It was last Sunday, October 30, 2016, when Audley Coulthurst passed away. His name did not appear in the obituaries throughout the world; only in a few cities in the United States was it even recognized. Audley Couthurst was one of the last members of what were known as the Tuskegee Airmen. In the days of segregation, they were a group of black pilots that flew in the 327 Flight Group of the United States Army Air Force. They flew bravely, and made a great contribution to the Second World War. Only a few of the Tuskegee Airmen are left, and so Audley’s passing, like that of so many of that generation, was nonetheless remembered.
The reason I paid attention to Audley’s death was that three years ago I met him – in all places, at the Indianapolis 500 race! The Tuskegee Airmen were the guests of honour. They appeared at the Prayer Breakfast on the Saturday morning, where I was the Chaplain. Even though there were great stars, like Mario Andretti and Martina McBride and Florence Henderson, no one paid attention to them because of the Tuskegee Airmen. They were the ones who were the real heroes. After a very passionate rendition of a prayer that they led, and the Benediction, I went up to them and shook their hands. There were only a few, but Audley was the most cheerful. I said how pleased and honoured I was to meet them. I had heard about the Tuskegee Airmen since I was a boy. I asked them why they came to an event like this, and Audley said, “Because we never want the next generation to forget. We want the next generation never to repeat what we went through.” God bless Audley Coulthurst!
I have thought about his words, particularly leading up to today, because in our passage this morning from the Gospel of Luke, the Song of Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist. I realized exactly the same sentiments were expressed then – two thousand years ago! The Song of Zechariah, sometimes known classically as The Benedictus, is a passage of hope in the midst of despair, a passage of peace in the midst of war, and a passage of salvation to a people who are lost. As The New Testament writer, N. T. Wright says, “Often it is left to the older person to remind the next generation of memories of hope and of imagination for peace.” Zechariah realizes that his son is going to be someone special. He knows that his son is not going to be the Messiah of the Jews, but he knows that his son is going to play a major role in the life of the Messiah.
What we have is this immense, powerful statement of hope to a nation that was desperately in need of it. Why? Because there are themes in this incredible passage that resonate throughout time because the themes are eternal. Zechariah prays more than anything for there to be a mighty saviour. Israel needed a mighty saviour. He was writing this to his son and in praise of what God was doing through him at a time when his nation of Israel was an occupied country. It was following the Roman-Jewish war, and Israel was suffering under the hand of an imperial oppressor, that was cruel, and had co-opted local government officials to participate in their oppression. It was a time of moral and spiritual decay and hopelessness. The nation felt that there was nothing that could save them. They had memories of the war, but they were soon forgotten. They had become complacent, and they were now living as an occupied people, simply finding their way, but without hope. In the midst of this, Zechariah believes that God is doing something great, that despite this war, he felt God was going to do something: a mighty saviour would come. But that was not where the people were. They were in incredible pain and suffering. They had forgotten the war and what was coming.
This happens all too often throughout history – people just forget! Sarah Teasdale, the great American poet, suggested that in wartime we do forget, and in peace time we forget those who gave themselves in war. She wrote There Will Come Soft Rains. Here is what Teasdale said:
There will come soft rains and the smell of ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white,
Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low-fence wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.
Teasdale understood that after a war people forget that they were saved from something horrible. They lose a sense of hope. She captures this hopelessness in a cosmic way by understanding that not only will those who were in the war be forgotten, but that all of nature will forget and not care – neither the birds, nor the trees, nor the flowers, will care.
Like the Tuskegee Airman, who says “I do this in order that we might always remember” Zacharias is reminding the people of Israel that in their moment of sorrow and despair, they should have hope that a mighty saviour will come, and that his son will be part of it. He also speaks in dark tones. He prays that Israel will be rescued from its enemies and those who hate them. He says it not once in this passage, you will notice, but twice. Israel’s enemies were a reality. A reality from the moment the nation of Israel was born. From the Canaanites to the Edomites, the Hittites to the Philistines, the Assyrians to the Egyptians to the Romans, the people of God had had their enemies, and oftentimes their enemies were victorious. He looks back to a day, a day when David was the King and defeated them, to the glories of Abraham and the founding of the people of God, and he has hope in the midst of all this, that the enemies will be defeated, that Rome will be defeated, that the things that oppress and hold people down will be defeated.
In our society, we do not like to think about enemies because somehow it doesn’t seem correct to do so. The fact of the matter is, there are always oppressors, and tyrants, always those who succumb to the sin of violence and greed and oppression. Zechariah is talking about liberation from that. He is also talking, and this is perhaps the most salient part of all this, about the sacrifices that are going to have to be made in order to face down the enemy, to liberate the people. He knew, I think in his heart of hearts that the Messiah, as according with Scripture, would suffer and die as prophesied by Isaiah. I think he knew that his son, in being on the side of the Messiah, would suffer because of this liberation. As the story goes, John, his son, was beheaded. Zechariah knew that the defeat of the enemy never occurs without sacrifice. That goes for time immemorial: Liberation, freedom from oppression, the victory over the forces of evil, all this requires sacrifice.
This year, I was given a most amazing book, Unremarkable by Blake Heathcote. It is the story of Flight Lieutenant John Weir. Weir, who eventually lived not far from our church, was remembered in this incredible book. In it, there are two or three pages that talk about what this Flight Lieutenant went through. We need to understand, our generation and the generations to come, need to know the sacrifices that were made.
