Sacrifice: Let Freedom Ring

Good morning friends, this is Dick Foth with stories from the road and the story I have from the road is literal this morning. I'm recording this a bit after 6 a.m. on Friday, June 7th. A few days ago, a little afternoon, from Frankfurt, Germany, we went wheels up on United Flight 181, the Sun and Lawn, a grandson, having spent a few days in Europe on what we call a grandkids trip. That's a story for another day. As we lifted off and pulled up into that blue sky, we turned slightly to the left northwest, and after just a little bit flew out over the English Channel, and if I could have seen, which I could not from my side of the airplane, and looked down, I would have seen that what we call the Normandy beaches, northern France, which 80 years ago yesterday were a wash in the lives and the blood of tens of thousands of young men. 150,000 Allied troops, mostly American, British, and Canadian, were landed on a 50-mile stretch of beach, and many of them that day paid the ultimate sacrifice, the last full measure of devotion. And so that was celebrated yesterday, not celebrated, it was memorialized, remembered yesterday, by hundreds and thousands of people there at the site. But 80 years is a long time, and it's easy to forget what that meant, what it took to purchase freedom, to get it back from people who had been enslaved for four years. In Washington DC some years ago, I asked a member of the president's cabinet, and I asked a retired three-star general, different weeks, but about the same time, I asked them this question, what's a word that characterizes leadership to you? And without hesitation, not being in the same room, or anything, each of them said sacrifice. That's what June 6, 1944, was about. Reporters were not many, I think only 30 were allowed with the invasion force, and they were not allowed on the beach that first day, or the beaches, but they wrote later, and I wanted to share some words from two of them. One of them is Andy Rooney, who lived a long life afterwards. The other is Ernie Pyle, who lost his life just a few months before the end of the war in the South Pacific, ten months less than a year, so, after D.D. This is what Andy Rooney says. There have been only a handful of days since the beginning of time, on which the direction the world was taking, has been changed for the better in one 24-hour period by an active man. June 6, 1944, was one of them. What the Americans, the British and the Canadians were trying to do, was get back a whole continent that had been taken from its rightful owners, and whose citizens had been taken captive by Adolf Hitler's German army, was one of the most monumentally unselfish things, one group of people, ever did for another. And he goes on to say this, that's the large picture. That's the strategic one-line picture, if you will. Then he gets down in the weeds. If you're young, and not really clear what D.D. was, let me tell you, was a day unlike any other. I landed on Utah Beach several days after the first assault waves went in on the morning of June 6. Uncertain of the day now, when I came in row on row of dead American soldiers were laid out on the sand just above the high-type mark where the beach turned into weedy clumps of grass. They were covered with olive drab blankets just their feet sticking out at the bottom. Their GI boots sticking out. I remember their boots, all the same, but such different boys. They had been dead several days, and some of them had been killed not on the beaches, but inland. Goes on to say no one can tell the whole story of D.D. because no one knows it. Each of the men who waited a short that day knew a little part of the story too well. To them, the landing looked like a catastrophe. Each new friend shot through the throat, shot through the knee, each new the names of five hanging dead on the barbed wire in the water. 20 yards off shore, three who lay unattended on the stony beach as the blood drained from holes in their bodies. They saw whole tank crews drown when the tanks rumbled off the ramps of their landing craft and dropped into 20 feet of water. You say, why are you telling us all that go? Why are you doing that? I'm doing it because they wrote the truth and because sacrifice is not some lofty concept. Sacrifice, as Churchill would say, would be paid, meet it out in blood, sweat, and tears. That other fellow, Ernie Pyle, was a fellow from Indiana, just a rural boy, not big, about a hundred pounds, probably soaking wet. But he talked to him, he was in Europe for a year and he was there just shortly after D.D. within within a day. He was 43 years old and he rode in a way that had been crafted over the previous 10 years as he drove across the country. I think in a Dodge convertible or something, going to all kinds of places and seeing people during the depression and reporting human