Christmas in the Trenches
a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the Second Congregatonal Meeting House on Nantucket Island,
Sunday December 22, 2002
“Distant music sounded deep, as if from within my ribs. The music was, in fact, people from all over the world in the upper chamber, singing harmonies in their various tongues....” from *For the Time Being*, by Annie Dillard
***
[extemporaneous introduction: “a nation of dyslexic devil worshippers who have sold our souls to Santa....”]
In any event, I’ve been thinking an awful lot about the traditional Christmas story this past week, and especially about how well the story works AS a story, on so many different levels, despite the fact that (most of it, at least) probably didn’t really happen at all. But why let the facts interfere with the truth? There’s a mythological quality to the Nativity narratives which is meaningful in its own right, notwithstanding even the fact that Matthew and Luke contradict one another, not only on the minor details, but also regarding some of the major points as well. How, for example, can Jesus be descended from David, through Joseph, thus fulfilling the prophecy that the Messiah shall be a “shoot from the stump of the House of Jesse,” and at the same time be “born of a Virgin” and “conceived by the Holy Ghost,” not just the Savior, but the Son of God Incarnate?
Not that any of this really matters to Unitarians, who for centuries have been saying that the real miracle of Christmas is the miracle of birth itself, and the coming of new life and new light into the world -- that “Every Night a Child is Born is a Holy Night,” and that we are all the sons and the daughters of the Creator.
But even this “demythologizing” of the Christmas Story tends to ignore what is , to my mind, the most important aspect of the tale. What kind of Universe do we inhabit, where the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, the Prince of Peace, the Messiah and God’s Anointed Son Incarnate, God’s Word Made Flesh, Christ the Savior is born, not in some palace someplace, like Pharaoh or Caesar (or the Buddha, for that matter), but in a barn, to an unwed mother, the illegitimate offspring of a landless, peasant day laborer who ekes out a meager existence from the sweat of his brow and by the work of his hands, and who may or may not actually be the child’s biological father? Homeless people, for whom there was no room at the inn; refugees, who fled to Egypt following the child’s birth, in order to escape Herod’s murderous persecution.
Can you imagine what it might be like to be a child born in those circumstances? Is it any wonder that you would grow up to proclaim a message of radical egalitarianism, or that you should meet your end before attaining your 34th birthday, publicly executed as a religious fanatic and potential terrorist by the foreign hegemonic power whose military occupation and civil governance of your homeland helps preserve the global peace?
Just a little something to think about, here in this holiday season.
For my own part, I’m always a little surprised to realize just how few vivid memories I actually have of Christmas from my own childhood. I can recall one Christmas gathering at my great-grandmother’s home south of Seattle...snow on the ground, a house crowded with strangers, all of whom were in some way related to me, and a table covered with the most extraordinary homemade confections, including something called “Divinity,” which was no doubt the first time in my life I had ever heard that word. But look where I ended up now.
And I can remember another Christmas traveling by train in the company of my grandmother over the Cascade mountains, in a blizzard, from Seattle to Spokane, to spend Christmas with my older cousins, one of whom subsequently hit me in the side of the head with a snowball so hard it made me cry. And that’s really about it. My best memories of Christmas are all as a grown-up: shopping for inexpensive and unusual stocking stuffers with my daughter on Christmas Eve; delicious meals of Standing Rib Roast and Yorkshire pudding, shared with family and friends; and lots and LOTS of Christmas Eve Candlelight services, which kind of come with the territory in my line of work.
And I honestly think that my “best Christmas ever” was just a few years ago, in 1999, which was the year that my youngest brother Erik converted to Judaism, and was married under a canopy in a very elaborate ceremony and reception at New York City’s Union Club, then immediately took off (with his bride) for a month-long honeymoon in Paris and Africa, leaving me the keys to his midtown Manhattan apartment. Of course, my entire family was there as well, at least for awhile, and we had a wonderful time exploring the city together: ice skating at Rockefeller Center, shopping for toys at FAO Schwartz, two Christmas Eve services: the first at Saint Patrick’s, and then the midnight candlelight service at All Souls Unitarian Church on Lexington Avenue.
