By Bill Hattendorf, Lay Preacher
In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. 

To every thing  (“Turn Turn Turn”) there is a season  (“Turn Turn Turn”), and a time to every purpose under heaven. A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to reap; A time to kill, and a time to heal.
So today is a season, if you will, of honoring veterans, and in some case a hoping of healing for them.
As most of us know, today, the 11th day of the 11th month, at the 11th hour, marks the 100th anniversary of the end of the Great World War, or “The War to End all Wars.”  The 11th of November was first called Armistice Day, and then Veterans Day, and eventually it was a national holiday. (There is a fascinating article in this past week’s New Yorker about the end of that war, titled “The Eleventh Hour,” being as strange as its beginning.)
Veterans Day is for honoring living veterans, as opposed to Memorial Day in May when we remember the fallen. But I think it’s human nature to remember the fallen ones today as well. 

Let me tell you right off that I’m a veteran.

My father and my three uncles and my grandfathers and two great-grandfathers were all veterans. One of my great-grandfathers, John Pender McLeod, who fought at Gettysburg and other places joined the 14th Vermont

Regiment just up the road in Brattleboro.
My dad was a fighter pilot in WWII. In 1940, he and his brother talked the local recruiting office into promising they could serve together as pilots. It wasn’t approved policy, but somehow it all worked out and they went through flight training and duty assignments in England, Ireland, North Africa and Italy together.
We have lots of newspaper clippings written about the exploits of those “Flying Hattendorf Brothers.” Gene Autry’s weekly radio program during the war did a radio dramatization with actors and sound effects and dramatic music playing as they acted out one of their P-38 missions.
My own military service in the Army was in 1969-71. I did basic and advanced training at Ft. Jackson, South Carolina. I got pulled out of training regularly to help with military funerals in the state, as there seemed to be lots of them there that fall. I was a military pallbearer for 22 funerals in four months, (and almost all of the deceased died in Vietnam). At the end of the graveside portion, after Taps is played, the flag is carefully folded into a triangle and is presented to the next of kin. The officer-in-charge takes a knee and says, “On behalf of the President and the people of a grateful nation, may I present this flag as a token of appreciation for your loved one’s honorable and faithful service.”
Those words stick in my mind: “On behalf of a grateful nation” … that’s what we do on Veterans Day … we come together as a “grateful nation” to give thanks for “honorable and faithful service.”
When I got to Nam, I first served with the 75th Rangers, Company F, attached to the 25th Infantry Division at Cu Chi, serving in Vietnam and Cambodia. Many of my assignments were going out in six-man teams on long range reconnaissance patrols, secretly imbedding ourselves for a couple of days and nights to watch enemy movements. It was a difficult time. I lost my best friend there, Fred Hopson.
Truth be told, I was never enthusiastic about serving in the war in Vietnam, but I gave it my all, made the best of it, thinking I was trying to make my own small corner of the world a better place.

When I came home I was not spit on and I didn’t get things thrown at me like some Vietnam returnees I know did, but I came home right as the sentencing was happening for Lt. William Calley over atrocities committed in the My Lai massacre. So when I got home, all anybody wanted to ask me was how many women and babies did I kill? And even though I hadn’t killed a single woman or baby, that was not a conversation I wanted to have.  I just wanted to get back to civilian life.

I literally put Vietnam away – my uniform and medals and all in a box in the back of a closet at my parents house. I asserted that Vietnam didn’t have any effect on me. I refused to count the two birthdays I spent over there.

I thought I was seamlessly reentering civilian life. Perhaps in some ways I was. But old friends, besides having aged a bit, did seem a little different. I was sure I hadn’t changed at all, of course.  It took me 35 years to figure out I had some issues to deal with.

But I did. And I have. And I hope I’m the stronger for it.

To everything there is a season: a time to build up, a time to break down;  a time to rend, a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak. In the Gospel lesson today, Jesus speaks – He goes on a tirade about the scribal class, although Mark is full of tension between Jesus and the scribes. Did the scribes really cheat widows out of their homes? We don’t know, but through that Mark gives us a way to connect that lesson with Jesus’s observation of a poor widow giving all she had, which seems to be more about the ways the scribes treasury consumed the means of the poor.
But the widow still gave … out of a sense of obligation, perhaps, out of a sense of hope. In ancient Israel, the poor were not required to give; they simply did so because they believed in the goodness of the institution, the goodness of its leaders, and the need for the religious institution to remain. She was serving society in the only way she was able. I relate to that personally in that I thought by accepting my military call, I was serving society as well.
To everything there is a season. This season right now, this time of year, always feels different to me; it does funny things to me. I suspect that fewer hours of daylight effect some things.

