 

Last Sunday was Memorial Day.  We recognized the sacrifice of our soldiers and their families who have paid the ultimate price in our wars.  Today it’s the Sunday after Memorial Day, it seems appropriate to think about the ongoing sacrifices of some of our living veterans.  They are coming home and that is good, but is it a home that nurtures them as they deal with what they have seen and experienced in our service?

 

This sermon is a celebration of BS’s words and music built around a recurring theme in his work: holding up a mirror to America, the America that we aspire to.  The impact of broken promises and dreams on America’s veterans has been a steady theme in his work.  

 

Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true, or is it something worse?

 

In the tradition of our church I thought that I would start with how Bruce first impacted me – his not so random act of kindness.

 

Following that I’ll use his songs, and what I know from media and talking with veterans and their parents of what is going on now in their lives.

 

Then - maybe part of the answer, disguised as a story about random acts of kindness that allowed Bruce to find his home, and how he has passed it along to some Veterans

 

What is the power of rock?

 

I struggle answering “why are you such a loyal fan of Bruce Springsteen?”  I am a fan because he is always uplifting for me.  I am loyal because when I needed it, he impacted my life profoundly.

 

Growing up I hated my life, I did a lot of self destructive things to relieve me of the expectations of others, and most people – myself included – worried about where I would end up.  I didn’t let people into my life, and resented and resisted anyone who tried to tell me how to live it.  But at night I would lie awake listening to the radio, feeling like the answer was out there, but never quite connecting.  Five songs into my first Springsteen concert, he played a song by the Animals called “It’s my life”

 

It's my life and I'll do what I want

It's my mind and I'll think what I want

 

It took a lot more shows, and many, many hours of listening for me to realize, that if I wanted people to let me live as my life, I would have to live it as it were going to be my life.

 

What made Bruce different?

Why could he change my life when other music couldn’t?

 

The simple answer is that he wanted to.  While others seemed to either sing of cynical hate or idealistic love, Bruce seemed to be intent on creating that transformational bridge between the two.

 

In the beginning, depressed as I was, I would sing, and sing with all my heart:

 

You're born with nothing,
and better off that way,
Soon as you've got something they send
someone to try and take it away,

Nothing is forgotten or forgiven,
when it's your last time around,
I got stuff running 'round my head
That I just can't live with or live down

 

While cars provide the ability to run from your problems in his songs, the women carry with them the idealized love where redemption might be found.  In Racing in the Streets, the hero meets such a woman, and at first her love together with his dreams may lead to a better life.  But something happens …

 

But now there's wrinkles around my baby's eyes
And she cries herself to sleep at night
When I come home the house is dark
She sighs "Baby did you make it all right"
She sits on the porch of her daddy's house
But all her pretty dreams are torn
She stares off alone into the night
With the eyes of one who hates for just being born

 

Bruce usually structures the songs in his concerts in threes. 

 

The first song might resonate with your fear and draw you in. 

The next song is the warning of where it might take you, or in the case of this pair, a warning that idealized love alone sometimes isn’t all you need. 

The third song in the threes offers a way out, and so having sung the bad with all my heart I would also find myself singing songs like Badlands, Promised Land and Thunder Road.

And somewhere inside me I found a place where I wasn’t afraid, bitter, and defeated and started my journey to a better life with anyone who cared to join me.  When I looked around me there were 10,000 like minded people committing to that journey together.

 

I like to say that when I was growing up, a Springsteen concert had the potential of religion, in that on any given night it could and did change how I thought.  These days his shows feel more like how I would describe church, we get together and find harmony – literally through song – and sing and celebrate common values as a community.

 

Bruce’s concerts are recognition of what challenges us, and a celebration of the spirit in the community that gives us strength and faith that we can overcome those challenges.

 

The Vietnam Veteran in song

 

Maybe that answers why Bruce … here.

 

So, why Bruce, now?