And then on Christmas Day, after everyone else had left but my wife Margaret, our now-grown daughter Stephenie, and me, we took the subway down to the Lower East Side and had hot pastrami sandwiches at Katz’s delicatessen, then walked across the Brooklyn Bridge and saw the statue of Henry Ward Beecher outside of Plymouth Congregational Church, and finally caught the train back uptown and ordered Chinese take-out for dinner.
Of course, as you may recall, 1999 had the added attraction of being New Year Y2K -- the millennium that never happened -- although at the time it certainly added plenty of spice and excitement to the festivities in Times Square. Then the following year (which, if you do the math properly, was the ACTUAL millennial Christmas), we were all treated to the spectacle of the contested election in Florida, in which three not-very-wise-men named Rehnquist, Thomas, and Scalia, were able to persuade two of their cronies to swing with them and give a naughty little boy one of the nicest Christmas presents ever -- nominal leadership of the entire free world -- even though he really didn’t deserve it. And then of course last year it seemed as though the entire season took place in the shadow of September 11th; and God only knows what this year will bring (although I’m guessing not much peace on earth, or goodwill to all).
But you never know. Because the Christmas Spirit has an extraordinary habit of surprising people when they least expect it. In 1914 it seemed to many as though the entire civilized world had gone insane. Hundreds of thousands of British, French and German soldiers confronted one another across a muddy, frozen battlefield which stretched from the Swiss frontier to the North Sea, six hundred miles of trenches and barbed wire, artillery craters and unburied corpses. And then, on Christmas Day, a seemingly miraculous event took place again and again all along the line. Here is a first-hand description of the experience by a British Second Lieutenant named Dougan Chater, from letter to his mother dated December 25th, 1914:
“ I think I have seen one of the most extraordinary sights today that anyone has ever seen. About 10 o'clock this morning I was peeping over the parapet when I saw a German, waving his arms, and presently two of them got out of their trenches and some came towards ours. We were just going to fire on them when we saw they had no rifles so one of our men went out to meet them and in about two minutes the ground between the two lines of trenches was swarming with men and officers of both sides, shaking hands and wishing each other a happy Christmas.”
Here is another account of what happened, this time from a German officer, Lieutenant Johannes Niemann, of the 133rd Saxon Regiment:
“The mist was slow to clear and suddenly my orderly threw himself into my dugout to say that both German and Scottish soldiers had come out of their trenches and were fraternizing… exchanging cigarettes, schnapps and chocolate…. Later a Scottish soldier appeared with a football which seemed to come from nowhere and a few minutes later a real football match got underway. The Scots marked their goalmouth with their strange caps and we did the same. It was far from easy to play on the frozen ground, but we continued, keeping rigorously to the rules, despite the fact that it only lasted an hour and that we had no referee…. Us Germans really roared when a gust of wind revealed that the Scots wore nothing under their kilts…. The game finished with a score of 3 goals to 2 in favor of Fritz against Tommy.”
The spontaneous Christmas cease-fire of 1914 was hardly universal along the Western front. In many places it didn’t take place at all, and in some it only lasted a few hours, while in others it persisted for days. But the phenomenon was common enough to cause great concern among the High Commands of both sides, who issued strict orders intended to prevent such an event from ever happening again. But the following year, on at least one occasion, it did happen again...this time near the village of Laventie, France, just west of the city of Lille. Private Bertie Felstead, who (when he passed away recently at the age of 106) was the last surviving eyewitness to the 1915 truce, recounted that it began on Christmas Eve, when the Germans began singing Christmas Carols from their trenches 100 yards across no-man’s land. “It wasn’t long before we were singing as well, ‘Good King Wenceslas,’ I think it was.... You couldn’t hear each other sing like that without it affecting your feelings for the other side.”
