Isaiah 2: 1-5; Psalm 122; Romans 13:11-14; Matthew 24:36-44
The Rev. Candice B. Frazer
Buckle up boys and girls—somebody is getting left behind. That is always my first thought when I hear this passage from Matthew thanks to our pre-millennial-dispensationalist-poorly-interpreted-scripture-made-up-theology of the 21st century. Two are standing together, one is taken and the other is left behind. Words that have been weaponized into scare tactic theology that places emphasis on us and not on God. When Jesus offers these words of warning, he is speaking to a population who may well get taken or left behind—by the Romans, the imperial power. The poor girl in the field may be kidnapped by soldiers and sold into prostitution. The one left behind may well be taxed at an extremely unreasonable rate and live in constant fear that she will lose all that she has—her home, her possessions, her children, her husband, even her own life through starvation. Jesus is not speaking to a magical win/lose situation in which somebody gets assumed up into heaven—he is talking about the horror of life under occupation.
Last week, Robert Clary died. Most of you probably don’t even know who Robert Clary was, me included, unless you heard him called by another name—that loveable Frenchmen known as LeBeau on Hogan’s Heroes. I love Hogan’s Heroes and still watch it most nights on MeTV at 9pm though the show was filmed and televised in the mid to late 60s. It is an off-color sitcom about Allied soldiers in WWII imprisoned in a Nazi POW camp, Stalag 13, under the bumbling, completely inept commandant, Colonel Klink, where it is always winter and never Christmas. Each episode highlights some aspect of the Allied POW spy network as they help to smuggle other prisoners to freedom or thwart Nazi efforts in the war.
Robert Clary plays Corporal Louis LeBeau, the patriotic Frenchmen and gourmet chef who typically wears a beret and is called “the cockroach” by Klink and his even more inept sergeant-at-arms, Sergeant Schultz. A large part of LeBeau’s role is comic relief. He is neither the best looking nor the main character, though he is part of the principal cast of Hogan’s Heroes. It was not until Clary’s death, that I realized he was Jewish, much less had been deported to a Nazi concentration camp in World War II.
Clary was born in Paris in 1926 to Polish Jewish immigrants, Baila and Moishe Widerman. He was the youngest of 14 children—10 of whom died in the Holocaust. He started his entertainment career at the age of 12 when he began singing on a French radio station. In 1942, at the age of 16, he was sent to a concentration camp in Poland before ending up in Buchenwald—the largest of Germany’s concentration camps. He was tattooed with the number A5714 on his left forearm which remained there until his death at the age of 96.
I must admit that when I found out that the man who played LeBeau on Hogan’s Heroes was not just Jewish, but had been interred and survived the holocaust, I was more than a bit surprised. I really could not understand why someone who had been so mistreated, suffered, and abused at the hands of the Nazis would want to be part of its portrayal. When Clary was asked about his role in Hogan’s Heroes considering his real life incarceration in a concentration camp, he was quick to point out that there was a difference between a prisoner of war camp and a concentration camp—prisoners of war were not gassed and what the Jews had to endure and their treatment as less than human was much different from those of the prisoners of war.
Even more surprising than discovering LeBeau was played by a holocaust survivor, was discovering that he was not the only Jew in the principal cast of Hogan’s Heroes. Werner Klemperer, son of the famous conductor Otto Klemperer, was a German born Jew who had immigrated to America in 1933 and joined the US Army in WWII where he spent his tour in the Pacific. He played the bungling commandant, Colonel Klink and is reported to have said, “if they ever wrote a segment whereby Colonel Klink would come out the hero, [he] would leave the show.” John Banner, who played the “I know nothing” Sergeant Schultz, was also Jewish and was a real-life sergeant during WWII in the US Army. And, finally, Leon Askin, who played General Burkhalter, was from a Jewish family in Vienna and fled to the US after being beaten by Nazis in Austria. His parents were killed in the Treblinka death camp. He, too, served in WWII as a Staff Sergeant in the US Army Air Forces.
