Christmas Bells from Cannon Shells

On Christmas Eve, the throngs jamming the streets of Saigon will have a temporary reprieve from the staccato of machine gun fire, and bursting of cannon shells. Instead, the night air will be filled with the melodies and carols of Christmas.

Saigon’s Roman Catholic cathedral will have strange bells to ring out the joyous message of peace on earth good will to men. For a whole year, an old monk in a monastery has been preparing for this joyous day. It all began with a dream in the heart of this old monk, a dream that came to him last Christmas Eve. It was not one of those dreams that come at night, but rather one of those dreams that comes at high noon when one has all their wits about them. His dream came in response to this question: “How could he, old as he was, do something to bring peace once more to his people.” Suddenly it dawned on him. Before he had become a monk, he had been a metal worker. He would employ his old trade to fashion a witness, to tell the world what Christmas was all about.

During the Tet offensive, he had the beggar boys of Saigon round up all the cannon shells they could find on the streets of Saigon. Each boy who brought in a shell got a warm bowl of soup and a penny. Soon he had a whole pile of shells of every assortment. Some had come out of China and Russia. Others had come out of the United States and Australia. Soon he began to work industriously on a metal lathe he had scrounged from an old metal shop that had been destroyed. Out of this strange collection of cannon shells, he fashioned a beautiful sounding set of bells, each cut and tuned to its own pitch. On Christmas Eve, the crowds would jam the Catholic cathedral in Saigon to hear the old monk take his xylophone hammers and play the sweet music of Christmas of peace on earth and goodwill to men—on his bells that were really converted cannon shells. This is one the old monk’s way of saying that cannon shells can be used for better things than killing men. They make beautiful bells to ring out the message of Christmas. As I read this story, I could not help but reflect on it. Is this not what Christmas is all about?

Then I remembered the words of Isaiah the prophet, which are later quoted by Micah as he proclaimed the good news of the Messiah:

The messiah shall judge between the nations,
And shall decide for many peoples.
And they shall beat their swords into plowshares,
And their spears into pruning hooks.
Nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
Neither shall they learn war anymore.
(Isaiah 2 vs 4):

While looking in my concordance to see exactly where this quotation from Isaiah was found, I made a strange discovery. Joel the prophet of doom, who wrote some two hundred years after Isaiah, turned these words completely around. He wrote:

Proclaim this among the nations.
Prepare war,
Stir up the mighty men.
Let all the men of war draw near,
Let them come up.
Beat your plowshares into swords,
And your pruning hooks into spears,
And let the weak say, I am a warrior.

The strange thing is that Joel too was talking about the day of the Messiah. But now instead of beating their “swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks,” they were going to do just the opposite. The plowshares were to be beaten into swords and pruning hooks into spears. Even the weak would study war and become warriors.

As I began to ruminate upon this whole thing, it suddenly dawned on me that in this beautiful story of the old monk who fashioned a set of Christmas bells out of old cannon shells, I had stumbled on a beautiful parable of what Christmas was all about. More than that I had opened up the door leading to one of the great mysteries of the Old Testament, prophets.

The great mystery of the Old Testament prophets was this: they actually had two opposite prophetic strains as to what the day of the Messiah would be. For prophets like Isaiah, the day of the kingdom of the Messiah would be one of great peace, when the whole world would be brought back into harmony. It would not only be a day “when they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks.” But:

There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse,
and a branch shall grow out of his roots.
And the spirit of the lord shall rest upon him the spirit of wisdom and understanding,
The spirit of counsel and of might,
The spirit of knowledge and the fear of the lord…
Righteousness shall be the girdle of his waist
And faithfulness the girdle of his loins….

His name shall be called wonderful counsellor,
Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace,
And of the increase of his government and of peace there shall be no end.           

And this will be the kind of lewdly the Isiah will usher in:

The wolf shall dwell with the lamb,
And the leopard shall lie down with the kid,
And the calf and the lion and the fatling together,
And a little child shall lead them.
The cow and the bear shall feed,
And their young shall lie down together.
The lion shall eat straw like the ox.
The sucking child shall play over the hole of the asp,
And the weaned child shall put his hand on the adder’s den.
They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain:
For the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the lord
As the waters cover the sea.