Then, on Christmas Day “there was shouting between the trenches, ‘Hello Tommy, Hello Fritz,’ and that broke a lot more ice. A few of the Germans came out first and started walking over. A whole mass of us went out to meet them. Nothing was planned.... Some of them were smoking cigars and offered us cigarettes. We offered them some of ours and we chatted.... We weren’t afraid.... We just sheltered each other. Nobody would shoot at us when we were all mixed up” Before too long, someone naturally produced another soccer ball. “It wasn’t a game as such. More of a kick around and a free-for-all. I remember scrambling around in the snow. There could have been 50 on each side. No one was keeping score.”
After about half an hour, a British major showed up and ordered the men back into the trenches, telling them “You came out to fight the Huns, not to make friends with them.” And moments later this command was punctuated by a salvo of British artillery. But Private Bertie Felstead, of the Royal Welch Fusiliers, had already learned a far different lesson. “The Germans were all right,” he recalled, shortly before his death on July 22, 2001. “There wouldn’t have been a war if it had been left to the public.”
The Great War of 1914-1918, then commonly thought of as “the war to end all wars,” is now routinely referred to simply as “the First World War” or “WWI.” Within a generation, the world would once more be plunged into a Second World War, which would in turn be followed by a half-century of “Cold War” between the surviving victors of that conflict, and now a so-called “War against Global Terrorism,” in which the entire world itself sometimes seems like a battlefield, and friends and enemies are often difficult to distinguish. This year the “Little Town of Bethlehem” once again resembles more an armed military camp than it does a sacred and holy shrine, occupied by soldiers and tanks and barbed wire checkpoints instead of shepherds and angels and wise men from afar.
And yet by now you would think that we should have learned that a peace imposed by force of arms is rarely a just and lasting peace; that true peace comes, not from the barrel of a gun, but rather from the birth of a child...
and the smiles of loving parents,
from gifts from strangers,
and the realization that “goodwill toward all”
begins with each of us,
with the innocent child
that still lives within us all,
and the songs we sing
to one another
in the darkness....
at the Second Congregatonal Meeting House on Nantucket Island,
Sunday December 22, 2002
“Distant music sounded deep, as if from within my ribs. The music was, in fact, people from all over the world in the upper chamber, singing harmonies in their various tongues....” from *For the Time Being*, by Annie Dillard
***
[extemporaneous introduction: “a nation of dyslexic devil worshippers who have sold our souls to Santa....”]
In any event, I’ve been thinking an awful lot about the traditional Christmas story this past week, and especially about how well the story works AS a story, on so many different levels, despite the fact that (most of it, at least) probably didn’t really happen at all. But why let the facts interfere with the truth? There’s a mythological quality to the Nativity narratives which is meaningful in its own right, notwithstanding even the fact that Matthew and Luke contradict one another, not only on the minor details, but also regarding some of the major points as well. How, for example, can Jesus be descended from David, through Joseph, thus fulfilling the prophecy that the Messiah shall be a “shoot from the stump of the House of Jesse,” and at the same time be “born of a Virgin” and “conceived by the Holy Ghost,” not just the Savior, but the Son of God Incarnate?
Not that any of this really matters to Unitarians, who for centuries have been saying that the real miracle of Christmas is the miracle of birth itself, and the coming of new life and new light into the world -- that “Every Night a Child is Born is a Holy Night,” and that we are all the sons and the daughters of the Creator.
But even this “demythologizing” of the Christmas Story tends to ignore what is , to my mind, the most important aspect of the tale. What kind of Universe do we inhabit, where the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, the Prince of Peace, the Messiah and God’s Anointed Son Incarnate, God’s Word Made Flesh, Christ the Savior is born, not in some palace someplace, like Pharaoh or Caesar (or the Buddha, for that matter), but in a barn, to an unwed mother, the illegitimate offspring of a landless, peasant day laborer who ekes out a meager existence from the sweat of his brow and by the work of his hands, and who may or may not actually be the child’s biological father? Homeless people, for whom there was no room at the inn; refugees, who fled to Egypt following the child’s birth, in order to escape Herod’s murderous persecution.