If we were to layer today’s gospel over this story of the Jewish nation, it is not difficult to see that Robert Clary, Leon Askin’s parents, and so many others are the ones taken. The other three are left behind. But the reality of the holocaust was that everyone, regardless of whether they were Jewish or not, was affected by it. Jesus situates his warning of those taken or left behind in the story of Noah and the flood and the surprise with which it overcame the world—even though Noah was right in the midst of people warning them of the coming tide and building his boat. Instead of preparing for what was to come, however, people simply called him a crazy old man and continued on with their lives ignoring the growing threat—kept deadlines at work, bought the latest fashions for the upcoming party season, hosted or attended their holiday gatherings—with barely a thought to what this impending doom might actually mean. They choose to remain asleep, impassive, neutral to the reality that was shaping the world around them.
Though Jesus speaks in an apocalyptic tone in this passage, warning those of the first century of the growing threat of Rome, I think his message is meant to be more than a scare tactic. I believe Jesus invites us to reconsider how we are shaping our lives, how we are readying ourselves for the return of the Son of Man. Not because when Christ comes again one will be taken and one will be left or even because it will be all gloom and doom—but because even in our lives today nothing is assured. We cannot and have never been promised a free ride or an easy passage. Life is filled with suffering and regret and hardship, missed chances and lost opportunities. But it is also filled with joy and peace and times of laughter and love.
In writing about his concentration camp experience, Clary says,
We were not even human beings…We were hanging on to life by pure guts, sleeping on top of each other, every morning waking up to find a new corpse next to you…The whole experience was a complete nightmare—the way they treated us, what we had to do to survive. We were less than animals. Sometimes I dream about those days, I wake up in a sweat terrified for fear I’m about to be sent away to a concentration camp, but I don’t hold a grudge because that’s a great waste of time. Yes, there’s something dark in the human soul. For the most part, human beings are not very nice. That’s why when you find those who are, you cherish them.
Robert Clary was liberated by US troops on April 11, 1945. Twelve members of his family had been sent to Auschwitz where they died. Three of his siblings had not been taken away and survived the Nazi occupation of France. Clary says the reason he survived is that because he was young and immature, he didn’t really fully realize the situation he was in—he is not sure he would have survived had he known—and he used his talent for song and dance to entertain SS soldiers every other Sunday accompanied by an accordionist. After being liberated and returning to Paris, he continued his entertainment career finding his way to the United States in 1949. He held onto life in the midst of war and suffering and licentiousness and all the other things Paul warns us about. And he hung onto life afterward as the world was made new again. Robert Clary—the one taken—understood better than anyone the darkness to be discovered in humanity, yet he did not allow that darkness to determine his life. He defined who he was and how he would live
Though Robert Clary was the only one of the four Jewish men on Hogan’s Heroes to actually experience the horror of a Nazi concentration camp, all four would have lost relatives or friends to the holocaust as over six million Jews were murdered throughout Europe. The four men maintained a close friendship throughout their lives—connected by the horrors and experiences of the holocaust and WWII. They spoke against the holocaust and their experiences of it and were also able to make fun of it—not in terms of making light of its wrongs, but by casting light into its deep darkness. They stayed awake to the evil of the world without being consumed by it and found the places of kindness instead. That was what liberated them.
We do not know if we will be the one taken or the one left behind. And, honestly, we cannot even know which might be the better situation. In this season of Advent, we are called to look deeper into the world and discover that our truth does not lie in Santa Claus or football games or all the other things that distract us from God. Our truth lies in our salvation—and that salvation does not happen at some far-off point in the future when Christ comes again—it happens now, in our daily life—regardless of whether or not we are the ones taken or left behind. Maybe the real lesson of Hogan’s Heroes is kindness. Instead of focusing on all the world’s ills, we simply focus on all the acts of kindness we discover every day in the world around us and live into that kindness ourselves. We do not know the day or the hour—so wake up, be ready, simply by being kind to one another in thought, word, and deed.