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| My friend John Hemminger's P-47 was named Edna Mae |
Honoring Servant
Greatness (Philippians 3:17-21) Excerpt from STAND FAST In the Way of Truth
“Pay attention!”
Steve
Kelley, sportswriter for the Seattle
Times, recently recollected the advice his father used to give him when
they sat together watching the Philadelphia Phillies at Connie Mack Stadium.
“Pay attention,” his dad would say when Willie Mays came to bat. “You’re
watching greatness. You don’t want to forget this.”
I remember sitting on “Tightwad
Hill” with my uncle watching the farm club Tacoma Twins, cheering wildly as I
peered through the binoculars. Next day after school, I’d grab my bat and try
my best to imitate the swing of those heavy-hitter wannabes. For the record, no
matter how hard I tried, I wasn’t wired for baseball greatness. “You can’t put
in what the Lord’s left out,” quipped the trainer in the classic film, Chariots of Fire. When I would come to
bat at neighborhood games, on queue the outfield moved in, or just squatted
down and waited until I finished flailing the air. Through all this, however, I
have figured out something important: I pay attention to men I think are great,
and I desperately try to be like them. And so do you.
Kelley’s dad was right about one
thing: you don’t want to forget greatness. We must sit up and “pay attention”
to real greatness. But what makes someone worthy of this attention? What makes
someone truly great, a worthy hero, someone you should never forget, someone
you should hold in the highest regard, someone you should imitate?
All men honor heroes
“Any nation that does not honor its
heroes,” said Abraham Lincoln, “will not long endure.” In an age when debunking
heroes has become as American as apple pie and hot dogs, an age of flag-burning
ingratitude, of pompous disdain for the past, an age that chants “Hey, hey, ho,
ho, Western Culture’s got to go,” we should cringe at Lincoln’s prophetic
words. Maybe we’ve come too close. Maybe we’re there already. Maybe we are a
people that mock at real heroes and, in their place, are now bowing down before
the real villains.
Nineteenth-century Scottish
historian Thomas Carlyle wrote that “Hero-worship cannot cease till man himself
ceases.” In the fifth century, Augustine referred to men as homo adorans, man made to adore, to
worship, to venerate heroes. Thus, kings and generals are followed by their
adoring armies even into the jaws of death. “Once more unto the breach, dear
friends,” cried Shakespeare’s Henry V
as he rallied his men before the battered walls of Harfleur, “or close the wall
up with our English dead!” In the 1st
century BC, Julius
Caesar was so adored by his
legions that they were prepared to cross the Rubicon and march in defiance
against Rome
and Pompey. Or the young Alexander the Great
motivating thousands to fight and die so that he might spread Greek culture and
language--and rule the world in the bargain.
The literature of Western
Civilization is the fascinating saga of great achievement, an enduring celebration
of heroes. Great poetry praises the deeds of heroes, real or imagined, from the
300 Spartans at Thermopylae, to the bloody triumphs of Beowulf, to the
dragon-slaying Red Cross Knight of Edmund Spenser’s epic allegory, to the 600 courageous
men of Tennyson’s Light Brigade, even to the humble heroics of Tolkien’s
mythical Frodo the Hobbit--it all fires the blood and fascinates the
imagination.
One thing is overwhelmingly clear:
You and I were made to adore heroes. We pay attention with all our being to
great men.
Beware of false
heroes
This ingrained tendency to adore
heroes, however, poses particular challenges for young men growing up in a
culture inundated by glitzy, muscle-bound icons of popular culture and the
sports arena. Pop culture particularly plays on your love of heroes. It could
not survive without it. The icons of entertainment demand your worship. They
live and die for it. So it has always been.
Many historians argue that the
history of the world is the history of men following heroes. It would be just
as accurate to say that the history of the world is the history of young men
blindly following the wrong heroes, following unworthy examples, whose vices
are tragically compounded in their fawning worshipers.
So who are your heroes? In today’s
reading, Paul urges the Philippian
Christians to “Join with others in following my example,” that is to say,
follow the right men, set up heroes for yourself and be like them. Speak as
they speak; do as they do. The Bible often speaks this way. Twenty-eight times
we are told to imitate others, often to follow Christ the Captain of our
salvation, but fully seventeen of those times we are commanded to follow others, like Paul, who have been transformed by the power of the gospel of Jesus Christ and have been enabled by that same power to heroically follow Christ.
Paul, here, is in earnest. This is no casual
advice, take it or leave it. No. He reminds us, “I have often told you before
and now say again even with tears.” Why with tears? Why so earnest? Because
“many live as enemies of the cross of Christ.”
Because an earthly hero has his “mind on earthly things.” And the young man who
chooses to follow worldly heroes, to applaud at their entertainments, to listen
to their music, to cheer at their achievement, to spend his money on their
products, to paper the walls of his bedroom with their posters, that young man
should not be surprised if he follows those heroes right into the jaws of hell.
