"Kwai - and Our Eternal Home"
A Remembrance Day meditation
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, November 10, 2002
Text: Romans 8:18-27
This is the time of the year when we think collectively of great books, whether it is the Booker Prize going to Yann Martel for the The Life of Pi or the Giller, that has just gone to Austin Clarke for The Polished Hoe. We think of books and how influential they are; and at this time of the year, I must admit, I still can't get over the fact that The Adventures of Dennis the Menace did not win in 1987 - and it bothers me deeply. But there have been so many really great books. They fill our libraries. Often they collect dust. Often they are not recognized.
A few weeks ago someone from this congregation loaned me a book, a book that clearly had not gathered dust but had been read many times; the reader felt it was a book that I should read. He said: "It will inspire you, Andrew. It will inform you."
When I read it some weeks later it accomplished both those things. It is not only a book that is beautifully and poignantly written. It is timely. Although written many years ago, it is timely because it speaks to our generation and to a day like this. It speaks to a generation that has often become complacent because of peace and has forgotten the horrors of war. It speaks to a generation that likes to think that history is something that is simply in the past, rather than something that can be revisited in the present. It speaks to us when we hear of wars and rumours of wars, about the reality of war. And it speaks to people of faith, about the power of the transforming grace of God. It is a wonderful book and it is entitled, "Through the Valley of the Kwai."
It is the story of a Scottish intellectual who was called up by the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders during World War II. He attained the rank of captain and was called with his battalion to go and fight in Malaya. And as I read this story I realized it was about a man who in his intellectual pursuits had become an agnostic. He had questioned the existence of God, and had come to the point where he was not sure of any of the truths of the Christian faith in which he had been brought up. He had become not only an agnostic but also a cynic.
The gist of the story is that as he enters the war and ends up in a "Hell camp" on the River Kwai, and becomes a Christian. And not just a Christian but the Dean, eventually, of the chapel at Princeton University and reaches the great height, I believe, of preaching in this pulpit in the 1970s. It's a wonderful story and it's a hellish story. It is hellish because when the man, Ernest Gordon, went with his battalion to Malaya to fight, his battalion was reduced from 1,000 men to 120, and from 120 down to 30, and from 30 down to himself.
He had to escape because Malaya had fallen to the enemy and he was alone. And so he commandeered a ferry to Singapore. And then Singapore fell, and he went to Sumatra and then Sumatra fell, and he ended up in prison. While he was in prison he helped many others escape; but after a while he escaped and with eight colleagues went to Penary on the coast, and sailed north to Ceylon (which we know as Sri Lanka); but 600 miles from freedom he was captured and he and the eight men on the boat with him were taken to Hell in Thailand and in Burma.
He went from one camp to another, from Changi to Chung Kai. With many others, he was a prisoner of war in the valley of the River Kwai.
Last week, a well-known businessman called Tom Caldwell phoned me when he saw the title of my sermon this morning: "Do you know, Andrew, that my former next-door neighbour, a man called Mr. Markowitz, had once been a POW in Kwai? He had helped William Stevenson, had been at Camp X, but had survived the torture in Kwai." Mr. Markowitz came home to Canada to Forest Hill Road, up the street, and 10 years later died because of the torment of what is known as the Kwai syndrome. That's how horrific the conditions were that these men faced in the valley of the River Kwai.
But what makes Ernest Gordon's story so fascinating is that it is not just a story of horror. It also intersects with our passage from the Book of Romans today, because Ernest Gordon's experience parallels what the Apostle Paul is speaking about in Romans. Ernest Gordon saw pain so great that he did not have words to utter to describe them and couldn't pray in the midst of it, for he had lost his faith. He was so hurt by creation rocking and reeling under the pain and the agony of the hell on the River Kwai; yet, as we see in this story, he was transformed by Jesus Christ in the midst of that valley.
You see, Ernest Gordon experienced first-hand what Paul talks about when he refers to the groaning of creation. All around him, this young Scottish intellectual was seeing destruction. He saw the torture of men that he knew and could hear their cries at night, even though he wasn't similarly tortured. He saw disease like beriberi and dysentery and what are known as tropical ulcers, where the legs just erupt in pain and bleeding; so much so, he said, that he could smell the death of flesh as much as he could hear the death of men.
