"The Thrown Torch"
Opposing the foe of death with the torch of faith.
Sermon Preached by
The Reverend Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, November 7, 2004
Text: Hebrews 11:8-16
I'm sure that like me, many of you here today and those listening on the radio have been watching with some interest the television program that is trying to discern who we think is the greatest Canadian. As I've been watching this unfold, my mind has turned to many I would think should be considered among the greatest Canadians.
There is something positive about this exercise. Some would choose the person we think most fittingly portrays our nations' goals and values. Some are looking, perhaps, for an icon to represent what has influenced our nation. And in many ways, looking for the greatest Canadian is a sign of a nation that is coming of age. For we recognize that what we have today has been built by those who have preceded us, and by looking back and determining who we think is the greatest, we say something profound about ourselves.
There is also something negative about doing this. For in this day and age of celebrity, with the hype about individuals, we want to look for one, singular person who stands out from the crowd to represent us all. But when we do that, we forget that there are countless souls who have already passed through the fingers of time - those who are deceased, those from long ago, those of whom there is often little or no memory. Maybe it was one of them, or maybe it was all of them who were the greatest Canadians. And so, to isolate one from the pack who represents us is a thrill and a joy, but it is incomplete.
I particularly feel that emotion on a day such as Remembrance Day. I know that there are those great icons of Canadian military history who have achieved great status and who will always be remembered by our culture. I think of Billy Bishop, who was married in this very church. Or of Sir William Stevenson, who undermined the Axis war effort by breaking the Nazis' Enigma code. Interestingly, one of his assistants was buried from this very church only two weeks ago.
But there are other names which do not readily roll off the tongue. Great Canadians who perhaps do not stand out in the annals of history, but nevertheless are notable. Who of us here, for example, thinks of Allistair McKinnon, John Brody, Claire Glass or Arthur Lepoint?
These names probably mean nothing to you, and they meant nothing to me until a few days ago when I opened up a book called First Drafts. It is an account of letters written by Canadians throughout the ages. In it is a section of letters written during the First World War, the Great War, among them letters written home by McKinnon, Brody, Glass and Lepoint. When I read these letters, it was as if they were saying to me, “I wonder who really are the great Canadians.” One that stood out particularly as if he were speaking from the dead to the living was George Atkins, writing to his mother in 1916.
This is a section of his letter:
Mother, last night there was a terrible high explosion of shrapnel and we were held firm and could not move. Two or three times they nearly landed one in our trench and the force of the explosion threw us down and I couldn't hear nothing but ringing in my ears. I was hit on the head about four times but my steel helmet saved me. Then I had a bullet go right through a mess tin strapped on my back. I'm going to keep it as a souvenir. But I wasn't very frightened, although the strongest nerves couldn't stand it for a long while when the shells are bursting around and above, but we had to stay in that trench for eight hours without water and no food, only two dry biscuits each.
It was up to our shoe tops in water and we got all stiffened and cramped-up. We were thankful when the relief came at last. Of course, we had some very close shaves, but God must have been watching over us and it made one think about that. The wounded were very brave and bore the pain and the suffering like heroes and some had ghastly wounds.
I expect to be home soon now, then I can give you a good account of it. We were so tired when we got home that we just fell down and slept for a long, long time. I will close now mother, as I'm pretty shaky today through the nervous strain and the loss of sleep. We haven't seen our friends, but we're going to try to find them. They suffered heavily, too.
I think we're out for a good rest now. Goodbye. With love, your son, George.
An unknown Canadian writing to his mother, and now we know his name.
But I think of other things written by Canadians that make us think about names and cause us to remember. The one that has always touched me the most, and I'm sure has touched you, is the poem by Dr. John McCrae, “In Flanders Fields.” I've read that poem many times over the last few days, but the other day I was surprised when someone on the radio said he felt we should no longer read the third verse of this poem. “Not only, is it bad poetry,” he said, but its sentiment does not reflect the day and present. The words, ”˜Take up our quarrel with the foe: To you from failing hands we throw the torch; be yours to hold it high,' should be removed and we should not say it any more, for we have moved beyond it.”
I know that a what he was saying was born out of a love of peace, and I know that the idea of remembering our quarrel with the foe is something that is not palatable to most of us, but I still thought, “What a profound error in judgement.” What a terrible thing to say, to rewrite what those who have gone before us have written. In the arrogance of our moment, in the peace of our day, to be able to say that these words could be removed because somehow we know better and have experienced something greater. Who are we to say to those who have died and those who experienced the horror of war, that we want their words to be removed? What arrogance! And what a profound mistake.
It is a mistake. Because having heard what this reporter said, I decided to go back and find out why John McCrae wrote those words, that we and future generations might read them and understand. It turns out McCrae wrote during the second battle of Ypres, Belgium. It was a terrible battle: The Germans had decided to draw attention away from their eastern front by starting a new battle on the western front. And so, they decided to take the town of Ypres, and in so doing, they introduced a whole new form of warfare: A form of poison gas. They had tried chlorine gas in the east, but it had frozen in Bolimov and failed. But in the west it worked.