But to some me, the season we’re in right now is “All Saints,” not just the All Saints Day last Sunday. The season began the first of November or before, and it goes on through Veterans Day, Thanksgiving, Advent, Christmas, at least to Epiphany. I think of these 10 weeks or so as “All Saints Season.” During this time, manifested publicly at our house with a candle in every window, I feel I have a heightened awareness of the spiritual – I’m in an intensified period of what my Scottish grandmother called the “thin places.”  
“Thin places” are those times or events in our lives when it seems like the veil between heaven and earth – or between this visible, touchable, physical world and the invisible, spiritual, eternal world is stretched very thin. It happens when the curtain between them seems more porous – thinner – and between heaven and earth – between the here and now and the there and then – communication seems to pass back and forth more easily, that we’re in a more Godly place, when we are more hyper-aware of life’s deeper meaning.
God feels closer, and we feel more interconnected. Everything that has happened before has led us to this moment, and this moment is part of a larger, unfolding future. Thin places are mystical. You can’t create them or invent them; they simply happen. They come from God. I think of them occurring mostly in peaceful or beautiful or magnificent places, but thin spaces happened for me in training and in wartime.  
One of the ways armies train you for war is to debase the enemy, to make the people you’re fighting against less than human. One way of coping with war was to de-personalize those other folks (even of the good guys and the bad guys looked exactly alike).
Most of our travel in Vietnam was by helicopter, but we used trucks sometimes if we weren’t going very far. About two-thirds of the way through my tour, I can remember going through a village in a convoy on the back of the last truck. Most of the people were walking in the same direction we were going. They had separated up ahead to let us go through, and I was seeing the people funneling  back together behind us, all of these eyes looking up at us as we blankly stared out at them – or over them. And I’m not sure exactly what happened, but calling it a “thin place” is about the only answer I’ve ever come up with.
Somebody I told this to suggested it seemed like a “silent thunderclap.” All of a sudden, for me, this sea of humanity that I’d been seeing for the last ten months without personality or personal traits, mysteriously turned into individual people with individual faces. All of a sudden, they became real people, with personal stories, and that changed the whole nature and experience of the war for me. Frankly, It made my last months in country more difficult. More wrenching.
This time of year, in this “thin place,” I’m filled with gratitude for all of God’s blessings. High among those blessings are the sacrifices of so many veterans, living and gone. They came from farms and from cities, they came from colleges and factories. They came – white, black, red, yellow, brown – with Polish names, Italian, Jewish, Russian, African, English, or Arabic names. They answered the call from every quarter and section of our American life.
Some years ago, I encountered a “thin place” that was military related, but not about my service. My dad was involved with reunions of his 82nd Fighter Group Association. Dad was president of the group for a while, and hosted some 350 people when he brought the reunion to Atlanta one year. As the original members began dying off, they starting inviting family members along. The first one Sheila and I attended was in Hartford in 2003. There were air museum tours, a river boat ride, and a memorial service for those who had died in the last year, but the event that I remember most was the final banquet.
There were flourishes like the color guard, and presentation a rose to each lady present. The pledge of allegiance was amazingly emotional. At one point, each former service member was asked to give his name, home state, when he’d served, and what his duty was.
I think the first to talk probably seemed the oldest. Dave Hawkins was in a wheelchair with his wife beside him. From Idaho, he’d joined the Army Air Corps when his was 18, and married his high school sweetheart a week before shipping out. Their youngest daughter was with them. He’d been a crew chief.
The next person was Olin Medley, joining up part-way through college. He was a pilot, like my dad; in fact the two of them crossed the ocean together on the Queen Mary. His wife and two daughters were with him, and he was from Oklahoma City, where he still lived.
Early in those personal introductions, I had closed my eyes, not really thinking about it, as I listened to each speaker. In my mind’s eye, I could see each speaker in his youth, full of vim and vigor, these now older, senior veterans. What hopes, dreams, and visions they must have had as they answered their nation’s call. What heart-break they felt as they left careers, girl-friends, parents, children. I saw them in their former youth … and I suspected that they saw themselves momentarily back in their youth as well.
The master of ceremonies for the evening, Monty Powers, talked about how they had been part of something larger than themselves – that the missions couldn’t have happened without the P38 pilots in the air but also the ground crew on earth to keep the planes flying and all the support at home and from the allies to keep the machine of war going on to victory. He spoke of how all our common life depends upon this sense of teamwork and sacrifice.
The freedom we enjoy, this abundance of life, the liberties we so easily take for granted were paid for at huge cost. 43 million Americans have offered themselves for this freedom; two million were permanently disabled due to battle wounds, and 660,000 have paid the supreme sacrifice of their own lives.
We are – all of us – so much more interconnected than we know. Actions of veterans way back in the 1770s or the 1860s have had a huge impact our lives today (to say nothing of more recent wars)  
“On behalf of a grateful nation …”
So in this season that I call “All Saints,” on this Veterans Day weekend, I invite you to acknowledge – to join me – in this “thin place” in which we find ourselves surrounded – surrounded – by so great a cloud of witnesses. Can you sense their presence? Many of them have sat in these pews and worshipped in this space.  All the Saints.
Let us be thankful … for those who have gone before … and for those 25 million veterans who are still living in our midst. May we truly be “a grateful nation.”  Amen.