But it got worse. On top of the torture and disease, the enemy made the prisoners of war within the camp compete with one another. They competed for food. They were used against each other. There was division and dissention within their ranks, so much so that Gordon wrote in a very moving part of the book: "I hated the other prisoners and I hated myself for hating them." Such was the extent of the pervasive hell and horror in the death camp in Kwai.
You see, he knew first-hand that creation was groaning; but he wasn't really surprised: He was a man who had grown up reading Kafka and Camus and Sartre. He knew of human sin. That was no surprise. Perhaps the horror of it, though, was. The reality of that sin was too much for him to take and he asked the question that many people ask when they are faced with horror, when they go through the Valley of the Shadow of Death: Where is God then, on the River Kwai? Is God alive in Chung Kai? Where is this God?
It took a simple man to let him see that God could actually be in the midst of the suffering groans of creation of the valley of the River Kwai. And in one of the most moving and beautiful passages, the highlight of the book, there is an encounter between a man called Dusty Miller, a simple Scot, not of the same rank as Ernest Gordon by any means, but a man who was actually mopping his wounds and healing the ulcers that were on his leg. In something akin to a Socratic dialogue we hear this encounter between the man of intellect who doubted and the man of faith who mopped his wounds.
The man of intellect challenged him and said: "Dusty, do you realize that more than 20 men are dying here every day and most of them are young?"
He said he dragged himself up, sitting in a better position to argue with Dusty. "Well, then," he continued, "doesn't it make you all the more certain that there is no meaning of any kind to be found in a situation as hopeless as this one? When you examine the facts, isn't it hard to see any point in living?" He had reached the pit of Hell.
He looked at Dusty and Dusty said: "I'm not sure I follow you, Captain. I see a lot of point in living."
I thought, said Gordon, "He is taking too much this calmly. He must have his doubts - I do. I'm going to test him further." And so he did. He kept on and on debating about the nature of the doom that they were feeling and the fact that people were dying and where is God in the midst of all of this?
Ernest Gordon even turned on religion because he was so angry. He said: "Religion and the arts are like a gramophone record we play to drown the cries of pain from the people of the world. Admittedly, they help numb the senses, but drugs can do much better."
Dusty looked puzzled: "No, sir, I cannot believe that. I don't think there is anything accidental about our creation. God knows us. He knows about the sparrow and each hair of our heads and He has a purpose for us."
"Do you really believe that?" cried Ernest Gordon. "If that is the case, why does He just sit there quiescently on a great, big, white throne in the no-place called Heaven?"
Dusty considered it for a moment and then, in the hell of the Kwai, said these words: "Maybe He does do something, but we cannot see everything that He does now. Maybe our vision isn't very good at this point for here we see through a glass darkly but we shall see and sometime understand. We have to go on living and hoping and having faith that life is stronger than death, for only God can give life; but we," (and this is the key) "we have to receive it and we have to receive it daily."
Dusty hesitated, searching his memory, says Gordon, for a quote and finally the quote came to him:
"No one could tell me where my soul might be.
I sought for God, but God eluded me.
I sought my brother out and found all three:
My soul, my God and all humanity.
"That's about all I can say," concluded Dusty.
You see, the difference between Ernest Gordon and Dusty Miller was this: Ernest Gordon was seeing the death around him and was faced with hopelessness. Dusty Miller saw the needs of people around him, and in the name of Christ met them, mopped up the wounds and healed them, and saw hope in the midst of the death of the valley of Kwai. Therein lay the difference.
And as these two continue to debate for pages throughout the book, the difference lies in the fact that Ernest Gordon had a philosophical conception of God and expected God just to make everything all right all the time. Dusty Miller had a practical concept of God, he saw the presence of Jesus Christ in the need of his brother and responded by mopping up the wounds and maintaining hope. That is why he quoted to Ernest Gordon that great passage from John's letter: "If a man says he loves God, then he is a liar if he hateth his neighbour whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?"
Ernest Gordon wanted God to do something. Dusty Miller believed in God and he did something. That was the difference. Ernest Gordon was so transformed by what he saw that not only did he see creation with new eyes, not only did he see suffering with new eyes, not only did he see God with new eyes, but he so believed that it transformed everything around him.
