Luke 1:39-45,56—A Quiet Miracle

I realize it’s quite late to post a Christmas Eve sermon, but a recent request for a manuscript of it has led me to conclude, “Better late than never.”

This particular sermon was set up by the Sunday morning before, as I described in my “First Matters” column in the church News on December 19:

Sunday morning, Ernest Garrett showed me a clipping from Saturday’s newspaper. “I can’t believe it’s been 62 years,” he said, as I read the one-sentence entry in “Today in History,” noting the beginning of “the Battle of the Bulge,” the costliest battle of WWII for American lives lost (19,000). Exposure to the extreme cold caused as many casualties as the fighting, which continued into January of 1945.

Later, I listened in wonder to Lore Johnson's children’s sermon recounting an episode in her life as a teenager living alone in Germany during the American occupation after the war. She told about finding employment in the home of an American officer and his family, cooking, cleaning house and washing dishes and diapers. Lore offered an entirely different perspective on getting “coal” for Christmas when she told about how grateful she was for the big box of it that the officer surprised her with, because it allowed her to heat her otherwise cold room for the whole winter.

Two very different memories of WWII from FBC member-ministers whose lives testify to the love and grace of God at Christmas and all year long.

In January of 1996, Fritz Vincken, a bakery owner from Honolulu, Hawaii, traveled to Frederick, MD, to meet Ralph Blank in the nursing home where he lived. It was not the first time the two had met, but they had not seen each other for more than 50 years. The first time they met was sixty-two years ago tonight, on Christmas Eve 1944. The circumstances of their introduction to each other constitute one of the great Christmas stories of all time.

When Fritz Vincken was twelve years old, he and his mother Elisabeth took refuge in a small hunting cabin in the Hürtgen Forest four miles outside the town of Monschau near the border of Germany and Belgium, after their home in Aachen had been destroyed in an Allied air raid. “When we heard the knock on our door that Christmas Eve in 1944,” wrote Fritz Vincken wrote years later, “neither Mother nor I had the slightest inkling of the quiet miracle that lay in store for us. . . . . as I went to the door, the Battle of the Bulge was raging all around us. We heard the incessant booming of field guns; planes soared continuously overhead; at night, searchlights stabbed through the darkness. Thousands of Allied and German soldiers were fighting and dying nearby. When that first knock came, Mother quickly blew out the candles; then, as I went to answer it, she stepped ahead of me and pushed open the door. Outside, like phantoms against the snow-clad trees, stood two steel-helmeted men. One of them spoke to Mother in a language we did not understand, pointing to a third man lying in the snow. She realized before I did that these were American soldiers. Enemies! Mother stood silent, motionless, her hand on my shoulder. They were armed and could have force their entrance, yet they stood there and asked with their eyes. And the wounded man seemed more dead than alive. “Kommt rein,” Mother said finally. “Come in.”

The soldiers carried their comrade inside and stretched him out on my bed. None of them understood German. Mother tried French, and one of the soldiers could converse in that language. . . . They’d lost their battalion and had wandered in the forest for three days, looking for the Americans, hiding from the Germans. They hadn’t shaved, but still, without their heavy coats, they looked merely like big boys, and that’s how mother began to treat them. Now mother said to me, ‘Go get Hermann. And bring six potatoes.’ This was a serious departure from our pre-Christmas plans. Hermann was the plump rooster (named after Hermann Goering, Hitler’s No. 2, for whom Mother had little affection) that we had been fattening for weeks in the hope that Father would be home for Christmas. But, some hours before, when it was obvious that Father would not make it, Mother had decided that Hermann should live a few more days, in case Father could get home for New Year’s. Now she changed her mind again: Hermann would serve an immediate, pressing purpose. . . . Soon, the tempting smell of roast chicken permeated our room.