Can you imagine what it might be like to be a child born in those circumstances? Is it any wonder that you would grow up to proclaim a message of radical egalitarianism, or that you should meet your end before attaining your 34th birthday, publicly executed as a religious fanatic and potential terrorist by the foreign hegemonic power whose military occupation and civil governance of your homeland helps preserve the global peace?
Just a little something to think about, here in this holiday season.
For my own part, I’m always a little surprised to realize just how few vivid memories I actually have of Christmas from my own childhood. I can recall one Christmas gathering at my great-grandmother’s home south of Seattle...snow on the ground, a house crowded with strangers, all of whom were in some way related to me, and a table covered with the most extraordinary homemade confections, including something called “Divinity,” which was no doubt the first time in my life I had ever heard that word. But look where I ended up now.
And I can remember another Christmas traveling by train in the company of my grandmother over the Cascade mountains, in a blizzard, from Seattle to Spokane, to spend Christmas with my older cousins, one of whom subsequently hit me in the side of the head with a snowball so hard it made me cry. And that’s really about it. My best memories of Christmas are all as a grown-up: shopping for inexpensive and unusual stocking stuffers with my daughter on Christmas Eve; delicious meals of Standing Rib Roast and Yorkshire pudding, shared with family and friends; and lots and LOTS of Christmas Eve Candlelight services, which kind of come with the territory in my line of work.
And I honestly think that my “best Christmas ever” was just a few years ago, in 1999, which was the year that my youngest brother Erik converted to Judaism, and was married under a canopy in a very elaborate ceremony and reception at New York City’s Union Club, then immediately took off (with his bride) for a month-long honeymoon in Paris and Africa, leaving me the keys to his midtown Manhattan apartment. Of course, my entire family was there as well, at least for awhile, and we had a wonderful time exploring the city together: ice skating at Rockefeller Center, shopping for toys at FAO Schwartz, two Christmas Eve services: the first at Saint Patrick’s, and then the midnight candlelight service at All Souls Unitarian Church on Lexington Avenue.
And then on Christmas Day, after everyone else had left but my wife Margaret, our now-grown daughter Stephenie, and me, we took the subway down to the Lower East Side and had hot pastrami sandwiches at Katz’s delicatessen, then walked across the Brooklyn Bridge and saw the statue of Henry Ward Beecher outside of Plymouth Congregational Church, and finally caught the train back uptown and ordered Chinese take-out for dinner.
Of course, as you may recall, 1999 had the added attraction of being New Year Y2K -- the millennium that never happened -- although at the time it certainly added plenty of spice and excitement to the festivities in Times Square. Then the following year (which, if you do the math properly, was the ACTUAL millennial Christmas), we were all treated to the spectacle of the contested election in Florida, in which three not-very-wise-men named Rehnquist, Thomas, and Scalia, were able to persuade two of their cronies to swing with them and give a naughty little boy one of the nicest Christmas presents ever -- nominal leadership of the entire free world -- even though he really didn’t deserve it. And then of course last year it seemed as though the entire season took place in the shadow of September 11th; and God only knows what this year will bring (although I’m guessing not much peace on earth, or goodwill to all).
But you never know. Because the Christmas Spirit has an extraordinary habit of surprising people when they least expect it. In 1914 it seemed to many as though the entire civilized world had gone insane. Hundreds of thousands of British, French and German soldiers confronted one another across a muddy, frozen battlefield which stretched from the Swiss frontier to the North Sea, six hundred miles of trenches and barbed wire, artillery craters and unburied corpses. And then, on Christmas Day, a seemingly miraculous event took place again and again all along the line. Here is a first-hand description of the experience by a British Second Lieutenant named Dougan Chater, from letter to his mother dated December 25th, 1914:
“ I think I have seen one of the most extraordinary sights today that anyone has ever seen. About 10 o'clock this morning I was peeping over the parapet when I saw a German, waving his arms, and presently two of them got out of their trenches and some came towards ours. We were just going to fire on them when we saw they had no rifles so one of our men went out to meet them and in about two minutes the ground between the two lines of trenches was swarming with men and officers of both sides, shaking hands and wishing each other a happy Christmas.”