This was Isaiah^[I] s great dream for the future when the Messiah would come. War would be no more. God’s people would no longer be wanderers on the earth, nor would they need to keep their land by the sword. Even all nature would be brought into harmony and peace. Healing from the Messiah would make whole the vast expanse of the universe—the world of man and of beast and of nature. These would be made one by the Prince of Peace—who with his righteousness and wonderful counsel would rule the whole universe from Mount Zion.

But now let us look at the other side of the paradox: when we turn to the prophet Joel. He has just the opposite view as to what the day of the Messiah would be like. He sees the day of the Messiah as the last day when the grim reaper will put in his sickle and reap the wicked from the face of the earth. Instead of it being a day of salvation and peace it will be a day of war, bloodshed and ultimately doom.

Listen to his prophetic word:
Proclaim this among the nations:
Prepare war,
Stir up the mighty men.
Let all the men of war draw near,
Let them come up.
Beat your plowshares into swords,
And your pruning hooks into spears,
Let the weak say: “I am a warrior.”

Hasten and come,
All you nations roundabout,
Gather yourselves there.
Bring down thy warriors oh Lord.
Let the nations bestir themselves.
And come up to the valley of Armageddon
For there I will sit to judge and all the nations round about.

Put in the sickle,
For the harvest is ripe.
Go in, tread,
For the winepress is full,
The vats overflow,
For their wickedness is great.

Multitudes, multitudes in the valley of decision!
For the day of the Lord is near
In the valley of decision!
The sun and the moon are darkened
And the stars withdraw their shining

And the lord roars from Zion,
And utters his voice from Jerusalem,
And the heavens and earth shake.

Now how do we understand this strange paradox—this strange dream of two days of the Lord—directly opposite. The day of despair and doom—or it could be the day of hope and salvation and peace for all mankind?

I think the answer is very plain. The prophets of Israel did not have a closed future. The future could go either way—the day of despair and doom—or the day of hope and salvation and peace for all mankind.

Of course, the big question is this: what determines the future? Who is to say whether the day of the Lord would be the day of doom or the day of hope and salvation. As you study the prophets, you cannot help but realize that the answer is really in man^’s hand. In a real sense, what man does is all important. God has structured history that way. As a man sows, so shall he reap. If he sows righteousness, he shall reap peace. If he sows hostility and anger with his brother, the day of the Lord will be a day of doom.

Here then is the meaning of our parable: cannon shells can make wonderful Christmas bells. It all depends on what the metal worker wants them to be. They can either be fired from cannons to kill one another, or they can be struck with hammers and produce the beautiful music about peace on earth, goodwill towards man.

With each day, man has become the determiner of his own destiny. When man first learned to shape crude stone implements, he was the one who would determine whether that sharpened stone with a handle in it would be used as an axe to split wood for his fire, or as a tomahawk to bash in his brother’s skull. Only that primitive man could determine what that new world of the carved stone would be.

When man learned the trick of reducing the metal in rocks to bronze and iron—and then to shape it and put it to use—only he could determine if it should be turned into a plow to multiply his crops, and a pruning hook to hook the fruit off the vine, or whether he would shape it into a spear and a sword to destroy his brother, or perhaps for his brother to destroy him. Each new day—in a sense hastened the day of the Messiah. But the big question was this: Would the day of the Messiah be the day of doom, or would it be the day of salvation.

Now we are living in this fast advancing and most exciting twentieth century. In our lifetime we have mastered the land, sea, and air. However, once more we are faced with the agelong question: “Will we hasten the day of despair and doom, or will we further the age of hope and peace?” The mastery of the atom has opened wide two doors into the future. The one is a door of listless power to be turned to the advantage of man—it is a power that can drive a submarine under the ice of the North Pole, to emerge safely on the other side of the ice. It is a power that may provide all the energy to feed and clothe man as he is faced with an age of overpopulation and scarcity. It is a power that can be loosed on a human body ravaged by disease, and it can actually destroy the disease. The atom has and can, as we learn more about it and master it, open the door to a new day. But herein lies the paradox of the atom, with it we have produced hydrogen bombs by the thousands—which if we loose them upon the earth will destroy us.

Take another example. We have produced giant planes that will be in the air travelling at twice, three times and even four times the speed of sound. They can do two things—they can bring our brother closer, even if he lives at the other end of the world. They can bring him closer so that we can come to know him and love and appreciate him. On the other hand, they can also bring our brother closer, so that we can hate him and destroy him. We can even carry our hydrogen bombs in these giant planes—bombs that will destroy both our brother and us.