I was setting the table when once again there came a knock at the door. Expecting to find more lost Americans, I opened the door with hesitation. There stood four soldiers wearing uniforms quite familiar to me after five years of war. They were soldiers of the Wehrmacht, they were ours! I was paralyzed with fear. Although still a child, I knew that whoever sheltered the enemy would be shot! Mother was frightened, too. Her face was white, but she stepped outside and said quietly, ‘Fröhliche Wehinachten.’ The soldiers wished her a Merry Christmas, too. ‘We have lost our regiment and would like to wait for daylight,’ explained the corporal ‘Can we rest here?’ ‘Of course,’ Mother replied, with a calmness born of panic. ‘You can also have a fine, warm meal and eat till the pot is empty.’ The Germans smiled as they sniffed the aroma through the half-open door. ‘But,’ Mother added firmly, ‘we have three other guests, whom you may not consider friends.’ Now her voice was suddenly sterner than I’d ever heard it before. ‘This is Christmas Eve, and there will be no shooting here.’ ‘Who’s inside?’ the corporal demanded. ‘Amerikaner?’ Mother looked at each frost-chilled face. ‘Listen,’ she said slowly, ‘You could be my sons, and so could those in there. A boy with a gunshot wound, fighting for his life. His two friends lost like you and just as hungry and exhausted as you are. This one night,’ she turned to the corporal and raised her voice a little, ‘this Christmas night, let us forget about killing.’

The corporal stared at her. There were two or three endless seconds of silence. Then Mother put an end to indecision. ‘Enough talking,’ she ordered and clapped her hands sharply. ‘Please put your weapons here on the woodpile, and hurry up before the others eat the dinner!’ Dazedly, the four soldiers placed their arms on the pile of firewood just inside the door. . . . Meanwhile, Mother was speaking French rapidly to Jim. He said something in English, and to my amazement I saw the American boys, too, turn their weapons over to Mother. . . . Despite the strained atmosphere, Mother went right on preparing dinner. . . . one of the Germans had put on his glasses to inspect the American’s wound. ‘Do you belong to the medical corps?’ Mother asked him. ‘No,’ he answered. ‘But I studied medicine at Heidelberg until a few months ago.’ Thanks to the cold, he told the Americans in what sounded like fairly good English, Harry’s wound hadn’t become infected. ‘He is suffering from a severed loss of blood,’ he explained to Mother. ‘What he needs is rest and nourishment.’

Relaxation was beginning to replace suspicion. Even to me, all the soldiers looked very young as we sat there together. Heinz and Willi, both from Cologne, were 16. The German corporal, at 23, was the oldest of them all. From his food bag he drew out a bottle of red wine, and Heinz managed to find a loaf of rye bread. Mother cut that in small pieces to be served with the dinner. . . . Then mother said grace. I noticed that there were tears in her eyes as she said the old, familiar words, ‘Komm, Herr Jesu,’ ‘Come, Lord Jesus, be our guest.’ And as I looked around the table, I saw tears, too, in the eyes of the battle-weary soldiers, boys again, some from America, some from Germany, all far from home. . . . Our private armistice continued the next morning. . . . . The corporal . . . advised the Americans how to find their way back to their lines. Looking over Jim’s map, the corporal pointed out a stream. ‘Continue along this creek,’ he said, ‘and you will find the 1st Army rebuilding its forces on its upper course.’ The medical student relayed the information in English. ‘Why don’t we head for Monschau,?’ Jim had the medical student ask. ‘Nein!’ the corporal exclaimed. ‘We’ve retaken Monschau.’ Now mother gave them all back their weapons. . . . The German and American soldiers shook hands, and we watched them disappear in opposite directions.”

A Christmas miracle, indeed. Not everyone believes in miracles, of course. One online commentator on the made-for-TV movie based on this true story wrote, “This film seems too contrived for me. I can’t believe that soldiers who were indoctrinated to hate their enemy and who suffered years of war and personal loss, would lay down their weapons to have a Christmas dinner. . . . All in all, this film seems too naïve in its premise.” Too naïve, indeed. For centuries, the proclamation of the Christmas story has been dismissed as too contrived, too naïve for the fearful and threatening realities of the world in which we humans live. Take, for example, the unexpected encounter between another woman named Elizabeth and her young relative named Mary in this morning’s gospel lesson. Long after Elizabeth gave up expecting to be expecting, she was surprised to be expecting. And well before Mary expected to be expecting, she is surprised to be expecting. In their joy and in their confusion, these two women stumble into each other’s arms, only to be further surprised by Elizabeth’s announcement that the child she was carrying in her womb, whom the world would eventually know as John the Baptist, kicked when Mary arrived, carrying in her womb the child the world would eventually know as Jesus of Nazareth. “Contrived and naïve,” some would say of this encounter, and I confess that sometimes I have been among them.

