Being Thankful
From Pastor John Gehring:
This is a published version of a speech I was asked to present at the Fellow Heirs’ Annual Holiday Dinner. I was told I could speak on Veteran’s Day, Thanksgiving, or Christmas – my choice. I chose to speak on all of them through the fabric of our veterans and the wars they fought.
Part One: Appreciating our veterans. Freedom
What is freedom? What freedom did we gain in the Revolutionary War and continue to defend throughout World War I and World War II?
If you ask someone over the age of 70, they will most likely say, “We fought for the freedom to govern ourselves.” If you ask your average high school student today, they will likely say, “We have the freedom to do whatever we want.”
With such a foundational shift in our understanding of freedom, we find the structures built upon it have harmful defects for both those who demand their freedom and those who get run over by it. For example, a foundational precept was that we had freedom of religion. Now it is interpreted as freedom from religion.
Even in Patrick Henry’s famous “Give me Liberty, or give me death” speech at St. John’s Church, this oft-quoted line was preceded by this one: “It is only in this way that we can hope to arrive at truth, and fulfil the great responsibility which we hold to God and our country.”
We are grateful for the men and women who have fought for our freedoms and further enabled us to fulfill our responsibility to love one another as Christ commands us.
But we have now exchanged those responsibilities for rights. Rather than the interactive messiness of meeting the needs of others, we cherish the space we require to exercise our rights. It’s been quoted in recent Marvel movies that, “With great power comes great responsibility.” I propose a more accurate saying: “With great calamity comes great responsibility.” A rich man clamoring for his rights is absurd while the Titanic is sinking. And isn’t it interesting how prosperity drives us apart and adversity drives us together.
Part Two: Thanksgiving
During World War II, C.S. Lewis wrote concerning the lessons learned from war. Allow me to quote a small portion:
What does war do to death? It certainly does not make it more frequent; 100 percent of us die, and the percentage cannot be increased. It puts several deaths earlier, but I hardly suppose that that is what we fear. Certainly when the moment comes, it will make little difference how many years we have behind us. Does it increase our chances of a painful death? I doubt it. As far as I can find out, what we call natural death is usually preceded by suffering, and a battlefield is one of the very few places where one has a reasonable prospect of dying with no pain at all.
Does it decrease our chances of dying at peace with God? I cannot believe it. If active service does not persuade a man to prepare for death, what conceivable circumstances would?
Yet war does do something to death. It forces us to remember it. The only reason why the cancer at sixty or the paralysis at seventy-five do not bother us is that we forget them. War makes death real to us, and that would have been regarded as one of its blessings by most of the great Christians of the past. They thought it good for us to be always aware of our mortality. I am inclined to think they were right. All the animal life in us, all schemes of happiness that centered in this world, were always doomed to a final frustration. In ordinary times only a wise man can realize it. Now the stupidest of us knows. We see unmistakably the sort of universe in which we have all along been living, and must come to terms with it.
If we had foolish un-Christian hopes about human culture, they are now shattered. If we thought we were building up a heaven on earth, if we looked for something that would turn the present world from a place of pilgrimage into a permanent city satisfying the soul of man, we are disillusioned, and not a moment too soon. But if we thought that for some souls, and at some times, the life of learning, humbly offered to God, was, in its own small way, one of the appointed approaches to the Divine reality and the Divine beauty which we hope to enjoy hereafter, we can think still think that way. And be thankful for it.
Part 3: Christmas
On a crisp, clear morning over 100 years ago, thousands of British, Belgian and French soldiers put down their rifles, stepped out of their trenches and spent Christmas mingling with their German enemies along the Western front. In the hundred years since, the event has been seen as a kind of miracle, a rare moment of peace just a few months into a war that would eventually claim over 15 million lives. But what actually happened on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day of 1914 — and did they really play soccer on the battlefield?
Pope Benedict XV, who took office that September, had originally called for a Christmas truce, an idea that was officially rejected. Yet it seems the sheer misery of daily life in the cold, wet, dull trenches was enough to motivate troops to initiate the truce on their own — which means that it’s hard to pin down exactly what happened. A huge range of differing oral accounts, diary entries and letters home from those who took part make it virtually impossible to speak of a “typical” Christmas truce as it took place across the Western front. To this day, historians continue to disagree over the specifics: no one knows where it began or how it spread. Nevertheless, some two-thirds of troops — about 100,000 people — are believed to have participated in the legendary truce.
Most accounts suggest the truce began with carol singing from the trenches on Christmas Eve, “a beautiful moonlit night, frost on the ground, white almost everywhere”, as Pvt. Albert Moren of the Second Queens Regiment recalled, in a document later rounded up by the New York Times. Graham Williams of the Fifth London Rifle Brigade described in even greater detail:
First the Germans would sing one of their carols and then we would sing one of ours, until when we started up ‘O Come, All Ye Faithful’ the Germans immediately joined in singing the same hymn to the Latin words Adeste Fideles. And I thought, well, this is really a most extraordinary thing – two nations both singing the same carol in the middle of a war.”
The next morning, in some places, German soldiers emerged from their trenches, calling out “Merry Christmas” in English. Allied soldiers came out warily to greet them. In others, Germans held up signs reading “You no shoot, we no shoot.” Over the course of the day, troops exchanged gifts of cigarettes, food, buttons and hats. The Christmas truce also allowed both sides to finally bury their dead comrades whose bodies had lain for weeks on “no man’s land,” the ground between opposing trenches.
The phenomenon took different forms across the Western front. One account mentions a British soldier having his hair cut by his pre-war German barber; another talks of a pig-roast. Several mention impromptu kick-abouts with makeshift soccer balls, although, contrary to popular legend, it seems unlikely that there were any organized matches.
The truce was widespread but not universal. Evidence suggests that in many places firing continued — and in at least two a truce was attempted but soldiers attempting to fraternize were shot by opposing forces.
And of course, it was only ever a truce, not peace. Hostilities returned, in some places later that day and in others not until after New Year’s Day. “I remember the silence, the eerie sound of silence,” one veteran from the Fifth Battalion the Black Watch, Alfred Anderson, later recalled to The Observer. “It was a short peace in a terrible war.” As the Great War resumed, it wreaked such destruction and devastation that soldiers became hardened to the brutality of the war. While there were occasional moments of peace throughout the rest of World War I, they never again came on the scale of the Christmas truce in 1914.
Conclusion: In James chapter 4, God says, “What is the source of quarrels and conflicts among you? Is not the source your pleasures that wage war in your members? 2 You lust and do not have; so you commit murder. You are envious and cannot obtain; so you fight and quarrel.”
There is a gift we celebrate at Christmas and it is this: The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. And we beheld His glory. This gift brings an internal freedom. A freedom that no external pleasure can buy - freedom from the bondage and even penalty of sin. This is not the freedom we enjoy for a lifetime. It is the freedom we embrace and celebrate for eternity. What is true freedom? Freedom in Christ.