By Bill Hattendorf
 
Happy Mothers Day! Happy Mothers Day to all of you who are mothers. I’m very grateful to my mother (for having me – so I could be here today). I’m most grateful to my wife, Sheila, who is mother to our three children. And to our daughter, Kelsey, who is mother to our first grandkid, Harvey (2-1/2).
 
Are there fishermen/fisherwomen … are there fishers of fish here this morning? When I was a kid, I can remember fishing with my dad, and asking about the different kinds of fish. After talking about rainbow trout and pike and whatever, he also explained that fish came in two sizes: [1] There were the little ones that were too small to keep, that we’d throw back in; better to let them grow bigger and catch them when they’d grown up. And [2] then there were the “keepers” – the ones that were big enough to hang on to and bring home. The keepers. Over the years, of course, I learned that there was really a third size:  the ginormous ones … that somehow always got away.
 
Now a segue between fish and motherhood  – I have to share that today’s lesson brought me back to the time shortly after our youngest was born. Sheila had been in labor for about 36 hours, starting on a Thursday night. We’d tried all the tricks people had suggested to us, taking long walks, eating Chinese food, etc., etc.
When the baby, eventually named Spencer, decided he was ready to come out on Saturday morning, he weighed 11 pounds. When viewed in the bassinet in the nursery, he looked like a 3 or 4 month old compared to the other babies.
 
When talking with a friend of mine a day or so later, he wanted to know all the vital statistics, and when I told him 11 pounds, he kind of whistled and said, “Well, … he’s a keeper.” Sometimes spouses or parents use that expression as another way of speaking about love. “She’s a keeper; I like having here around.”
 
One of the ways that Jesus communicates His love for us is by keeping us. Jesus says, “You’re a keeper, not because of anything you’ve done but simply because I love you.” Jesus keeps you and me through His life, death, resurrection, and intercession. The old adage, “Finders keepers” is really true when it comes to Jesus. He finds us and He keeps us. This is why we can say that Jesus is “The Keeper.” In today’s lesson, Jesus prays to the Father that He will keep the disciples safe in a hostile world and guard them.
 
Today’s lesson from John’s Gospel comes from the prayer Jesus prayed for his disciples on the last evening before his death, “the hour was approaching.” In John's arrangement of things, it is virtually the last thing  Jesus does before his arrest in Gethsemane. It’s plainly a prayer for those who had become followers of Jesus during his ministry, but equally clearly, I think, it extends to all who would become followers of Jesus in the future. So all of us are included in this prayer of Jesus. We are (in the words of the prayer) those whom God the Father has given to Jesus, who belong to God and to Jesus, whom Jesus asks his Father to protect and to consecrate. These prayers of Jesus are for us, and, what's more, I think we can depend on it that Jesus has never stopped praying these prayers for us. In the presence of God, to which Jesus has gone, Jesus continues to intercede for us. Our whole life as Christians is upheld by the prayer that Jesus prays for us always.
 
Prayer was incredibly important to Jesus and should be to us as well.
In today’s verses, Jesus makes three requests to God for His followers:
• In verse 11, He prays for security,
• In verse 15, He prays for protection. and
• In verse 17, He prays for sanctification.
 