But every year the Christmas proclamation reminds me and reminds us all that God is at work in the world of fearful and threatening realities in which we live in ways that often confound our expectations and contradict our sophistication. The Christmas proclamation reminds us that God is present and at work in ways and in places and in lives that you and I aren’t even inclined to consider or see. After all, it was in a fearful and threatening world in a Palestine occupied by the foreign forces of the Roman Legion, while the paranoid tyrant Herod the Great pursued a domestic policy of stability by the assassination of anyone he perceived to be a threat, two women, one too old and one too young, fell into each other’s arms to share the joy and the confusion of the quiet miracles they were experiencing. Centuries later, two knocks on the door of a hunting cabin in Hürtgen Forest turned a lonely hut surrounded by the Battle of the Bulge into an oasis of peace and humanity. “Es ist Heiligabend,” Elizabeth Vincken said, “und hier wird nicht geschossen.” “It is the Holy Night, and there will be no shooting here.” So, too, we come to this place occupied and preoccupied by forces and fears and threats that we cannot control. We come to this place, some of as combatants and some as noncombatants but all of us caught up in wars that rage around us and within us, culture wars, political wars, retail wars, marital wars, gender wars, mommy wars, wars on terror, wars on addiction, wars on loneliness, grief, disease and depression—name your battle. We come here for a respite, a rest, a private armistice in a place where quiet miracles occur when we fall into each other’s arms, when we offer one another a handshake of peace and directions in finding our way.

“Your mother saved my life,” Ralph Blank said to Fritz Vincken, when they met again in 1996, and he showed him the compass that the German corporal had given him along with the directions back to the location of the Allied lines. “Now I can die in peace,” Vincken said. My mother’s courage won’t be forgotten and it shows what good will do.” And like the first Christmas story, it reminds us of the unexpected ways and places that God is present and at work in a fearful and threatening world.

“Now to the Lord sing praises, all you within this place,
and with true love and gentleness each other now embrace;
this holy tide of Christmas all others doth deface.
O tidings of comfort and joy, comfort and joy;
O tidings of comfort and joy.” (English carol, 18th century)

(Note: The first-person account above is quoted from “Truce in the Forest,” by Fritz Vincken, posted at http://www.afn.co.kr/archives/readings/truce.htm, with several variants collated in from the German version, “Winternacht in den Ardennen,” posted at http://www.kreisanzeiger-online.de/new/start.php?id=75. The words of Blank and Vincken in the final paragraph come from Vincken’s obituary written by Rod Ohira and posted on the website of the Honolulu Advertiser at http://the.honoluluadvertiser.com/article/2002/Jan/11/ln/ln37a.html, and are used by permission. Additional sources consulted include the Hawaii Oral History project posting, “Interview of Fritz Vincken, February, 1997, in Honolulu, Hawaii, Conducted by Joalena Ashmore, Senior at Kahuku High,” at http://www.ba-ez.org/educatn/LC/OralHist/vincken.htm, and a brief notice in a New York Times article on May 7, 1985, “Reagan in Europe: Speech in Germany, Arrival in Spain; Author of Tale Moved by Reagan’s Telling.” All online sources were last accessed on 12/18/2006. I confess that President Reagan was more trusting than I, as it was not until after learning of the 1996 meeting with Blank corroborating Vincken’s account that I was willing to use this story that I first heard some thirty years ago. For a careful account of a very different experience of Christmas Eve 1944 in the Ardennes, read The Hotton Report, by Robert K. McDonald [Wakefield, LA: Finbar Press, 2006]).