Thanks to Hollywood blockbusters like “Saving Private Ryan,” “Pearl Harbor,” and Clint Eastwood’s “Letters from Iwo Jima,” even younger people today know quite a bit about World War II. However, knowledge of its predecessor, World War I, is often lost on us. We remember vaguely that World War I involved the same cast of characters as WWII, and we know that its unsatisfactory conclusion contributed to the rise of Hitler ten years later. What we may not be aware of is the stunning fact that 10 million people died in World War I. That’s the combined populations of Virginia and West Virginia, wiped out in the span of four years, from 1914-1918. Millions of women were left widowed by World War I. Millions of children grew up without their fathers.
Unlike WWII, the First World War leaves us few tales of glory. It was not, as they sometimes say, a “good war.” It was a depressing conflict marked by the use of poison gas, brutal machine gun fire, and warfare waged from deep trenches. In these squalid pits soldiers lived and died for four straight years, fighting back and forth in the attempt to gain a few hundred yards of territory between them.
However, one story from the First World War does stand out. Hostilities had broken out between Germany, France, and England in August of 1914. By Christmas of that year, trenches had been dug across the French frontier, and already one million men had died. No Man’s Land in between the trenches was strewn with bodies and craters made by artillery shells. The tension was incredible. Every soldier’s finger stayed constantly poised on the trigger of his rifle. The only adequate way to describe the situation was as hell on earth.
Yet that Christmas Eve 1914, something miraculous happened. As the day’s fighting wound down and darkness began to fall, a German enlisted man set a small candlelit Christmas tree, sent to him from home, up along the edge of the German trench. Through the cloud of gunpowder and the smell of death, the tree served as a barely visible beacon of Christ in the midst of hell. For a while, troops on both sides were mesmerized by the sight, and then, slowly but surely, other candles and small, decorated trees appeared on both sides of the lines.
The glimmering Christmas light grew brighter, and ultimately some soldier, whether he was British or German no one remembers, leapt over the trench and walked into the danger of No Man’s Land. Any other day, he’d have been riddled with bullets. But no one fired. Other soldiers followed his example, and within hours the Germans and British were celebrating the birth of Christ together. They exchanged gifts of food, beer, and cigars. Christmas carols were sung. Opposing soldiers embraced. For 24 hours this “Christmas Truce” continued. Death lost its hold on men who had just hours before hated each other, and they found a way to love one another as Christian brothers.
Just as it did on that first Christmas night in the shepherds’ fields outside of Bethlehem, the life-changing power of God miraculously found its way into the trenches of the Western Front on Christmas Eve 1914. The light of a Christmas tree shattered that hell, and once the beacon of Christ reached the soldiers, they, like the shepherds, couldn’t resist it.
Yet there is another lesson to be learned from the Christmas Truce. It truly happened, but it also only lasted twenty-four hours. As Christmas passed, the men moved back into their trenches, and the gunpowder grew thick again. The soldiers ultimately turned away from
the beacon. Willful humans extinguished the light of Christ on the battlefield and allowed the veil of darkness to move back before their eyes.
As it did for the soldiers, as it did for the shepherds, Christ’s Gospel offers us both grace and risk this Christmas season. God’s grace is abundant in the promise that God is with us, in our joys and in our sorrows, bearing us along in our lives always.
But if this grace is to transform us, then we must respond, and it is in the response that we encounter the risk. The risk to us to answer the call of Christ is far less than the risk faced by the shepherds or the soldiers of World War I. We don’t have to risk our entire lives or our livelihood in the face of either oppressive powers or enemy guns. Nevertheless, we must ask ourselves whether the risk of Jesus is too much for us to take. The call to recognize God’s nearness and love one another requires much, and we presently live in a time of recrimination and fear in which it is easy and even encouraged to be suspicious of those who look, think, and sound different from us.
This Christmas, I pray we will risk the No Man’s Land of our world, leaping out of our trenches and loving our fellow human beings. When we do so with everything we are and everything we have, our lives are transformed and miracles happen. Merry Christmas.
St. John’s Episcopal Church is located at the corner of Jefferson Street and Elm Avenue. Sunday worship is at 8 a.m., 9 a.m., 11 a.m., and 5 p.m. Look St. John’s up on the web at www.stjohnsronaoke.org.