From this, you and I are duty bound to draw the line in the sand. This is no
trivial matter. Don’t follow the enemies of the cross of Christ. “Their
destiny,” Paul declares without equivocation, “is destruction.” And so will yours prove to be if you follow them.
Moreover, the more impressed you
are by the status and achievement of unbelievers, by their sophisticated good
looks, by their clothes, their shoes, by their posture, their swagger, by their
prowess in sports, by their associations, their way of speaking, by their money
and fancy cars, lavish houses, planes, and yachts, the more you are moved by
these things the less you will be able to separate out their vices. Soon they
won’t seem like vices at all. At the last their vices will be yours. Know that
their end will be yours as well. Fully expect to become like those you
adore.
“We are all creatures of
imitation,” wrote nineteenth-century Anglican bishop J. C. Ryle. “Precept may
teach us, but it is example that draws us.” And since those examples can draw
us from both directions, you must beware of the tendency to go easy on the
parts of your sports or music heroes’ lives that you know are sinful.
Do you honestly think that you will
be unaffected by the foul language, the unfaithful living, the hostility to
truth, or the swaggering arrogance of your worldly heroes? I doubt it. And the
more impressed you are with their achievement the more likely you are to
embrace other elements of their lifestyle.
Don’t expect to see it coming like
a tidal wave. It all happens gradually. Rarely does a young man, like yourself,
who is growing up in a Christian home, rarely does he plunge headlong into sin
with his back against all he has been taught. Generally, it happens little by
little, one single, what’s-the-big-deal step at a time. “The road to hell,”
observed C. S. Lewis,
“is a gradual one.”
The best way to avoid the gradual
road to hell, is to cultivate honor for and imitation of truly worthy heroes.
Here’s one of mine.
Fight to the death
I’ve
thought a good deal lately about one of my heroes. P-47 World War II fighter
pilot, John Hemminger lived with his wife and three children on American Lake, a five-minute bicycle ride from my
childhood home. I was the neighbor kid who always hung around in the summer,
fishing, swimming, and doing wood-working projects in the basement. Along with
the stray dogs that attached themselves to kind-hearted Mr. Hemminger, I too
adopted the Hemminger family as my own.
My mother’s rule was that I
couldn’t go swimming unless the thermometer read seventy degrees. I soon
figured out how to nudge it up with the hair dryer, and then I’d hop on my bike
and off to the Hemmingers. I always tried to time things so I could sit down
for the usual lunch fare of grilled cheese sandwiches, soup, Gravenstien apple
sauce, dilly beans, and smoked salmon. Nobody did homemade applesauce like Edna
Hemminger, and nobody did salmon like John Hemminger.
John Hemminger was a man of deeds
and not words, and so I rarely heard him speak about the war, and never about
his role in it. I was forced to piece things together from pictures and from
stories others told about his role in that great conflict.
“The greatest catastrophe in
history,” Stephen Ambrose called World War II and “the most costly war of all
time.” In April, 1945, 300,000 Americans attacked the Japanese island of Okinawa, while the US Navy was pounded
by 350 kamikaze planes. We lost thirty-six ships. In human life, the casualties
were beyond staggering: 49,200 men in one battle. The Japanese lost 112,129
human lives at Okinawa. Still they fought on.
Germany
surrendered in May, but by summer, it appeared that Japan would fight on until there
was not a Japanese soldier who remained alive. A full-scale Allied invasion of Japan
seemed the only option, but it was an invasion that would have cost 1,000,000
American soldiers their lives. President Truman opted to drop two atomic bombs
on Japan
in hopes of breaking the enemy’s will to fight to extermination. It was as if
the entire nation had become kamikaze flyers.
Fighter pilot
greatness
In 1941, after the Japanese attack
on Pearl Harbor, America joined the war, and can-do
men like John Hemminger were desperately needed to fight. He said goodbye to
his childhood sweetheart, Edna Mae Firch, and joined up.
The picture I will always have in
my mind of him is of a quiet young man in a leather bomber jacket, a shy,
boyish grin stretching across his handsome features, posing with his beloved
P-47, affectionately dubbed Edna Mae.
Though called on to do highly dangerous and daring feats, there was no hint of
the cocky, swaggering dog fighter in his looks or carriage.
John Hemminger loved machines. I
can only begin to imagine his fascination at first sight of his P-47’s Pratt
and Whitney, eighteen cylinder, 2,800 horsepower engine, or the heart-pounding
thrill when he first accelerated into the heavens at his plane’s maximum speed
of 433 mph.