In this exciting day, we have learned different kinds of germ warfare. We have learned how to destroy germs that destroy us. We have also learned germ warfare, where we can use the world of germs to destroy our brother. You see, its always the paradoxes. Tomorrow is the future — tomorrow is open. It can either spell Armageddon or the kingdom of peace—Mount Zion.

Now this is what the story of Christmas was all about. God sent his son into the world to show us how to make bells from cannon shells, to ring out the good news of peace on earth goodwill to men. How did God tell this story? He told it through the living word of his only begotten son. And the Apostle John could write: “And the word became flesh and dwelt among us—and we beheld his glory as of the only begotten of the father.”

What was this word that God spoke through Jesus Christ. It was the word about love in the world. Even in the people around the life of the living Lord there was this kind of love. Joseph had enough love for Mary, that he did not push her away, when he found that she was of child by someone besides himself. I recently heard someone say: “We have really been too hard on the innkeeper.” he could have turned this young couple away from his door. He did the best thing he could. In deep compassion, he took them out to the stable and put fresh hay in a manger, so that the weary and expecting parents could spend a comfortable night. Loving parents spirited the child away from the wrath of the jealous, crazed Herod.

But love takes the center stage in the child of Bethlehem, the man of Nazareth, the crucified one of Golgotha—the resurrected one on the road to Emmaus. He not only taught that you should love the poor and the downtrodden—he also lived that love among them—creating the miracle of bread for the hungry—and someone has astutely pointed out that perhaps the great miracle of the feeding of the five thousand was that it inspired a lad to share his meager lunch with so many, even at the risk of not getting any himself.

He spent most of his time loving the unloved. He not only taught: “love your enemies,” he literally loved them, asking forgiveness for those who had degraded the name of justice by falsely accusing him —and falsely condemning him, and turning him in his innocence over to the crucifiers—asking forgiveness for the Roman soldiers who drove the nails—and perhaps hardest of all, preparing a breakfast for his disciples the day after his resurrection—after they had let him down and fled on the day of the cross.

He could have taken the other route. On Palm Sunday, they wanted him to be a king. They wanted him to take the sword and the spear. The wanted him to use the guns and the shells against the enemies and the oppressors. But he chose the other. His kingdom was not of this world or of war and hate and power struggles and all the rest.

Instead, he took the low road of humility, riding into Jerusalem on the lowly donkey. He chose the suffering of Gethsemane— sweating it out alone, when he could have had the acclaim of the crowd if he would only become their strong, warring Messiah. Instead of reigning from David’s throne—he chose to reign from a cross. Greater love has no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends.

The cross is strangely shaped like a key. Indeed, he was giving to the world their key to the future of hope. This is what Christmas means. That is why wisemen followed a star so far to come to pay him obeisance. He came to show the world how to make a Christmas bell out of a shell.

You know the other night I succumbed to the temptation to accompany my wife on a shopping tour of the local mall. At one point while I stood waiting for her for a few moments, I just watched the crowd. I could not help but ask: “Why all this madness at Christmas time?” People were tearing things from the tables, grasping at things from their neighbors—slowly but surely emptying the shelves of everything worthwhile and useless. Why all this madness? Was it the madness of guilt on the part of over-indulgent parents who were trying to make it up to their children at Christmas for what they had not given them of themselves during the past year? Was it the last gasp of a generation feeling the impending doom, and this was their last chance to spend—to grasp — to get?

I do not know just what this madness means, but this I know. Somewhere or other we have lost the star. We are as anxious as the Magi when the lost the star and stumbled around the court of Herod. The tragedy is this: if we lose this star too long, it may be too late. Armageddon may be upon us. This is the paradox of life. But Christmas opens the door to hope.

Robert Frost put it this way:

So, at times when the mob is swayed
To carry praise or blame too far.
We may choose something like a star,
To stay our minds on and be stayed.

This is the message of Christmas —follow the wise men. Zero in on a Star. It will lead you to Bethlehem.

For in thy dark streets shineth
The everlasting light
The hopes and fears of all the years
Are met in thee tonight.

It’s not too late. Let’s turn our cannon shells into Christmas bells.

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