 

Veterans show up early and often in Bruce’s songs.  On his second album we start with

 

The ragamuffin gunner is returnin' home like a hungry runaway
He walks through town all alone
He must be from the fort he hears the high school girls say
His countryside's burnin' with wolfman fairies dressed in drag for homicide

 

Already we can see the themes that run through his songs and the veteran’s experience.  The veteran has returned home … but it isn’t really home.

 

The Veteran fights for an ideal of America and one can imagine that they sustain themselves with images of returning to normalcy in the America of their dreams.  But in Born in the USA as in Youngstown Ohio the homes that they return to are not the same.  They need stability more than ever but the economy is in decline and they are no longer welcome in their efforts to re-enter it.

 

I come home from 'Nam worked my way to scarfer
A job that'd suit the devil as well
Taconite, coke and limestone
Fed my children and made my pay
Then smokestacks reachin' like the arms of God
Into a beautiful sky of soot and clay

 

We sent our sons to Korea and Vietnam
Now we're wondering what they were dyin' for

My sweet Jenny, I'm sinkin' down
Here darlin' in Youngstown

When I die I don't want no part of heaven
I would not do heavens work well
I pray the devil comes and takes me
To stand in the fiery furnaces of hell

 

The central character of Youngstown has a life built around a social structure – a dream of America – that doesn’t come true.  And with the sense of betrayal that goes with discovering lies, he falls into a degenerative cycle of withdrawing from society and of bitterness. 

 

For our veterans this is re-enforced because their primary support comes from the military and the VA.  And in the cases where those supports fail them they further isolate themselves from family and community.

Today’s Vets, tomorrows what?

 

The songs have impact because they are dramatic stories, but do they represent a general truth?

 

Before giving you some numbers I need to qualify them … the facts have been clouded by the politicization of our wars and of how we treat Veterans, so there are ranges, and I have tried to give consensus numbers

Between 21 and 38% of the US’s homeless population is veterans.*

If we use the low end that means that there are 154,000 homeless veterans

79% reside in central cities.

 

The military takes care of its own, and for most Veterans that works.  If the VA and military community doesn’t provide enough help, Veterans will naturally gravitate to others who have also fallen through the cracks.  They tend to go the central cities to be with other disenfranchised Vets.  I think our challenge is how to help them re-integrate into our community, before they drop out.

 

Those are our collective lessons from the Vietnam era, so how is today different?

It is true that we have a more mature military – the average age of full time service members deployed is 27, national  guard 33, while in Vietnam it was 19

 

In previous conflicts we tended to deploy single men who deployed once, today:

60% have family

10% women

16,000 single mothers

47% of dead left spouse or children

 

In the Vietnam era veterans had fewer responsibilities to assume upon their return, and so could take time to honor their pain.  And there wasn’t the threat of having to resume service hanging over their head as it is today.

 

Of the 1.6 million have served in our current wars, as of 2007 525,000 have served more than once

 

And there is more exposure to concussive weapons, with older less physically resilient soldiers:

 

35% of Walter Reed patients have traumatic brain injury (TBI)

Of the 229,000 veterans of Enduring Freedom who sought treatment from the VA, 37% received a diagnosis of a mental health problem, 17% PTSD

 

We can debate about which of our wars were worse – the ones in the Middle East or the ones wars in the Far East, but that doesn’t help our sons and daughters.  The fact is that we will have a legacy coming home from these wars.  Some of those Veterans need help, and some of that help needs to come from our community.

 

That help may be in the form of baby sitting, so that the parents can have a date night, it may be doing yard work, it may be asking …

 

Bruce’s history how not so random acts of kindness can change people’s lives

 

I thought that it might be appropriate now to tell a story about good people doing good, and the differences that those not so random acts of kindness can make. 

 

By all accounts Bruce’s childhood was not auspicious.  His father could not hold down a job, and in Bruce’s eyes had given up, after having his dreams beaten out of him.  But he saw his mother’s quiet dignity as she coped, and he sensed the happiness that she got from AM radio of the early 60’s.  And when he saw Elvis Presley on the Ed Sullivan show he saw his future.