interest stories. He told stories. This writer says about life on the road, little oddities and small heartlifting triumphs and misery that afflicted the drought stricken dust bowl regions of the Great Plains. This was back in the 1930s and the person writing this article about Ernie Pyle, his name David Christener. And he pile was read by a lot of folks. He had columns daily, column at about 400 daily papers and 300 weekly newspapers. He would win the Pulitzer prize and all of that. But here was this small man by some standards, hundred pounds, as somebody described him with too much feet. And he he describes on June 12th six days after he described in his first dispatch that was printed. The advantages were all theirs. That is the Germans, Pyle said of the German defenders, concrete gun and placements, hidden machine gun, nest with crossfire, taking in every inch of the beach. He meant to be shaped ditches, buried mines, barbed wire, whole fields of evil devices under the water to catch our boats and foreman onshore for every three men we had approaching the shore. And yet Pyle concluded, we got in. He goes on to describe what happens when he walked the beach. And it's it's chilling to read it. This was ten days after D. Day. It was a lovely day for strolling along the seashore he wrote. Men were sleeping on the sand. Some of them sleeping forever. Men were floating in the water. They didn't know they were in the water. But they were dead. And he goes on to catalog the wreckage scores of tanks of trucks and boats resting at the bottom of the channel. Jeeps burned to a dull gray and half tracks blasted into a shambles by a single shell hit. So he tells the unvarnished truth. He goes on to write another article on the 17th of June where he describes without explicitly talking about the mangled bodies. He describes eloquently what he saw. It extends in a thin little line just like a high watermark for miles along the beach. Pyle wrote about the detritus of the battle. Here in the jumbled row for mile on mile or soldiers packs here are socks and shoe polish, sewing kits, diaries, bibles, and hand grenades. Here are the latest letters from home. Here are toothbrushes and razors and snapshots of families back home staring up at you from the sand. Here are pocketbooks, metal mirrors, extra trousers, and bloody abandoned shoes. He describes himself as stunned and confused, a dazed witness to gambles and losses on a scale that nobody, nobody, not then not now, could comprehend. I picked up a pocket Bible with a soldier's name in it and put it in my jacket he wrote. I carried it half a mile or so and then put it back down on the beach. I don't know why I picked it up or why I put it back down. If her any pile had opened the Bible to Hebrews in the New Testament, he would have read this. Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, chapter 12, let us throw off everything that hinders in the sin that so easily entangles. Let us run with perseverance, the race marked out for us fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer perfector of faith for the joy set before him. He endured the cross, scorning its shame, sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. Sacrifice is the name of leadership, what price is paid by someone for anything, but the price paid for freedom is a whole different thing. The price paid 80 years ago for our human freedom boggles my mind. I've known two World War II veterans well when I was a young man, a young pastor Ralph Norton and Paul Todd, members of congregation who both fought in Europe, everything from street fighting to the battle of the Belgian tanks. They didn't or couldn't speak of the war very much, but when they did they spoke with tears and it usually had to do with the fact that they lost so many friends and they didn't know why they were spared, but along the way both of them walked into the freedom that the sacrifice of Jesus made available to them. They are both with the Lord now, but their lives, their testimonies, their valor as young men in that moment in time touched my young life and now my old life and I will never forget them. There is something about freedom that if we're not careful we take for granted. There was a huge price paid for ours both at the human level here in these United States of America and at the spiritual level around the world and forever by Jesus. And I remember those two things this day, Omaha Beach, Utah Beach, Juno, Gold and Sword, triggered the memory, but it is confirmed in my own spirit when I think of the result that allows us to choose, to dream, to live life to the full because someone didn't get a chance to. I am so grateful for those young men and I'm so grateful for that young man, Jesus, who paid the price so that we could be free. That's it for this June 7th, 2024 morning. God bless, we'll catch you later.