He was a
gentle, peace-loving man, so I particularly wonder what his first thoughts were
when he laid eyes on the eight 12.7mm Browning machine guns bristling from the wings
of his P-47, a machine engineered for killing. One thing I’m sure of: there was
no better cared for fighter plane than his, and likely none more skillfully
used for its designed purpose.
John Hemminger was credited with
the last P-47 kill of the war. By some accounts, he and the Japanese pilot were
slugging it out somewhere over the blue waters of the Pacific, September 2,
1945, while American top brass accepted the Japanese unconditional surrender on
board the USS Missouri. The facts are
unclear, because John Hemminger rarely spoke about the war, and boasting was
something he never did.
What is clear is that John
Hemminger, along with a generation of Americans, was a humble servant hero who
did his duty, and then, unlike many with whom he fought, he returned home.
Bidding farewell to his P-47 Edna Mae,
he married his beloved Edna Mae, raised his family, and lived a long, seemingly
insignificant, life. John Hemminger and his dear wife were not bombastic about
their faith in Christ, but few people have more consistently lived out the
Lord’s injunction to love their neighbor as themselves. Consequently, their
home was a quiet, contented one, filled with stability and service.
In the world’s eyes, after the war
John Hemminger lived an ordinary life, some might have called it boring. But
not so to the dozens of missionaries he supported and took fishing when they
were home, and whose decrepit cars he repaired, rebuilt, or replaced, often at
his own expense. And all done hush-hush, so no one would give him credit for
his latest acts of generosity.
True greatness
Jesus told his disciples, if they
wanted to be great, to become servants. He didn’t say to become great baseball
players, or inventors, or CEOs, or powerful politicians, or celebrity pastors,
or best-selling authors—or even fighter pilots. “Whoever wants to become
great,” Jesus said, “must be your servant” (Matthew 20:26). If you want to be
great you too, must be a servant. John and Edna Hemminger were great
Christians, because they were transformed into great servants by the ultimate Servant of servants, Jesus Christ.
My hero John Hemminger
died of Parkinson’s Disease, December 27, 2006. His wife Edna Mae suffered for
decades with Multiple Sclerosis before her home going. But I never heard either
of them complain. They bore their trials with patience—even with smiles. Nor
did I ever hear either of them speak critical words about others. I think they
were simply too busy, in Christ’s name and by his grace, loving and serving their neighbors. Pay
attention, young man. This is true greatness.
You probably don’t need to travel
to faraway places to get to know and honor servant heroes. I suspect that in
your church, neighborhood, and extended family there are several John and Edna
Mae Hemmingers. Folks like them help unmask the masquerade of what passes for
greatness among modern celebrities. Pop icons and all their vain-glorious
glitter look pretty irrelevant next to great people like these--but only if you
train your eye and your affections to know and honor genuine greatness.
Glitz or glory
Let’s face it. It’s far easier to
talk about being impressed with servant greatness than it is to actually be so.
I wonder if the normalization of sin is not the reason. “Worldliness is what
makes sin look normal,” wrote David Wells, “and righteousness look odd.” Hence,
venerating worldly heroes sets us up to begin feeling that humble, holy living
is pretty out of touch, not much fun, certainly not cool.
Here again, you must pay attention.
When you honor heroes who live worldly lives, you should expect to gradually become
more impressed with their worldliness. Meanwhile, your worldly hero’s lifestyle
will increasingly seem to be the normal way of things. And since no one wants
to be odd, everyone wants to think of himself as a normal guy, so gradually you
will wink at their vices, embrace their values, and imitate their ways.
Finally, Paul’s point in Philippians 3:17-21 is that if you do this, when the
dust settles, you will share in their destruction.
Puritan Jeremy Taylor described the
incremental decline that a young man should expect to pass through if he forges
friendships with worldly heroes and their sin. “First it startles him, then it
becomes pleasing, then easy, then delightful, then frequent, then habitual,
then confirmed, then the man is impenitent, then obstinate, then resolves never
to repent, and finally he is damned.”
On the Judgment Day, all that
worldly glitz, all that superficially impressive lifestyle will be unmasked.
And if you have been duped by a false hero, by one whose “mind is on earthly
things,” it will be far too late to halt the cycle of decline. You must do it
now.
Join with others in following the
example of great Christians—like John and Edna Mae Hemminger. The Bible is full
of them, and so is church history. Pay attention to them.
Throw in your lot with the truly
greats. Know your citizenship. Paul says it is “in heaven.” Know that most of
the world’s heroes are frauds. Their power, their prestige, their wealth, is
all borrowed and will someday be swept away with them. “Their destiny is
destruction.” No real man would throw in his lot with losers like that.
You, young man of God, were
predestined for a glorious body, transformed by the infinite power of the Lord
Jesus Christ. Make him your ultimate hero, honor those who honor him, and resolve
that he will have no worldly rival.
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