 

When Bruce was in his late teens his parents moved to California and he decided to stay in New Jersey.  Local families who believed in him took him in until he could find his way.

 

By the late 70’s he had a cult following, and was trying to find a larger vision for his work.  While touring he was reading a book by the pool in a motel in Arizona.  A man in a wheel chair asked him how he liked the book.  Bruce told him that he was deeply moved by the book.  The man thanked him – that man was Ron Kovic.  He wrote the autobiography entitled “Born on the Fourth of July” and was played by Tom Cruise in the same movie.  Ron Kovic volunteered for Vietnam out a sense of patriotism, was paralyzed, and poorly treated by the VA.  He left his family and community, become an outcast but eventually returned to both protest the war and fight for Veteran rights. 

 

Towards the end of his 1981 tour he did a charity concert for Vietnam Veterans.  Bruce shared the stage with Bobby Muller, like Ron Kovic also in a wheel chair due to injuries in Vietnam.  Bobby had just started the Vietnam Veterans for America, (now Veterans for America).  More recently he has been instrumental in publicizing the Brain Trauma Injuries plaguing our veterans of the Afghan and Iraq wars. 

 

As part of his introduction of Bobby; Bruce spoke of meeting veterans the night before:

 

I was nervous and I was a little embarrassed about not knowing what to say to ‘em and.....it’s like when you feel like you´re walking down a dark street at night and out of the corner of your eye you see somebody getting hurt or somebody getting hit in the dark alley but you keep walking on because you think it doesn’t have anything to do with you and you just want to get home....well, Vietnam turned this whole country into that dark street and unless we’re able to walk down those dark alleys and look into the eyes of the men and the women that are down there and the things that happened, we’re never gonna be able to get home

 

In Bobby’s words before that concert no one would give him time, but after that show no one would say no.  Just as Ron Kovic and others inspire Bruce to bigger things, Bruce played a part in Bobby Muller’s growth.  In 1991 Bobby co-founded the International Campaign to Ban Landmines. In recognition of it’s leadership in the global landmine campaign it was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997.

 

Most of Bruce’s songs celebrate common people struggling in their day to day lives to maintain their grace and to do a little of what he calls God’s work.  And on a nightly basis he promotes local food banks, and quietly provides them with substantial support.

 

Celebrating those who do God’s work

 

Bruce was very affected by John Ford’s film version of Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath.  He offered up his own underdog, making a stand, trying to reclaim the ideals of this land is your land:

 

Preacher lights up a butt and takes a drag

Waitin' for when the last shall be first and the first shall be last

 

I'm sittin' down here in the campfire light

Waitin' on the ghost of Tom Joad

 

Now Tom said "Mom, wherever there's a cop beatin' a guy

Wherever a hungry newborn baby cries

Where there's a fight 'gainst the blood and hatred in the air

Look for me Mom I'll be there

Wherever there's somebody fightin' for a place to stand

Or decent job or a helpin' hand

Wherever somebody's strugglin' to be free

Look in their eyes Mom you'll see me."

 

I think that Tom Joad represents Bruce’s inner Christ and what he aspires to.

 

Making dreams come true as an adult

 

When I set out to write this sermon I was hoping that I could get a couple messages across.

 

The first is that the faith, and hope and love that you put into life, be it as not so random acts of kindness, or through the passion of a heavily amplified rock show can make a difference in people’s lives.

 

The second thing is that helping our community be a worthy home to bring our boys and girls home to is important.  Last year Bruce sang of the America of our dreams and the gap between the reality and that ideal:

 

My father said "Son, we're lucky in this town
It's a beautiful place to be born
It just wraps its arms around you
Nobody crowds you, nobody goes it alone.
That flag flying over the courthouse
Means certain things are set in stone
Who we are, what we'll do and what we won't."

Its gonna be a long walk home

 

Indeed it is, for our new President and America, and for our veterans.

 

But as Bruce says “the America of your dreams is out there waiting for you”, but you have to work for it, and you cannot get there alone.