In chapters 13-17 of John, purportedly set just prior to Jesus’ arrest, trial, and death on the cross, Jesus encourages his disciples (including us) as a sort of resurrection promise. We are encouraged not to dwell in feelings of abandonment or despair after the crucifiction, but to hope in the assurance of Jesus' continuing presence.
 
Yoday’s reading is the central section of Jesus’ prayer, which actually covers all of chapter 17.  I think the most significant of the themes is that of “giving.”  Both the Father and the Son are “givers” and their mutual giving creates the grace which those of us who belong to Jesus have inherited and in which we are now seen to live. The action of “giving” joins the Father and Son as one. As the Father does, so does the Son. That gives a special significance, then, to those things that are given.
 
The first of these things is that followers of Jesus know themselves as belonging to Jesus. To know oneself as belonging to Jesus is to know this as integral to the Father's and the Son's essential nature and purpose.
 
The second thing that has been given, Jesus says, is the knowledge of God's “name.” If these ones whom the Father has given to Jesus now belong to Jesus, then what these believers have been given is to “know the name,” the character of the One who is the source of the eternal life which they have come to know in Jesus.
God's “name” stands for all that God is and has done, most importantly in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. To know that name is to have one's life sustained in the power of that name -- to be protected and guarded in that name.
 
Thirdly, these followers have been given the “word.” They are protected in the “name” precisely because they have been given and have guarded the “word.” Of course in the context of John's witness to the “Word become flesh” (which is a theme in chapter 1) we’re supposed to understand that “word” is used in its double sense. As the “word” has been given to us in Jesus, we know ourselves in the intimate bonds of belonging to him.
 
In Romans (8:36), Paul asserted that nothing can ever separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus, so the glory of Jesus in his cross and resurrection is focused in his believers who now belong to him. Jesus' prayer claims an intimate oneness in the sharing of the Father and Son: “All mine are yours, and yours are mine, and I have been glorified in them” (17:10).
 
It is not enough to just hear Jesus’ prayer. His words ask that we live, act, and work with God in answering his prayer. We are to actively participate in Jesus’ prayer by shaping our lines to be increasingly like his. So while we might give an “amen” to Jesus’ prayer, we must also examine our own hearts and ask ourselves some hard questions.
 
The real issue is not about what’s out there in the world but about what’s in here, in our hearts. What is our hearts’ orientation?
However unintentional, how do we benefit from or participate in the systems of the world that oppose God’s way?
Are we willing to change?
Do we operate out of our wounds and brokenness?
Are we motivated by resentments or the need to win?
Do we live with an attitude of prejudice, self-loathing or hatred?
To the degree that we do, I think we deny God our lives and contribute to the darkness of the world.
That is not God’s hope for our lives or for the world.
 
You, and I, and all humanity are worth so much more than that.
Jesus’ own life and prayer declare that.
We are the gift that he and his Father share.
Jesus entrusts us to his Father’s protection even as he entrusted himself to the Father. To do anything less denies us God’s sanctification and our protection.
“Holy Father, protect them,” Jesus prays.
In large part the answer to Jesus’ prayer rests in our hands, our
     hearts, and our “amen,” – not just a spoken amen, but a lived amen.
 
If we can just live the amen,
Then we offer forgiveness rather than retribution,
     mercy instead of condemnation,
     and compassion rather than indifference.
If we lay down our lives in love for another,
Then we see life through the lens of beauty and not cynicism.
      then we choose unity over individualism and
      God’s ways over personal agendas.
In those moments we are the amen to Jesus’ prayer,
         our hearts are healed, and the world is different.
 
The great evangelist D.L. Moody (who just happened to start the Northfield and Mount Hermon schools up the road)  stopped a stranger one day on the street and asked him,
     “Are you a Christian?”
The man was put off by the question, so he said,
     “Mind your own business!”
Moody said,
     “This is my business!”
The man looked to him, cocked his head a little and said with a bit of a chuckle,
     “Then you must be Moody.”
 
Wouldn’t it be great to be known as “the person whose business is witnessing?” Of course, this is our business too.
 
Are we accomplishing God’s mission for our lives?
Are we looking forward or looking back in our lives?
Are we focusing on our potential good or our past failures?
As Heather and Molly remind us every Sunday:
“God is more concerned with the hope for our future
     than the sins of our past.”
 
Let us let go of the past and look ahead!
Jesus says, “Finders keepers.”
I’d say He has found us and will keep us.
Thanks be to God!