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"GOT IT?" by Rev. Charles Hoffman

October 27, 2002 23^rd Sunday After Pentecost
Psalm 90:1-6 Matthew 22:34-46

I was listening to National Public Radio one day recently, and I heard an interview with conservative columnist George Will. George Will is one of those writers who sends most of his readers scurrying off to find a dictionary. I imagine that he has never met an abstruse phrase or a recondite treatise or an esoteric word that he didn't like. George loves to use imperspicuous (rare) words when he writes. You get the feeling that he's impatient with those of us who have only average intelligence.

In the interview that I heard, he had just responded to a loaded question. Apparently, the interviewer wasn't satisfied with the answer and so he asked the question a second time. Once again, George painstakingly spelled out the same answer. And then, with more than a hint of disdain for the thick- headedness of his host he said, "Got it?"

It was as if to say, "How many times do I have to spell it out for you?"

So ended the interview.

Now in the gospel lesson for the day we have a situation that has some parallels to the George Will interview. The Pharisees are still trying to trick Jesus into making a mistake, to get him to say something that they can use against him before the authorities.

So they put the question to him: "Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?"

You have to wonder how these religious leaders could think that question would give Jesus trouble. Especially since Jesus wasn't the first one to answer the question as he did in this exchange.

Even you and I could have handled that question. I've had the answer drilled into me through a whole lifetime in the church. We all agree: the first commandment is to love God with my whole being and the second is to love our neighbor as myself. That's the key to understanding the Bible. End of lesson.

So let's take the offering, sing a hymn and go home. Right? Wrong. Because, you see, the challenge for every person in every time is to hear that lesson. It rolls off the tongue but too often it also rolls off our minds like the proverbial water off the duck's back. We have become immune to its truth. So the challenge today is to make this old truth new. How can we say it with a fresh voice? How can we hear it with open ears? How can we comprehend it as something vital? And when I looked at this text a few weeks ago those were the questions that confronted me. How many times do we have to be told which is the greatest commandment?

After all, everyone knows the answer to that one. This is Sunday school 101. Why keep asking the same old question? What's a preacher to do?

Recently for me help arrived in the form of an old book. I'd never read it before; never even knew of its existence. The book was written over forty years ago. It contains the memories of a Scottish prisoner of war in the South Pacific during the Second World War.

The author is Ernest Gordon. The title of the book is Through the Valley of the Kwai. And as the title suggests, it details the same ordeal as that in the book and movie entitled Bridge Over the River Kwai.

Ernest Gordon was a prisoner in that camp and I want to share his story with you because it, more than anything else I have read in recent memory, illustrates the power of love and the wisdom of what Jesus had to say to those Pharisees.

I won't tell all that led up to his imprisonment in the jungles of Thailand. Suffice it to say that this company commander in the 93^rd Highlanders found himself part of a forced labor camp with the impossible assignment to build a railroad for their captors. The years were 1942 to 1945, three and a half years a POW.

Not long after imprisonment, Ernest Gordon came down with malaria and then had to have his appendix removed in an improvised, open-air hospital with no better light than a kerosene lantern.

In the early stages of the ordeal Gordon was not a religious man. He had pretty much rejected his early religious training and he was critical of the foxhole religion that was flourishing around him. He said that "the dominant motivation for such wholesale embracing of religion was not love and faith, but fear: fear of the unknown, fear of suffering, fear of the terror by night, fear of death itself, fear that made for division rather than for community" (Through the Valley of the Kwai, Bantam, 1963, p. 50).

With uncommon insight, Gordon knew that he wanted no part of a religion based on fear.

But things got worse, much worse. He contracted amoebic dysentery to go along with the malaria. The workload increased. The prisoners were to finish in eighteen months a railroad project that engineers estimated would take five or six years. The men were being starved, beaten, abused and worked into oblivion. The camp was a place of misery, despair and death. Then came an outbreak of cholera. More and more men died. Every day they died.

Listen to Ernest Gordon: "As conditions steadily worsened, as starvation, exhaustion, and disease took an ever-growing toll, the atmosphere in which we lived was increasingly poisoned by selfishness, hatred, and fear. We were slipping rapidly down the scale of degradation" (p. 64). The only thing that mattered now was survival. It was the law of the jungle. Even when a man lay dying, Gordon said that there was no word of mercy. "Everyone was his own keeper. It was free enterprise at its worst, with all the restraints of morality gone" (p. 64).

The men began to steal from each other. They fought over the food and waited like jackals to rob the dead of whatever might remain after they had breathed their last. And by now the religion based on fear had been completely forgotten. It hadn't worked; it was discarded along with dignity, hope, and compassion.