The spirit of Jesus Christ so touched him that he started to read his Bible. The more he read his Bible, he saw Jesus washing the disciples' feet. The more he read his Bible, he saw Jesus entering into the midst of the suffering of the lepers and the outcast. The more he read his Bible he saw the cross and he realized in the cross, that herein lies hope. He realized that the sin of humanity, in all its brutality, will never be victorious over that symbol and over that person and over that concept of God, because that is a God who does not elude us but comes to us and transforms creation. He realized that when one part of creation is in pain, all creation is in pain, and when one part of creation is healed by Christ, all of creation is healed by Christ.
Such was the power of what happened to Ernest Gordon that it affected the whole of the camp. Like a wild fire, what followed the simple mopping up of a wound by Dusty Miller transformed the whole spirit of the camp from one of death and decay into one of life.
Ernest Gordon went on to write: "Faith sustained us as individuals, but it also sustained the community of which we were a part. It shaped our culture. It determined our morality and gave unity to our common life. Where we had been divided, we were now united. Where we were once fearful, we now had hope. It would be absurd to say that faith and reason were separated, for faith led to reflection and reflection involved reason. Men who had very little education developed a keen interest in a variety of subjects such as philosophy, politics, literature, law and the humanities. Faith had inspired them to think creatively, to be aware of themselves, to be conscious of the ultimate, to be open to the world beyond their own environment."
You see, when the spirit of God breathed life into that death camp on the River Kwai, all of them were changed. In the midst of the horror of war, God had spoken and transformed creation. But more than that, what these men saw around them not only changed their own immediate context but also transformed them to such an extent that they wanted to change other people's lives. As a result of the mopping of a wound by Dusty Miller, these men decided to create a 40 piece orchestra and play to the glory of God. They created a university so men could learn and they created a church in the middle of the hell of the valley of Kwai.
You see, those who had tried to expunge their humanity and drive out their hope had not been successful. They hadn't been successful because of the demonstration of Christian discipleship by mopping a wound in the valley of hell on the River Kwai.
It changed these men's lives for the rest of their days and in one of the most moving passages describing that change, Ernest Gordon wrote the following:
As men, we wanted to understand now how the Christian life shared in the fate and the condition of the world. Because we were men we could not escape our involvement in the world with all its imperfections. We were victims of the Japanese but we also shared their blood-guilt. Like them we had killed in battle and lived by the law of a life for a life and an eye for an eye and a wound for a wound. We were involved because of our own uncertainties. No only our captors threatened us, but life itself. The props of western civilization had been swept from under us and with them our faith in man and the things of man: his technology, his belief in progress, his utopianism, his rationalism and his pride. With others of the 20th Century we were hung, suspended over the big hole, the abyss of meaninglessness and the outlook was bleak. We were involved too because of our doubts. Many of us had turned to Christianity from unbelief but we still carried with us the fear of faith. We could say with Dostoevsky (and I quote): 'It is not as a child that I believe and confess Jesus Christ, my hosanna is born of a furnace of doubt.' Our doubts were an inheritance as the children of our times. We had two alternatives: We could chose the way of man based on the sovereignty of the natural order, closed, sealed, impersonal, hopeless; or we could chose the way of Jesus Christ - free and personal, based on the sovereignty of God. The wind of the spirit had blown upon us. We could not prove how or whence it had come.
Ernest Gordon, then, was transformed in the midst of the war and this day we remember many who gave their lives, who lost their lives, some who returned, many who did not. We remember them. We remember also the hell of war. We remember also the power and the grace of God.
Every generation, I believe, always has the same choice that those prisoners faced on the River Kwai: They can decide from this moment on, as a result of the freedom that they have been given by the sacrifice of others, to live their lives by either the rule of nature or the way of Christ. They can decide to live their lives with the meaninglessness and the purposelessness of those who saw the rotting flesh in Kwai, or they can see Christ in the world and mop the wounds and bring the word of hope. The choice is before every generation. But, as Dusty said to Ernest, you have to make that choice daily. Amen.
This is a verbatim transcription of the original sermon.