Sermon Archive
Remembrance
Sermon preached by Kenneth Boyd at Holy Communion on 9 November 2003, Remembrance Sunday
Today's ceremony of Remembrance dates from a time when the personal memory of those who died in the First World War lived on in countless bereaved British families and communities. And again, in the years immediately following the Second World War, Remembrance of the fallen was of known and loved men and women. But today, only a few remain who can put faces to the names on the nation's war memorials. Many others have died in more recent conflicts, whom their families and former comrades remember personally. But their deaths have not affected our whole community as those of the two world wars did. In many respects moreover, we are no longer that community whose members, in the Second World War especially, felt they were all in this together, and who after that war recognised the poignant truth of the words 'For your tomorrow, we gave our today'. What therefore, for those of us here today who have no personal memory of the war dead, is the meaning of Remembrance?
Let me put that question at what may be its most difficult by recalling one of the best known poems to emerge from the trenches of the First World War: In Flanders Fields, written by the soldier-poet John McCrae. These are its concluding lines, which for us today are disturbing.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
These lines are disturbing for us today because 'the foe' with whom we seem urged to take up the war-dead's quarrel is now a friend, or at worst an economic or football rival. If keeping up the quarrel with Germany is what Remembrance is all about, then perhaps in everyone's best interests, it is time to forget. But then again, even though we have no personal knowledge of this soldier-poet or his fallen comrades, part of what makes his words so disturbing is that even today it is difficult not to take them personally. How can we respond to their soul-searing appeal, not to 'break faith with us who die'?
The only way, I suggest, is by a deeper understanding of 'the foe' with whom they quarrelled. In their case, apparently, the foe was Germany. But on a deeper understanding, 'the foe' is all the human arrogance, cruelty, greed, indifference and carelessness, in every country, and indeed in each of us, that recurrently reaches its highest pitch in war, and sometimes in what even the Church has to concede is a just war. We break faith with those who died, in other words, whenever by action or inaction we allow the preconditions for war to develop. In this respect it is not sufficient to say, however sincerely, that we are 'anti-war' when war looms. We need also to play our part in maintaining the 'eternal vigilance' which is 'the price of peace', and which today involves working for greater economic equality between nations, greater respect for human rights, and an increasingly internationalist and interfaith approach to world problems. That is an enormous agenda, of course, but it suggests how we as a nation can try to keep faith with those, who for our tomorrow gave their today. If Remembrance reminds of that, it remains important to observe it.
That is not the only meaning of Remembrance however. Because war, even a just war, represents human failure, those who die in war are all alike victims, all alike defeated and lost, and as time passes no longer remembered by anyone. Is that the last, sad word that can be said about them?
Now many people today do say that the dead are ultimately lost when all who knew them have also died. In the widely-held secular belief system of the 21st century, what lies beyond the horizon of human understanding is not a mystery, but nothing at all. Perhaps we may be permitted to question the confidence with which that belief is held. What lies beyond the horizon of human understanding is a mystery: the real question is whether it is a meaningful or a meaningless mystery, and no amount of reasoning can answer that. Earlier in this service we heard Job's answer: 'I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth: And though worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God'. Job's answer is not reasonable or even, some would say, coherent. Yet it is no less reasonable, no less coherent, than the answer of those who close down the discussion by asserting, Gradgrind like, that they want nothing but the facts.
Job's answer, of course, is one which (as Handel proves) gains its full force when it is not said but sung; and perhaps music is the most illuminating way of answering the question of whether the ultimate mystery is meaningful or meaningless. Theology limps behind, almost always saying too much. So let me now simply repeat the words of Christ in John's gospel today: 'this is the will of him who sent me; that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up at the last day'.
If that is true, and we have no unmusical way of proving it, then the victims of war, the defeated and lost, are not lost forever, but remembered in God; and remembered in a way that, like Job, they see. We, who never knew them personally, have no power in ourselves to remember them; and one day there will be no-one left who remembers us - except God.
Our Remembrance observance today belongs to our particular European past, and someday it may cease. But it draws its resonance from a deeper source - the invitation of another once defeated and lost victim, to 'do this, in remembrance of me'. As we respond to that invitation, as we 'do this', we enter into a mystery beyond human understanding, none the wiser intellectually, but on our heart strings hearing, far off, our human cacophony becoming God's music.
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