Here is another account of what happened, this time from a German officer, Lieutenant Johannes Niemann, of the 133rd Saxon Regiment:
“The mist was slow to clear and suddenly my orderly threw himself into my dugout to say that both German and Scottish soldiers had come out of their trenches and were fraternizing… exchanging cigarettes, schnapps and chocolate…. Later a Scottish soldier appeared with a football which seemed to come from nowhere and a few minutes later a real football match got underway. The Scots marked their goalmouth with their strange caps and we did the same. It was far from easy to play on the frozen ground, but we continued, keeping rigorously to the rules, despite the fact that it only lasted an hour and that we had no referee…. Us Germans really roared when a gust of wind revealed that the Scots wore nothing under their kilts…. The game finished with a score of 3 goals to 2 in favor of Fritz against Tommy.”
The spontaneous Christmas cease-fire of 1914 was hardly universal along the Western front. In many places it didn’t take place at all, and in some it only lasted a few hours, while in others it persisted for days. But the phenomenon was common enough to cause great concern among the High Commands of both sides, who issued strict orders intended to prevent such an event from ever happening again. But the following year, on at least one occasion, it did happen again...this time near the village of Laventie, France, just west of the city of Lille. Private Bertie Felstead, who (when he passed away recently at the age of 106) was the last surviving eyewitness to the 1915 truce, recounted that it began on Christmas Eve, when the Germans began singing Christmas Carols from their trenches 100 yards across no-man’s land. “It wasn’t long before we were singing as well, ‘Good King Wenceslas,’ I think it was.... You couldn’t hear each other sing like that without it affecting your feelings for the other side.”
Then, on Christmas Day “there was shouting between the trenches, ‘Hello Tommy, Hello Fritz,’ and that broke a lot more ice. A few of the Germans came out first and started walking over. A whole mass of us went out to meet them. Nothing was planned.... Some of them were smoking cigars and offered us cigarettes. We offered them some of ours and we chatted.... We weren’t afraid.... We just sheltered each other. Nobody would shoot at us when we were all mixed up” Before too long, someone naturally produced another soccer ball. “It wasn’t a game as such. More of a kick around and a free-for-all. I remember scrambling around in the snow. There could have been 50 on each side. No one was keeping score.”
After about half an hour, a British major showed up and ordered the men back into the trenches, telling them “You came out to fight the Huns, not to make friends with them.” And moments later this command was punctuated by a salvo of British artillery. But Private Bertie Felstead, of the Royal Welch Fusiliers, had already learned a far different lesson. “The Germans were all right,” he recalled, shortly before his death on July 22, 2001. “There wouldn’t have been a war if it had been left to the public.”
The Great War of 1914-1918, then commonly thought of as “the war to end all wars,” is now routinely referred to simply as “the First World War” or “WWI.” Within a generation, the world would once more be plunged into a Second World War, which would in turn be followed by a half-century of “Cold War” between the surviving victors of that conflict, and now a so-called “War against Global Terrorism,” in which the entire world itself sometimes seems like a battlefield, and friends and enemies are often difficult to distinguish. This year the “Little Town of Bethlehem” once again resembles more an armed military camp than it does a sacred and holy shrine, occupied by soldiers and tanks and barbed wire checkpoints instead of shepherds and angels and wise men from afar.
And yet by now you would think that we should have learned that a peace imposed by force of arms is rarely a just and lasting peace; that true peace comes, not from the barrel of a gun, but rather from the birth of a child...
and the smiles of loving parents,
from gifts from strangers,
and the realization that “goodwill toward all”
begins with each of us,
with the innocent child
that still lives within us all,
and the songs we sing
to one another
in the darkness....
posted by The Eclectic Cleric at 3:00 PM
