Saturday, November 22, 2025
Memorial of Saint Cecilia, Virgin and Martyr
Day of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Heroes
Now I am dying, in bitter grief, in a foreign land.
Those words of Antiochus IV, Seleucidan descendant of Alexander the Great after being defeated in battle by Hebrew hero Judas the Hammer, have been voiced millions of times, in war after war, history after history. Death comes for us all and sometimes it comes on the field of battle.
One of our own army veterans, soldier and Austin church usher Dave, wears his medals proudly on Memorial and Veterans’ Day, but rarely tells the story of how he got his bronze star and purple heart. After his army experience he returned to college and then began a promising career as a radio engineer. While at Lincoln Christian College he might have met Margaret, who was studying there as a seminary student, and now fifty years later they enjoy those memories, often talking on Sundays in the lobby before the service begins. Dave is one of countless soldiers who fought in the Pacific – Dave in Vietnam, and John F. Kennedy in the Solomon Islands during World War II.
President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on this day sixty-two years ago, early in the afternoon while the rest of the world was going about its business. I was a freshman at Lincoln Community High School, in Mr. Denny’s algebra class, when the wall speaker crackled with Walter Cronkite’s CBS voice. On television his voice broke into the soap opera “As the World Turns.”
“From Dallas, Texas, this flash, apparently official: “President Kennedy died at 1 pm Central Standard Time, 2 o’clock Eastern Standard Time, some 38 minutes ago.”
Walter cleared his throat. His voice broke. He struggled with his own grief.
“Vice-President Johnson has left the hospital in Dallas, and presumably he will shortly be taking the oath of office as the 36th president of the United States.”
Before being elected the 35th president, Kennedy had been a journalist, US congressman and senator from Massachusetts. Before his political career he wrote a bestseller Why England Slept and then after Pearl Harbor joined the US Navy. A year later he was commanding a patrol torpedo boat (PT 109) when at night a Japanese destroyer sheared his boat in half. After six days of brutal swimming from island to island without food or water except coconut milk, he and most of his crew were rescued. Everyone in his crew called him a hero and so did the rest of the United States.
In Profiles in Courage, a Pulitzer Prize-winning book published in 1957, Kennedy remembered the words of Texas Governor Sam Houston, who strove mightily to prevent his state from joining the Confederacy in 1860.
Men who never endured the privation, the toil, the peril that I have for my country call me a traitor because I am willing to yield obedience to the Constitution and the constituted authorities. Let them suffer what I have for this Union, and they will feel it entwining so closely around their hearts that it will be like snapping the cords of life to give it up. . . . What are the people who call me a traitor? Are they those who march under the national flag and are ready to defend it? That is my banner! . . . and so long as it waves proudly o’er me, even as it has waved amid stormy scenes where these men were not, I can forget that I am called a traitor.
I cherish the scenes in my imagination of heroes like Judas the Hammer, and my friend Dave, and John Kennedy, and countless others. I “thank them for their service.” For at least part of their lives they did what they did “for the sake of others.”
Our Savior Jesus Christ has destroyed death and brought life to light throughout the Gospel.
(1 Maccabees 6, Psalm 9, 2 Timothy 1, Luke 20)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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