Christ is our Hope.
On Christmas Eve 1914, a famous and wondrous moment happened. World War I, or as they called it at the time the Great War, had consumed Europe for about five months. On what would be known as the Western Front, England, France and Germany settled into about 1500 miles of trenches winding across France and Germany, from the Swiss border in the south to the coast of Belgium on the North Sea.
Between the trenches was “no man’s land,” a couple of hundred yards, more or less, of scorched earth and shell craters over which neither side could advance.
Yet, on that Christmas Eve 105 years ago tonight, the British Expeditionary Force heard German troops singing Silent Night to them. They responded with The First Noel. The carols continued, back and forth. In places, the Germans were joined by brass bands. Eventually, soldiers from both sides, encouraged by assurances of a Christmas peace, ventured cautiously into No Man’s Land. They exchanged Christmas greetings, whiskey, food and cigars. Despite orders against it, the truce continued through Christmas Day.
The Wall Street Journal wrote, “What appears from the winter fog and misery is a Christmas story, a fine Christmas story that is, in truth, the most faded and tattered of adjectives: inspiring.”
It seemed to fit their times. They were used to extraordinary events.
The early 20th century leading up to the war was an era of unprecedented and continuous advances in science and technology. A few examples:
In 1900 Charles Seeberger invented the escalator. In 1901 Marconi delivered the first transatlantic radio signal. In 1902, Willis Carrier invented the air conditioner. (Can I get an Amen?)
The Wright Brothers’ plane first flew in 1903. In 1904 Benjamin Holt invented the tractor. In 1905, Albert Einstein revolutionized our understanding of the universe, from the tiniest particles to the expanses of space, with his theory of relativity. Color photography was invented in 1907 and in 1908 Ford produced over 10,000 Model T’s off his new assembly line. In 1910, Thomas Edison invented the first talking motion picture and Marie Curie isolated radium, for which she would become the first woman to win the Nobel Prize.
It was an age of discovery and invention, of expanding knowledge and perspectives that convinced many that humanity had entered a new, modern age where every problem could be solved by the application of human ingenuity and reason. Herbert Spencer, a British social theorist, saw progress as the inevitable course of evolution and wrote, “…in virtue of this process, man will eventually become completely suited to his mode of life.”
Spencer’s “Myth of Progress” became the lens through which every academic discipline, every invention, politics and even many preachers saw the advance of everything. The social gospel, advancing humanity toward the Kingdom of God through social reforms, pushed the church’s work, hospitals, schools and charity of all forms into the public sector.
Many people thought humanity had moved beyond the pains of war. H.G Wells, author of The Time Machine, War of the Worlds and The Invisible Man wrote, “I think that in the decades before 1914 not only I but most of my generation – in the British Empire, America, France and indeed throughout most of the civilized world, - thought that war was dying out. So it seemed to us.”
It did not, of course. Progress also developed the machine gun, modern artillery and chemical weapons that wiped out much of a generation of young men. That war would consume Europe for another four years. The trenches moved very little if at all until the very end. Millions of lives were lost in fruitless attempts to take “no man’s land.” That Christmas Truce never recurred. They called it “the war to end all wars” as no one could imagine anyone ever letting such a thing happen again.
The Great War was so bad and such a shock that it completely trashed the myth of progress. All of our ingenuity and advances had not cured humanity. Even religious institutions failed. There had been many wars among Christian realms and nations over the centuries, but nothing on that scale. Lutherans, Catholics, Presbyterians, Anglicans and other Christians were in command and in those trenches.
Then, twenty years later, World War II erupted along the same lines but was even bigger and more horrific. We can look back over the last 105 years with a great deal of sorrow about our conflicts and inhumanity to each other, despite the ongoing wonders of progress.
Yet…
The people who walked in darkness
have seen a great light;
those who lived in a land of deep darkness—
on them light has shined.
We have hope, the very hope that shone forth on Christmas Eve in 1914, the hope that enables us to see the humanity in an enemy, the hope that enables us to see that how we reach our goals is as, or often more important, than the goals themselves.
And this isn’t primarily about world events. It is about each one of us, the trenches in our own hearts and the no man’s land between our sin and God’s grace that we could never cross on our own efforts. It is about each one of us facing the challenges of life knowing our mortality is precious and in the end fragile. It is about the hunger for truth and grace and hope in our own community, and our call to be Christ’s light to the young and the old who do not see hope at all. We have hope, hope to hold and hope to share. Light in the darkness.
For a child has been born for us,
a son given to us;
authority rests upon his shoulders;
and he is named
Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
Progress, real progress, is not in the advances of technology. Those are just tools. Real progress is to be found in that which draws us into deeper reconciliation and restoration with the God who created us, who calls us to love and serve him and who gave us his son as a light in the darkness.
I’ll close with a quote my father sent me just this morning from Presbyterian pastor Frederick Buechner:
“What keeps the wild hope of Christmas alive year after year – in a world notorious for dashing all hopes – is the haunting dream that the child who was born in a barn that day may be born again in all of us.” Frederick Buechner
O come, let us adore him. O come, let us adore him. O come, let us adore him.
Christ the Lord.
AMEN