Sermon Archive
Sitting under their own Fig Trees (with nothing to fear)
Sermon preached by John Armes at Matins on 12 November 2006, Remembrance Sunday
St John's is a place of contradiction, of paradox. Our buildings speak of establishment, our worship of traditional theology and our members represent the comfortably professional middle-classes. Yet, look closer and you will find a direct challenge to the powerful, a theological questioning of conventional belief and a real engagement with issues of social and international justice.
Nowhere is this apparent contradiction more evident than in our relationship with war. A cursory glance around the building gives the impression of a community at ease with its military past. Not just First or Second World Wars, but the Boer War, Crimean War, and even a discrete little plaque commemorating someone who died at the Battle of the Little Big Horn.
And yet, make a study of our murals, come past the church on many Saturdays, walk along the lower terrace and you will hear a strong, even strident anti-war message, a message that agitates for peaceful protest and non-violent action.
I welcome these contradictions, for the very fact that aspects of our life sit uneasily together is, to me, a sign of hope - a sign of a church rooted inescapably in the tensions of human society and yet trying to do something about them. We speak of the poor, yet our beautiful, lavish church building asks us hard questions about our good faith. We proclaim our creeds with confidence, yet our preaching asks us whether they ring true and, if they do, whether we live up to them. We proclaim a love for peace, and yet we are, I hope, saved from self-righteousness by the fact that so much surrounding us in this place of God reminds us of war.
We human beings are fallible, our good intentions constantly undermined by our inability to get along with our neighbours, our sense of common humanity constantly drowned by conflicting ideologies - and within this mixture of love and anger Christians are as fallible as anyone else.
I like the fact that appearance and reality at St John's subvert other people’s prejudices about us, and subvert our illusions about ourselves.
Our own struggles with a recalcitrant world are nothing new. Look around and recognise that our ancestors were human too. They and we share the same nature, and whatever our feelings about the wars they fought, we know that they mourned their dead, just as we mourn ours. Captain Edward Stanley who died at the battle of Inkerman in the Crimea, like so many others buried at Cathcart’s Hill; Captain Leslie Dewing Blackburn, who fought with the Rhodesian Rifles in the Boer War, dying at the age of 34 in 1899; and John Stuart Stuart Forbes who fought for the US 7th Cavalry at Custer’s Last Stand, were mourned by those wealthy enough to put up a plaque - but wealthy or poor, each death, like each plaque, tells a story of human grief and loss and it gives a name to our remembering.
War is always costly. No wise person every rushes to war for they know it’s a dirty and painful business. It should be no surprise to us then, that after the carnage of the First War, Britain did not rush to battle in 1939. Those who went, went not seeking glory but facing what they saw as a grubby necessity - today we honour that integrity and courage. But we can recognise too that there were those who saw things differently, who refused to go to war, and St John’s seeks to be a place where their integrity and courage can be respected and the challenge they still offer us heard with humility.
And perhaps we can do this all the more because our building offers us a long perspective on history. Look at those Victorian plaques and we cannot help but wonder how it was that we found ourselves at war with so many different peoples - with nations we now call friends, allies. And if that is the case, we can more easily recognise that our descendents will wonder in their turn at our disputes, offering their respect and admiration, their gratitude and, perhaps occasionally, their shame and disappointment too.
Our bible offers us an even longer perspective and not only a perspective on war but on a longing for peace. Micah's words in our first reading offer us a vision of a future when people shall not learn war any more. This will be a time when everyone 'shall sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees and no one shall make them afraid.' It’s a wonderful image, even taken at face value, for it evokes a sense of bucolic well-being, of fertility and fruitfulness, of security and shelter. To sit under one's own fig tree is to have the dignity of ownership of one's own plot of land and also the luxury of rest and leisure that this implies.
No prophet could have used this image, however, without being aware that the vine symbolized the people of Israel; so, to sit under one’s vine is to be safe in nationhood and identity. The fig tree, meanwhile, was often thought to be the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil from the Garden of Eden; so, to sit under one's fig tree is to retain one’s moral integrity.
But to reach the time and place when swords will be beaten into ploughshares requires first the painful necessity of remembrance; to try to face up to the damage of the past. We’ve seen it in South Africa, where the Truth and Reconciliation Commission encouraged those who had committed terrible wrongs during apartheid to admit them and so to begin to travel the slow and painful path towards forgiveness or, if not forgiveness, at least understanding and the resolve to start afresh. The hope was that this would allow the new South Africa to be built on the strong rock of truth rather than the sands of dishonesty. The story of P W Botha, the former president of South Africa who died this week, reminds us that truth and reconciliation cannot be commandeered or claimed without the cooperation of both sides.
But it is possible and we know from long experience that remembrance can be truly transforming. In the wake of war that remembrance is never easy; often it’s agonising. And yet time and again old enemies have learned to trust and respect each other because they’ve discovered in their sufferings and their loss a shared humanity.
I remember, as a young man, going with a group from my church in the north of England to visit a congregation in the beautiful German city of Lubeck. Lubeck was terribly bombed by the allies towards the end of the Second World War, and some of its ancient churches when we saw them, over thirty years after the ceasefire, still bore the scars of the bombardment. I remember wondering what other, less visible, scars were still carried deep down in the memories of the people who had lived through the war in that city.
We worshipped together and at communion we stood in a circle, passing the bread and wine to one another. I was suddenly conscious that here we were, a group of Christians from two countries that had once been at war, sharing together in the meal of Jesus, the meal that makes us not enemies but friends. And I wept, quietly. For I remembered how I had grown up in the fifties and sixties inheriting a view of the German people shaped by comic books and the residue of wartime propaganda. And now I found myself standing shoulder to shoulder with older men and women who knew at first hand the terrors of British bombs.
I turned to the old woman next to me and as I received the bread of Holy Communion from her, I noticed that she too was crying.
'Do this,' said Jesus, 'in remembrance of me.' In remembering him, in taking to our hearts his self-giving, a life laid down for his friends, we discovered that we were renewed, transformed, no longer German and British, but children of God, brother and sister, called to love one another and to make the future a better place than the past.
Each year, we know well, brings new examples of how we have failed to learn from the past; examples of new wrongs to right, new sins to be forgiven. But we go on remembering and each year add new memories to our list trusting that one day, one day we shall forget all we have learned about war and one day, people young and old will sit down under their own fig trees with nothing to fear.