There is a book (and now a movie) called To End All Wars that tells of the extraordinary life of Ernest Gordon, a British Army officer captured at sea by the Japanese at the age of 24.  Gordon was sent to work on the Burma-Siam railway line that the Japanese were constructing through the dense Thai jungle for possible use in an invasion of India.  For labour, they conscripted prisoners of war they had captured from occupied countries in Asia and from the British Army itself.  Against international law, the Japanese forced even the officers to work at manual labour, and each day Gordon would join a work detail of thousands of prisoners who hacked their way through the jungle and built up a track bed through low-lying swampland.

The conditions were horrifying.  Naked except for loin cloths, the men worked under a broiling sun in 120-degree heat, their bodies stung by insects, their bare feet cut and bruised by sharp stones.  Death was commonplace.  If a prisoner appeared to be lagging, a Japanese guard would beat him to death, bayonet him, or decapitate him in full view of the other prisoners.  Many more men simply dropped dead from exhaustion, malnutrition, and disease.  Under these severe conditions, 80,000 men died building the railway; 393 fatalities for every mile of track.

Ernest Gordon was gradually wasting away from a combination of beriberi, worms, malaria, dysentery, and typhoid.  Then a virulent case of diphtheria ravaged his throat so severely that when he tried to drink or eat, the rice or water would come gushing out through his nose.  His legs lost all sensation. Paralyzed and unable to eat, Gordon was laid in the Death House, where prisoners on the verge of death were laid out in rows until they stopped breathing.  The stench was unbearable.  He had no energy to fight off the bedbugs, lice, and swarming flies.  He propped himself up long enough to write a final letter to his parents and then lay back to await the inevitable.

For most of the war, the prison camp had been a survival of the fittest, every man for himself.  In the food line, prisoners fought over the few scraps of vegetables or grains of rice floating in the greasy broth.  Officers refused to share any of their special rations.  Theft was common in the barracks.  Men lived like animals, and hate was the main motivation to stay alive.

Do you think that sometimes describes us?  You and I, who have been set free, can be observed acting like this, can’t we?  Playing the survival of the fittest.  Every man for himself.  Stepping over others to get what we want, to make ourselves more comfortable.  Stepping on other people’s lives and feelings.  Hating others.  Because they have an easier time with something than you do.  Because you are jealous of them.  Living by selfish ambition.  Taking care of yourself before all others.  Idolatry – not caring what God thinks.  Dissensions and divisions: not being willing to get along!  Letting silly things keep us apart!  Our text says: “If you keep on biting and devouring each other, watch out or you will be destroyed by each other.”

I think we would all have to admit that we are like this at times.  And we aren’t even labouring under the heat and oppression of a prison camp!  We are living fairly comfortable lives!  So the question is: why would we want to live in such a way?  Why would we want to forget about God’s work in our lives, forget about the freedom He has given us, and live as though we were slaves to our sinful nature?  God crucified our sinful nature! Meaning: He put it to death pitilessly, painfully, and decisively!

The problem is that our sinful nature doesn’t want to remain dead.  It gets back up and creates conflict with the new person, the free person living inside.  It drags us down to the level of miserable men being tortured in captivity; fighting, biting, & devouring each other.  We want to live in a new way, we want to keep in step with God’s Spirit, but our sinful nature often gets the best of us, doesn’t it?  We live our lives as if God didn’t exist.  Kind of like those prisoners…

Back to that story now… Something changed the prison camp, something Gordon would call the “Miracle on the River Kwai.”  A particular event shook the prisoners.  Japanese guards carefully counted tools at the end of a day’s work, and one day, the guard shouted that a shovel was missing.  He walked up and down the ranks demanding to know who had stolen it.  When no one confessed, he screamed, “All die!  All die!” and raised his rifle to fire at the first man in the line.  At that instant an enlisted man stepped forward, stood at attention, and said, “I did it.”

The guard fell on him in a fury, kicking and beating the prisoner, who despite the blows still managed to stand at attention.  Enraged, the guard lifted his weapon high in the air and brought the rifle butt down on the soldier’s skull.  The man sank to the ground, but the guard continued kicking his motionless body.  When the assault finally stopped, the other prisoners picked up their comrade’s corpse and marched back to the camp.  That evening, when tools were inventoried again, the work crew discovered a mistake had been made: no shovel was missing.

One of the prisoners remembered the verse “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”  Attitudes in the camp began to shift.  Prisoners started treating the dying with respect, organizing proper funerals, marking each man’s grave with a cross.  With no prompting, prisoners began looking out for each other rather than themselves.  Thefts grew increasingly rare.

