On May 27, 2004 two days before it was dedicated, Victoria and I visited the World War II Memorial. We entered it through the Atlantic arch. On the Normandy inscription someone had left an album of Normandy photographs. Attached to the album was a zip-locked bag that contained three stones from the Normandy beach. On the inscription marking the Battle of the Bulge there was a red rose. And there Victoria and I remembered her father.

Robert Bracken White was born and raised in Detroit and had spent two years in Michigan majoring in aeronautical engineering, but in the fall of 1942 he transferred to Wheaton College in Illinois to study music. There he formed the beginning of a close and life-long friendship with Evan Welsh, later a beloved chaplain of Wheaton College. But the Wheaton idyll was short-lived. When he returned to campus after Christmas vacation, his induction papers were in his CPO box.

He entered the war as a member of the Headquarters Battery 285^th Field Observation Battalion deployed in Holland. His job was to spot the flash of enemy guns and, using instruments, to pinpoint their location. The coordinates would be radioed back to the artillery so that they could target the location and take it out.

On December 14, 1944 the Battle of the Bulge began. When it ended six weeks later, only 14 of the 144 men in his battalion were still alive.

What happened to his unit is a story told in the movie “Saints and Soldiers” (see the previous post). It’s also told in “The Making of a Missionary Doctor” a book about his early years written a few years after his death in 1982. Written by his sister, Frances White, a Professor of English at Wheaton during the war, she writes, “The responsibility of his battalion was to reconnoiter ahead of the infantry. Unfortunately, they sometimes had the experience of getting behind enemy lines before they were aware of their position. This was precisely what happened to your father’s battalion during the Battle of the Bulge, when they ran straight into a line of German tanks.”

Around 1200 (noon) on December 17, 1944, the 285^th FOB having road-marched to the area of Malmédy, Belgium, armed with rifles and machine guns, was surrounded by German tanks and infantry. The clash was brief but violent. The battalion commander surrendered. The American POWs were herded into a field near the Baugnez crossroads, and the tank crew mowed them down. The men of the 285th who survived that day did so despite their wounds or by feigning dead in the snow. History calls it the Malmédy Massacre.

What had spared my father-in-law? On December 12 a courier came up to him and asked if he was Robert Bracken White and handed him orders that he was to return with the courier to England. Officers with his skill were needed to train others for field observation duty in the Pacific Theater.

On January 8, 1945 his family received a letter from him dated December 25, 1944. He wrote:

Dear Mom & Papa & the kids,
Know you are anxiously awaiting word from me—so rest assured I am quite well, but you probably have no idea where I am. I cannot now tell you the reasons why I am where I am or what’s cooking but will shortly be able to make things clear. Am now back from the front in Germany and am in England at the replacement depot. It is truly miraculous that I am here in the light of what’s happened on the front. I just cannot understand God’s love for undeserving me. I really hated to leave my boys in spite of the danger. I had grown so attached to them. I feel quite sure that a great many of my boys were either killed, captured or wounded from bits of news I have been able to gather. How I pray so earnestly for them.

So it happened that later that spring, as Frances White writes, “A handsome young soldier strode into a Wheaton classroom and kissed and embraced his sister, much to the amusement of her class. Unannounced, Rob had come to pay me a visit.” She continues, “The following months were full indeed, for in addition to his ordinary duties, he assumed the responsibilities of visiting the families and sweethearts of his comrades who had laid down their lives on the battlefields of Europe. Although this self-appointed task was a difficult one, Rob wanted to do what he could for the loved ones his men had left behind. And, besides offering the customary words of comfort, he found opportunity to speak of the one who was so moved by the death of his friend that he wept openly at the grave of Lazarus.”

Looking around me in that plaza dedicated to remembering our World War II dead, I could see the living and I wondered at their stories. Veterans were bending down to touch the inscription of the battle they had been in, their children and grandchildren taking photographs. I tried to speak to Victoria but all I could do was begin sentences I couldn’t finish. I had to hold my face in my hands.

