Happy Birthday America
I have lived near Valley Forge Pennsylvania for most of my life. It is a beautiful park and well-maintained by our wonderful National Park Service folks. With its more than 3500 acres and monuments, its gentle rolling hills and many miles of biking/walking/running trails, it attracts lots of visitors and serves our area well.
It has not always been so pleasant here. In the winter of 1777/78, it was quite hellish. It was an organized, slow-motion disaster of disease and death. The Americans had suffered a terrible defeat at the Battle of Brandywine in September. This allowed the British to occupy Philadelphia, which, at the time, was our nation’s capital. The Continental Congress was forced to flee to Lancaster, and then to York. In normal warfare, when you capture an enemies’ capital, the war is over. Checkmate. That’s what the British thought. They were wrong. Americans do not really have holy ground; only an annoying itch for freedom, self-government and to be left alone. So they kept fighting. Washington attacked the main British force outside the city but was repulsed, losing the Battle of Germantown. He then withdrew to the hills outside Philadelphia, anticipating a British counterattack.
And so it was that more than twelve thousand men, along with horses and canon and carts, came to Valley Forge in late December of 1777. They were weakened, demoralized, ill-equipped and hungry. Many were half naked, and many were even missing shoes. The nation was new. The government was in hiding. The military supply lines were a mess. But these tired men went to work and immediately started digging in on the long southern ridge of what had been rich Pennsylvania farmland. They quickly denuded the landscape of trees as they built 2000 wooden huts against the coming winter. Almost overnight, Valley Forge had become Americas’ fourth largest city.
But it was a starving city. Of the 12,000 men who stumbled into Valley Forge, more than 1 in 6 would never leave. It was ugly. It was a military camp filled with non-military men. Soon the unsanitary conditions, combined with the bad weather, began to take its toll. Disease spread, typhoid, dysentery, influenza, smallpox. Much of it spread by body lice and other vermin. The lack of proper clothing and shoes led to frostbite. Men’s feet would turn black; the only solution was amputation. All of this was exacerbated by malnutrition. The men dying of exposure were said to be dying of “the meases”. This was a jab at the ineffective clothier General Mease. (gallows humor accompanies men-at-arms in every age.) Teams of men with carts would move through the camp daily to gather the sick and the dying and the dead. Men died by the hundreds. The American public had little or no knowledge of the suffering of their troops at Valley Forge. Some did know; a small group of women in Philadelphia made hundreds of shirts and managed to smuggle them out of the city, along with oxen and carts, to the camp. They came upon a dismal scene of men dying in the freezing mud. There never was a battle at Valley Forge; yet Washington’s army suffered far more casualties there than in any single military engagement of the war.
Standing here now, looking out over the rolling grassland, it is hard for me to envision the suffering. That such a beautiful place could have been so ugly. How many of us are like Valley Forge? How many of us have terrible ugliness in our past? You may have had to deal with terrible disease like them. Some of you are far too acquainted with death, like them. Some of the ugliness of your past is due to the incompetence or corruption of others. Some of it is due to the incompetence and corruption of you, your own bad decisions or actions. You may have ugly secrets, that no one else knows. The ugly is there, and sometimes it slips out; you do not have the resources of the National Park Service to dress it up, to make it pretty. If someone were to dig down, to scratch the surface of your landscape; they would find the bodies; they would see the ugly.
We cannot change the past. The past is fixed. Every day before today will always be exactly what it is, forever. The past is not a place to live. There is no hope there. Humans need hope as much as we need oxygen; without it, we perish. But, while the past is not a place for us to live, it is a place for us to own. Like real estate of the heart. It is part of our portfolio; part of the balance sheet that makes us who we are. Whatever misery or mistakes may be there, do not run from your past. Own it. It is the only thing on earth that you can truly say is yours. It seems to me that, more than anything else, it is our wreckage and defeats and hardship that make us what we are.
In February of 1778 a large and colorful Prussian military officer by the name of Von Steuben arrived at camp to help the hapless Americans. He must have made an impression because Washington made him Inspector General. Von Steuben inspected the condition of the camp and its men and remarked,” no European army could have held together in such circumstances”. He immediately went to work organizing the hygiene and training of the Americans at Valley Forge.
In the spring the Schuylkill river began to thaw. Supplies could be brought down more easily from Reading, a town 30 miles upriver. What had limped into Valley Forge in December was a bunch of ragged, stitched together state militias. What marched out six months later was an Army. An army the British would come to fear. Because they were not just dying in the mud there. they were also training, and drilling. Thanks to Von Steuben their tactics, discipline and formations became uniform. Valley Forge had lived up to its name. it had “forged” the American army.
Valley Forge is anchored on the west by two large hills; named, appropriately, Mount Misery and Mount Joy. Looking at them now, I am reminded of the words of the psalmist:
“I lift up my eyes to the hills. From where does my help come? My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.”
God has placed, on the lips of His prophets, eternal promises to a suffering people. People who have been displaced. People who have turned away from Him, and in their turning have become enslaved to other gods, to other things. He promised to give them “beauty for ashes”. He has promised to “restore the years that the locust has eaten”. He has promised to “lift up their heads”. One of the stated reasons that he has sent His Son into this world is to “bind up the broken-hearted”.
At any time in the last two centuries, you could have stood in the middle of Valley Forge and said truthfully: “this place has an ugly past, but a beautiful future.” The disease, the vermin, the frostbite, the amputations, the death; it’s all real. But so is the beauty. I see glorious spreading sycamore trees. I see soaring pine trees around Washington’s Chapel and the great memorial arch. I see a majestic oak tree standing alone in the middle of fifty acres of grassland. Every spring I see Valley Creek lined with fly fisherman trying to snag a trout. I see artists with their easels perched on the ridge along Valley Forge road, painting the gentle landscape below. I see endless tall grass meadows spreading out to the horizon. I see families picnicking, and lovers meeting on a late summer weekend. I see rows of ancient canons standing silent guard duty over the memories of a nation. One time when I was walking, halfway up a hill, I came across a litter of baby foxes playing outside their den: life, bursting forth, over the former fields of despair.
You were created for beauty. Do not settle for anything less. Whatever ugliness you may own, it need not mar the glory of your future. You may be asking: can God really restore to me the years that the locust has eaten? Can He really take the disheveled wreckage of my past and make me as strong as an army with banners? Can He really lift up my head to behold the glory of His own beauty? Can God truly give me beauty for ashes? The answer, my friend, is yes. But first, you must give Him all your ashes.
In memory of all those who suffered, so that we could picnic.
Happy Fourth of July.