Gordon’s friends helped him out too.  They built a new bamboo addition onto their hut on high ground, away from the swamp.  They carried his shriveled body on a stretcher from the contaminated earth floor of the Death House to a new bed of bamboo, installing him in clean quarters for the first time in months.  Two fellow Scots volunteered each day to come and care for him.  One faithfully dressed the ulcers on his legs and massaged the useless, atrophied muscles.  Another brought him food and cleaned his latrine.  Yet another prisoner exchanged his own watch for some medicine that might help the infection and fever.  After weeks of such tender care, Gordon put on a little weight, and to his amazement, regained partial use of his legs.

He writes: “Death was still with us – no doubt about that.  But we were slowly being freed from its destructive grip.  We were seeing for ourselves the sharp contrast between the forces that made for life and those that made for death.  Selfishness, hatred, envy, jealousy, greed, self-indulgence, laziness and pride were all anti-life.  Love, heroism, self-sacrifice, sympathy, mercy, integrity, and creative faith, on the other hand, were the essence of life, turning mere existence into living in its truest sense.  These were the gifts of God to men…  True, there was hatred.  But there was also love.  There was death.  But there was also life.  God had not left us.  He was with us, calling us to live the divine life in fellowship.”

As Gordon continued to recover, some of the men, knowing he had studied philosophy, asked him to lead a discussion group on ethics.  The conversations kept circling around the issue of how to prepare for death, the most urgent question of the camp.  Seeking answers, Gordon returned to fragments of faith recalled from his childhood.  He had thought little about God for years, but as he later said, “Faith thrives when there is no hope but God.”  By default, Gordon became the unofficial camp chaplain, giving answers to that urgent question.  The prisoners built a tiny church, and each evening they gathered to say prayers for those with greatest needs.

This return of God’s love into the camp changed everything.  A “jungle university” began to form.  Whoever had expertise in a certain field would teach a course to other students.  The university soon offered courses in history, philosophy, economics, mathematics, natural sciences, and at least nine languages.  Professors wrote their own textbooks as they went along, on whatever scraps of paper they could find. Prisoners with artistic talent salvaged bits of charcoal from cooking fires, pounded rocks to make their own paints, and produced enough artwork to mount an exhibition.  Two botanists oversaw a garden, specializing in medicinal plants.  A few prisoners had smuggled in string instruments, other musicians carved woodwinds out of bamboo, and before long an orchestra formed.  One man blessed with a photographic memory could write out the complete scores of symphonies from composers like Beethoven and Schubert, and soon the camp was staging orchestra concerts, ballets, and musical theatre performances!

What brought all of this on?  What produced this enormous change in these men, turning them from biting and devouring one another to working together to help each other out?  Same thing that produced a similar change in our own lives.  A man stepped out and gave his life for theirs.  Even though innocent, took a punishment He didn’t deserve so their lives would be spared.  That sacrificial love made all the difference for them.  And I’m not talking about the soldier, now.  I am talking about Jesus Christ.  He set them (and us all) free from the slavery of our sinful nature by sacrificing his life for us.  Friends, because of Jesus, you are free! 

Let’s live in that freedom!  Let’s live in step with the Spirit!  Let’s live new lives of love, sacrificing for each other!  Helping each other through the difficulties of life! Let’s live as though our lives would not make sense if God didn’t exist.  Let’s produce the fruit of the Spirit – love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, & self-control.  That’s how to live a life of freedom!  That’s how to keep in step with the Spirit!

Gordon’s book tells of the transformation of individual men in the camp, a transformation so complete that when liberation finally came, the prisoners treated their sadistic guards with kindness, not revenge!  Ernest Gordon’s own life took an unexpected turn.  In an about-face from all his previous plans, he enrolled in seminary and became a minister, ending up as Dean of the Chapel at Princeton University, where he died in early 2002.

To a man, those prisoners clung to the desperate hope that their lives would not end in a jungle prison in Thailand but would resume, after liberation, back in the hills of Scotland or on the streets of London or wherever they called home.  And even if it did not, they would endeavour to build a community of faith, beauty, and compassion, nourishing souls in a place that destroyed bodies.  (story adapted from Philip Yancey’s Rumors of Another World)

You and I live with a sure hope, given to us in faith by the Holy Spirit, that our lives will not end in this world, but because Jesus Christ has set us free from the destruction of sin, our lives will resume in the streets of heaven with God!  And this hope we have IS going to happen – it’s a guarantee!  So let’s not live like prisoners!  Let’s keep in step with the Spirit!   Amen.