Sermon for Remembrance

Vimy Ridge Memorial to the fallen of the Great War

2 Thessalonians 3:11-13

For we hear that some of you are living in idleness, mere busybodies, not doing any work. Now such persons we command and exhort in the Lord Jesus Christ to do their work quietly and to earn their own living. Brothers and sisters, do not be weary in doing what is right.

Luke 21: 9-10 ‘When you hear of wars and insurrections, do not be terrified; for these things must take place first, but the end will not follow immediately.’ Then he said to them, ‘Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom...



2016 has been a year of tumultuous political upheaval in the UK and the US.

Somehow with the dawn of the Internet and 24 hour news channels, it’s easy to be drawn into daily anguish about a political system that can be turned on its head overnight after a surprise vote to leave the EU, or an upset that puts someone as controversial as Donald Trump in the White House, with no previous political experience.

Church leaders reported some anguish amongst church members on the Sunday after the Brexit vote back in June, whether it was a sense of betrayal over being misled by politicians, heightened daily fear for non-UK Nationals, or being harassed for voting in a way that was portrayed by the liberal elite as isolationist, even xenophobic.

For some, our decision to leave the EU is framed principally as a failure to maintain our loyalty to a united Europe that has kept the peace for 70 plus years since the end of the Second World War.

What will happen to our old alliances if we find ourselves out in the political cold, is a lurking fear in many minds.

Across the Pond, psychotherapists in New York have reported a rise in Trump related anxiety issues amongst their clients.

Some have even used apocalyptic language to describe their fears by referring to the spectre of climate change, with the New York Times suggesting that a Donald Trump presidency could put climate change ‘on course for the danger zone’ (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/11/us/politics/donald-trump-climate-change.html?_r=0).

We are all a bit more touchy thanks to the Internet and constant exposure to comment about comment about comment on our current affairs.

I have spoken to several people, and noticed the tendency in myself, to be way too informed, to touch that news app. a bit too much throughout the day, to let that disturbing headline shout at you in the newsagent’s queue.

Being hourly in touch with such news can even disturb your sleep, as particularly younger people are worry about the way their world is going.

It can rob us of our inner peace.

There was a highly developed sense of the apocalyptic around in Jesus’ day.

It explains why so much of the latter part of the gospels deals with what Jesus says will happen at the end of the world.

Nobody questioned that the end of this would be a time of unparalleled stress – it was normal for First Century observant Jews to talk about these things.

For us, approaching Advent, it needs to form part of our belief too, because God holds the affairs of humankind in his overall framework and nothing can therefore truly be said to be out of control, though it may feel that way to us.

So I’d like this morning to help us be realistic about the world and its conflicts, but also to hear Jesus’s words to stand up for him in this world, and to endure.

Jesus was realistic about conflict and war.

‘Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom’ he says.

Elsewhere, in Mark and Matthew, we have the haunting phrase from the KJV: ‘wars and rumours of wars’.

Jesus doesn’t ignore the stark reality of war, but he says it doesn’t in itself signal the end of the world.

War instead is listed as part of the birth pangs of the age to come – not literally the end of the world, but, as it were, certainly en route.

The inevitability of war and conflict is illustrated by a look at a map of the world in which major or minor conflicts are listed according to how many violent deaths have occurred as a result of them in the past year.

At the top of the list with 10,000 deaths or more per year are conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq; conflict resulting from the Boko Haram insurgency, and of course, the Syrian Civil War, which dominates our news.

Then comes conflict in Somalia, Kenya, Nigeria, Sudan, Pakistan, the Mexican drug war, and Civil Wars in the Yemen, Libya and South Sudan, with each of these conflicts claiming up to 10,000 violent deaths each, in the last year.

All in all, in the list there are a total of 55 armed conflicts which are current, claiming lives and maiming for life others who suffer injuries as a result, with, of course, mental injuries being the dark hidden reality for many veterans.

And today we see vast numbers of refugees consequently fleeing the effects of war across the world, seeking a better life in countries such as ours where peace is a blessed daily reality.

And I suspect what the vast majority of these refugees and migrants want is not be corralled into camps and detention centres, not to be demonised by people who fear the stranger, but to ‘live quietly and earn their own living’, to quote Paul in the Epistle we had.

With regard to the world and war, the picture Jesus paints for his first century Jewish listeners, is not a pretty one, but it is realistic – humankind finds peace hard to come by.

Domination and greed we find easier.

And for us who live in peaceful neighbourhoods, it’s all too easy to ignore what does not directly affect us.