On April 22, 1915, 168 tons - 5,700 canisters - of chlorine gas were released into the air and trenches near the town of Ypres. So great was yellow haze in the sky that people could no longer see the sun. The gas filled the trenches for hours. The French Algerian soldiers, who were the first to come in contact with the gas, were asphyxiated. Ten thousand were affected by it. Within 10 minutes half of them were dead. Two thousand were taken as prisoners and the rest were either temporarily or permanently blinded.
Three days later, on April 25, more gas was released, this time against the Canadians. Nearly 5,800 casualties resulted, 1,000 of them fatal. Between then and the end of the battle at the end of May, 69,000 people died on the Allied side, 35,000 on the German side and gas had become an instrument of war, so much so that the British and others on the Allied side later used gas themselves, and did so until the end of the war. But it was at Ypres in April 1915 that this most heinous of weapons was introduced.
In the midst of this Dr. John McCrae wrote a poem. He had served as a doctor in the South African war, had come to the University of Toronto and graduated, had attended McGill University and taught there and had eventually become a professor of pathology at the University of Vermont, from 1905 to 1911. He was a man interested in healing, a man interested in bandaging up the wounds, but a Lieutenant Alexis Helmer, one of his close friends from Ottawa, died at the battle of Ypres and McCrae had to perform part of his burial ceremony. Sitting in the back of an ambulance by the river, overlooking the place where people were bandaged, this doctor sat down and wrote “In Flanders Fields.”
He wrote about the poppies, because poppy seeds lie dormant and only when the ground is turned over do they actually begin to grow. The western front was blooming with poppies because the ground was all dug up and devastated. That's why poppies grew. Sitting there, in 20 minutes he wrote 15 lines in memory of his friend, pleading, pleading for this to stop.
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
So what are we to do with this poem? What are we, who are the recipients of the thrown torch, to do? Our foe is no longer Germany; they are our friends and allies. What are we to do with the torch that McCrae and those who fell have passed on?
In the Book of Hebrews there is a sermon where a Jewish Christian is listing those who have been the forebears of the faith from the annals of time. He talks of Abraham and Sarah and their desire to go to the Promised Land, and many others, and near the end of Chapter 11 he says that their work was unfinished. Here were people who had died but in their faith had sought to be obedient to God.
In other words, the writer says that Abraham and Sarah and Moses and all the characters of the Hebrew tradition have passed on to us a torch, a torch that the early Christians saw fulfilled and lit and shining brightly in Jesus of Nazareth. But the writer does not forget those who have come before, for those who had a vision of a promised land but never saw it. He says that we should remember them and their faith. And so it seems to me that the torch that you and I hold in our hands is the torch of a remembering faith.
Remembering those who have gone before, who have slipped through the fingers of time, who may not even be known, but have died in such a way and in such horror and in such pain that we dare not forget them. We do not realize how privileged we are to have the freedom to hold the torch; and what is that torch but the torch of peace? And what is the foe but the foe of death? And what is that terrible thing that we remember, but the inhumanity of war and the pain of death and the misery of violence and the cost of young lives taken in their prime?
Who of us would not want to take up that torch and say, “In the name of peace we will move on with what we have heard, we will carry the light and the peace that we find in Jesus Christ against the foe of death.” This is the word that Isaiah gave us when he foresaw swords turned into pruning hooks. This is what Jesus said in his sermon on the great mount in Matthew's gospel, “Blessed are the peacemakers.” These are now the torches that we should carry, not in any way condemning those who have died and gone into the ground, but remembering them.
In Flanders Fields, pick up the torch and move on, for if we do not hear what they say, if we silence them when they speak to us from the grave, then we will not feel the need to cleave to the torch, and the world will be a poorer place.
In the 18th century John Scott of Amwell, a great Scottish poet wrote about the bloody battles of that era, and talked about how terrible the discordant drum sounds are of war. He wrote:
I HATE that drum's discordant sound,
Parading round, and round, and round:
To thoughtless youth it pleasure yields,
And lures from cities and from fields,
To sell their liberty for charms
Of tawdry lace, and glittering arms;
And when Ambition's voice commands,
To march, and fight, and fall, in foreign lands.I hate that drum's discordant sound,
Parading round, and round, and round;
To me it talks of ravag'd plains,
And burning towns, and ruin'd swains,
And mangled limbs, and dying groans,
And widows' tears, and orphans' moans;
And all that Misery's hand bestows,
To fill the catalogue of human woes.
My friends, we have heard even this day the catalogue of human woes, but the hope that rises from the ashes of those woes is to take a torch and to light it brightly to remember those who have gone before, but to be resolute this struggle for peace in the name of Christ, that those who were gassed and burned and blinded might not be lying in their graves over which poppies grow in vain, but might speak to us and say, “Here, take on the foe of death. Take this torch and light it with the power of faith and the hope of peace.” Amen.
This is a verbatim transcription of the original sermon.