By and by Ernest Gordon came down with diphtheria and soon he lost feeling in his legs. So he was sent to what was known as the Death House, a place of such degradation that it defies description. In fact, it was so bad that Gordon asked to be moved to the morgue itself where he lay among the dead. But he considered that to be an improvement over the living hell of the Death House.

Ernest Gordon entitles this section of his book The Valley of Death. But the next chapter bears the title Miracle By the River Kwai. This next chapter begins with one of his friends building a small hut where Ernie could be sheltered away from the other dying men. But before he was moved there he overheard a conversation between two doctors who were sure that Ernie was dying.

That conversation provoked a battle in his own mind and led to his conclusion that in spite of what the experts were saying and in spite of his condition he would choose to live. He wanted more out of life than just twenty-six years.

Help came in the form of two other young men. Dusty Miller and Dinty Moore, they were called. In this account Dusty is the one to watch. He is the one who "got it" when Jesus said that what matters is love. He was a rare spirit, an unusual combination of tenderness and toughness.

In civilian life Dusty was a gardener, Dinty a postal clerk. I don't think Gordon knew it at the time, but Dusty was a Methodist who worked with the youth back at his church in England. Dinty was a Roman Catholic.

They had decided to help their countryman die with dignity. So they gave Ernest or Ernie Gordon constant care. They bathed and tended to the putrid tropical ulcers that covered his useless legs. They brought him food, talked to him, remembered his 26^th birthday, and against all odds nursed him through the crisis until he was able to walk again and begin to take care of himself.

And about that time something strange began to take place. The ways of Dusty and Dinty were being emulated by others. And as Ernie began to reclaim his life so did the camp begin to reclaim its life. Listen to his reflections on what was taking place: "What I had experienced – namely, the turning to life away from death – was happening to the camp in general. We were coming through the valley. There was a movement, a stirring in our midst, a presence.

"Stories of a different kind began to circulate around the camp, stories of self- sacrifice, heroism, faith, and love" (p. 87).

Through simple acts of love toward others the power of life and renewal had been set free in that despicable place of inhumanity. Those men had no medicines, no modern medical instruments, and no adequate food, shelter or clothing. They were "devoid of the props of society that make for hope" (p. 99). They were removed from family, friends, home and country. They were subjected to constant abuse and oppression. They had nothing.

All they had was a human spirit captivated by love. Within their society there was at work what Gordon called "the leaven of love (p.112). And it infiltrated the whole. Amazing things began to happen. Improvisation and creativity were born. Sandals were made for those who had no shoes and artificial limbs for those who had no legs. Seminars were offered on a wide variety of subjects. A lending library was set up with the books that men had kept as priceless possessions.

There was also a burst of artistic activity including an orchestra improvised from a few violins, some brass instruments, and a woodwind section largely made from bamboo. A leader emerged who had a photographic memory for musical scores. And in time the orchestra gave concerts. They played the music of Beethoven and Schubert along with other selections. Even the camp guards came to the concerts.

The men of that camp also produced art shows and dramatic performances. And they gave blood for those who needed transfusions.

A church was born where many of the men found faith. Others, including Ernest Gordon, reaffirmed their faith. Reflecting on this resurrection of faith Gordon wrote, "The leaven was spreading. We were spiritually armed. We had a will to life rather than a will to death" (p. 132).

It seemed that everyone was affected by this powerful expression of love in the jungle. On one occasion some of the POW officers were observed giving water to wounded Japanese soldiers. And when the camp was finally liberated, when the liberators were about to shoot the guards who had watched over this scene of human horror, the prisoners themselves intervened. Let them live! This time, they said, it will not be an eye for an eye or a tooth for a tooth.

And what about Ernest Gordon? What about Dusty and Dinty? What happened to them? Sadly, Dinty died before the end of the war. Gordon doesn't give the details of his death. Ernest Gordon himself went on to become a Presbyterian minister and ultimately Dean of the Chapel at Princeton University.

As for Dusty, this gentle Christian whose love for God was transformed into heroic acts of service, it had been his desire to go back to England and to plant flowers amidst the rubble in the aftermath of war. He felt that people would need flowers to bring them cheer.

But it wasn't to be. Very near the end of the war he became part of a work detail forced to cut a road through Burma. After the road had been built Dusty and others were left behind to help keep it open during the monsoon season.

But the warrant officer in charge of the detail hated Dusty. He hated him because he could not break Dusty's spirit. Dusty was still putting his love for God first and expressing that love in service to others.

Finally, the obsessed warrant officer's hatred had become so great that he had Dusty put to death. More specifically he had him crucified on a tree somewhere along that muddy road through the Burmese jungle.

They asked Jesus, "Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?" And the Lord said to him, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself. Got it?"