I was wearing my clericals. We were about to leave when I heard a voice say, “Father!” I turned. There was an old veteran offering his hand to me which I took. “Father,” he said cheerfully, “I want to thank you. I have the greatest respect for people like you, for what you do,” he said. “To have someone like you with me meant everything once. It still does.”

He thanked God for me but it wasn’t me personally he was grateful for but for a priest — a particular one but all of them whose job in the world is to be a sign of the One who said he’d be with us always — that by my collar I signified. I reached to find words hard to come by and chose two my mother taught me. “Thank you,” I said. I introduced Victoria. I gave him my name. He gave us his. His name is Larry Bush. I’ll never forget him.

Every profession possesses its own unique temptations — mirror images of what that profession professes to be. In their zeal to uphold right and wrong, police are tempted towards petty corruption. In the service of justice, lawyers are tempted to subvert the mechanisms of justice. In order to thrill an audience, an opera singer is tempted to reach for a note which is false. To commend his subject, a teacher is tempted to become an entertainer.

Clergy too have their unique temptation. And not the ones you think — not the ones trumpeted in the daily press. The abuse of power, the mismanagement of money, sexual indiscretions: these temptations are not unique to clergy, they are to be found in every other vocation as well. No, in a time when social roles and character slip and slide, clergy are confronted by the unique temptation to avoid behaving like clergy: having been ordained, set aside by God for a specific task, clergy are daily confronted by the glittering temptation to flee the very specificity of the task.

And what is this specific task? Jesus tells us, albeit indirectly, in today’s gospel: “He who is a hireling and not a shepherd, whose own the sheep are not, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and flees; and the wolf snatches them and scatters them.” And lest we miss the point, he returns to the same metaphor at the conclusion of John’s gospel: “When they had finished breakfast, Jesus said to Simon Peter, ‘Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these?’ He said to him, ‘Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.’ He said to him, ‘Feed my lambs.’”

What is the specific task into which clergy are ordained? Day in and day out, to feed God’s people with his Word. It’s that simple — and that difficult. Difficult, because of the abiding temptation to redefine the task, in order to avoid the task altogether.

The most obvious form of this temptation arises from the uncomfortable fact that clergy are different, and so we are tempted to want to be the same — like everyone else — in order to be liked by everyone else. We are not ordained to be politicians or social reformers, analysts or welfare workers, the managerial elite which now control society. Yet we are tempted for that very reason to want this elite to give us a hearing, to like us, to take us into the club. And so we are tempted to redefine Jesus’ command: Feed my sheep. We are tempted to mount the pulpit and speak of everything from the Federal Budget to Bosnia, and drag in some proof-text to prove what we wanted to say anyway. Remember, Phillip, every self-appointed prophet in the Old Testament was a false prophet.

There is another form of this temptation, not so obvious but therefore doubly pernicious. That is to give the sheep only the food they crave, not the food they need, not the Bread of Eternal Life. So we are tempted to mount the pulpit, open with a movie or book review, a witty story, a cultural reflection, and then pull in a bit of Scripture to round things off. And we will have achieved what we wanted to achieve: people will think we’re not so odd, at the church door they will thank us for a thoughtful and beautiful message. Remember well, Phillip, Jesus’s words: “Woe to you, when all men speak well of you, for so their fathers did to the false prophets.”

_______________________________________________________

The Rev’d Fr. David Stokes, my friend and sponsoring rector, preaching at The Ordination of a Priest, Saint Bartholomew’s Church, the City of New York, January 6, 1996. It was David at his most characteristic, except that here the sermon was aimed at the one entering holy orders, at me — everybody else in St. Bart’s that day overheard it. David was at the time the rector of Saint Stephen’s Church, Providence, RI, an Anglo-Catholic parish, my sponsoring parish. The prayer that I pray before preaching — O, Lord, may thy Word be my word, and if my word is not thy Word, let thy people be cunning enough to see the same. — I learned from David Stokes.

Jesus said, “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. The hired hand, who is not the shepherd and does not own the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and runs away — and the wolf snatches them and scatters them. The hired hand runs away because a hired hand does not care for the sheep. I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father. And I lay down my life for the sheep. I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd. For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life in order to take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it up again. I have received this command from my Father.”