On Saturday, November 8th, 1941, Flight Lieutenant John Weir had taken off to fly suite over Abbeville in Normandy with a new pilot, Gardner, freshly attached to the squadron. This was a dangerous mission. Abbeville was one of the main Luftwaffe bases along the northern coast of France with as many as a thousand fighters stationed there. John was trying to keep an eye on his wing man, who was new to flying in twos (two planes flying as a fighting unit), and this was worrying him. Would he know what to do when they were attacked? Fifty hours of training wasn’t worth an hour of combat. It is the wing man’s responsibility to watch his flight leaders’ back as well as his own, and as flight leader, John Weir’s responsibility was to keep his eye peeled for enemy aircraft in the sky ahead. An RAF pilot, John was nurse-maiding. As they crossed the coast and flew inland, a group of ME 109s appeared out of nowhere, and with the sun behind them swept down in an ambush. Instead of keeping his eyes on them, John glanced back yet again to see if Gardener was in position. That was a mistake!
In the split second that John glanced away, he lost track of the enemy. They swung around him and out of sight, and by the time he looked forward again it was too late. He and Gardner were trapped. John flipped his Spitfire over hard to the left and down; his best hope to shake off the pursuer. At the same moment he heard Gardner shout over the wireless, followed by a scream: dead before his Spitfire began to tumble out of the sky. Everything happened so fast, John didn’t have time to think. A Messerschmitt attacked from behind. Its twenty millimeter cannons blew the left wing off his Spitfire, a machine gun raked his instruments panel and upper fuel tank. The tank was so full it didn’t explode, but gas sprayed back all over him. The instrument panel began showering sparks. Those ignited the gas, and the raw oxygen from his oxygen supply, which caused the cockpit to erupt in flames. What was left of his aircraft began to spin and disintegrate in mid-air. Now engulfed in flames, he yanked open the plane’s canopy and tumbled out.
He and Hughie had talked through what would happen if there was a fire in the cockpit. If you gasped for air, you would breathe more oxygen and gas into your lungs, and you would die immediately. They decided the best option was to hold their breath and bale out as fast as possible. So, although his tunic, gloves and helmet were on fire, he concentrated for a precious few seconds on just breathing. At 26,000 feet, the air is extremely thin, and pilots jumping at such heights died more often than not, asphyxiated from hypoxia. This is the state in which the body is deprived of oxygen. John had gone through intensive high altitude training for parachute jumps and he had a low metabolic rate, and therefore he required less oxygen, so he managed to remain conscious. But, it was a long, long way down. Descending from that height took a long time and was disorienting. Being blown out of the sky at a height of 15,000 feet or more, the experience was hallucinatory, largely due to oxygen deficit. It was freezing up there. In combat, engine noise blocks out everything else, so a dog fight could often seem to happen in a blanket of white noise, but being abruptly launched into the air would have been like diving into a pool and suddenly having all the familiar sounds disappear.
He landed hard, bootless, battered and badly burnt, with his uniform in tatters, and he set about burying his parachute and knew that the enemy would soon come down after him. Airmen had been warned that being shot behind enemy lines, they should not approach groups of people. As he walked, he checked himself over. He knew he had been burned in the cockpit fire, but he didn’t feel much pain. It felt more like sunburn. His eyes itched, as though they had dust in them, and he had to squint to see everything in the bright sun. His hands were sore as if scraped on a brick wall, but he was in one piece, so he kept moving. He then saw a man. The man was French. The man looked at John, touched his face in several places, and then shook his head. He said that he was sorry, but he could do nothing more for him. He told John what he saw: his face, neck and hands were severely burned; his hair had been singed to blackened wisps; his scorched eyelids were virtually fused shut. John could make out shadows and shapes if he tilted his head back and peered out through the slits, but he was effectively blind.
A few minutes later, the Germans appeared. “For you, the war is over” they said. He was escorted to a nearby Luftwaffe squadron. It was brief, due in large part to his unsettling appearance. There were bluish-black slits where his eyes had been. His hair was reduced to char. The skin on his face and neck was red and puckered by the flames. These were the kind of injuries that airmen feared the most, and they undoubtedly induced great professional sympathy from the Germans.
John Weir was eventually imprisoned, and was part of The Great Escape. He had suffered incredibly, but his story is one amongst thousands if not millions of sacrifices that are made at Passchendaele and Dieppe, at Vimy, at the Somme, at the Battle of the Atlantic, at Kandahar, or in the Middle East. It makes no difference. Whenever there is an attempt for liberation, sacrifices are made. It always raises the question, the question that I felt when I met the Tuskegee Airmen: are we worthy of their sacrifice?
Zechariah does not end with hopelessness. His is a passage of peace. There will always be those who say, “We should not remember. We should not celebrate. We should not have days such as this, because we are a people of peace.” But, “a people of peace” only comes when they know the cost of that peace. Peace comes at a price! For those who paid the price, we are grateful. We are grateful to those who have made peace on this earth. We hope for peace to reside in our hearts. We hope to be at peace with nations and pray to be at peace with God. God sent his Son, the Prince of Peace, in order that the world might follow someone better than those who come forward as the tyrants of the ages. Our hope for those who have gone before us who gave themselves is that they will have the peace of eternity. The hope for our generation is that we will never be so arrogant and so forgetful that we ourselves have the peace of eternity. And, our hope for our children and our children’s children is they will have the hope of eternity.
The great Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas, in a homage to Romans, Chapter 8, by the Apostle Paul, which speaks of peace with God and the life to come, wrote these incredible words:
And death shall have no dominion.
Dead man naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bone is gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad, they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.
And death shall have no dominion.
Under the windings of the sea
They lying long shall not die windily;
Twisting on racks when sinews give way,
Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;
Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan’t crack;
And death shall have no dominion.
And death shall have no dominion.
No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the sea shores
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
Though they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies
Break in the sun until the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion.
May we be worthy of those who have paid the sacrifice! And for them, may death have no dominion! Amen