But ignoring what doesn’t directly affect us is something that the ruling political class have discovered, to their chagrin, only raises huge problems in the long term. Sooner or later, there is a bloody, or non-bloody, political revolution.

But in case we feel overwhelmed by what is happening in the world, Jesus calls his followers to endure.

Enduring is a key word for the Christian disciple – we have to continually live out our calling to follow Jesus even when the world seems to be in turmoil, or even when our own lives feel as though they’re in turmoil.

The bible is full of highly unsuitable leaders making terrible decisions that affect 1000s of innocent people.

And it also hopefully points to a Daniel, a Moses, a Mary, who said yes to God’s call and whose faithful witness changed the course of human history.

This is what Jesus calls us to today: to endure - to stick at following him, even when life feels overwhelming.

And as we reflect on wars and rumours of wars, we thank God for those whose ultimate sacrifice bought for so many the peace we enjoy in our country today.

We pray for grace, wisdom and direction as we live through these uncertain times, holding onto the certainty of God’s ultimate kingdom and reign amongst us. Amen.

Cemetery when the poet Edward Thomas is buried,
Northern France

God of peace,

whose Son Jesus Christ proclaimed the kingdom

and restored the broken to wholeness of life:

look with compassion on the anguish of the world,

and by your healing power

make whole both people and nations;

through our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.

Copyright Archbishops’ Council 2016

Two 'novel' takes on suffering

Two books I read recently shared a similar theme and got me thinking about the perennial question often held up against religion - the problem of suffering. How much of it is our fault; how much is undeserved, and is there a God in it all?

It's a theme around which one treads carefully as an ordained Minister. I felt a bit bad recently when a group I belong to was being encouraged to signal commitment by attending all scheduled meetings, and all I kept thinking was - well, we'll try, but what about the sudden death of a loved one, or sudden illness or accident...none of us knows what is around the corner. A bit morbid, I know. That's perhaps what taking a lot of funerals, and frequently working with bewildered and bereaved people, does to you.

The Cellist of Sarajevo is a grim reminder of how the innocent suffer in war. More than 11,000 men, women and children were killed during the 44 month long Sarajevo siege, which is the book's subject. It begins with a mortar landing in a bakery queue, killing 22 civilians. A cellist, witnessing this atrocity from the window of his flat, decides to play Albinoni's Adagio every day there for 22 days, to honour the dead. 

Meanwhile the novel explores the everyday life of three disconnected residents of Sarajevo and how they deal with the struggle for existence in a city where even buying bread and fetching water are life threatening activities. Their fears are detailed minutely, but they seem rather under developed as people - the main character is really the city and what it has sadly become.

The philosophical question of the novel centres around a female sniper calling herself Arrow, who is charged with guarding the cellist from a distance, but this means killing in order to prevent him being killed. The morality of killing in war and who is in fact the enemy, is complicated enough for her eventually to abandon her identity as a sniper, which she finally does, by reclaiming her real name in the last sentence of the novel, seconds before the arrival of other killers, sent to kill the one who no longer wants to kill.

There should have been palpable tension but I found the whole thing a bit muted and flat, and I was left feeling underwhelmed by the book as a portrayal of human suffering. There was an overwhelming amount of local place detail and hardly any deeper exploration of relationships. I plodded through, out of a kind of loyalty to those who suffered in the real siege, but sadly I wouldn't say my mind, heart or soul were in any way expanded. 

In contrast, I became instantly hooked on John Green's The Fault in our Stars, unable to put it down until the final gut wrenching page. It made me think afresh about whether it is appropriate to expect meaning to emerge from what seems to be entirely undeserved suffering. 

Because that's what we want, in the end, to make sense of it all.

The subject is children dying of cancer, which sounds so morbid, but the book is clever, profound and funny as well as being immensely sad. It's full of witty one-liners which peel back the mask of all cancer sufferers being saintly and heroic, to reveal otherwise entirely normal people who do not primarily wish to be defined by their illness.

Hazel, a sixteen year with terminal lung cancer, starts attending a Support Group in the local church. It's full of clichés and platitudes ('the Support Group, was, of course, depressing as hell') but there she meets Augustus Waters, amputee and gorgeous seventeen year old, who proceeds to (successfully) persuade her to be his girlfriend.

At first she resits because as he is in remission and she will die one day soon, she wants to spare him any pain; but they fall in love anyway, sharing as they do an acerbic sense of humour and love of reading. In a romantic trip to Amsterdam they track down an author whose own cancer novel Hazel loves, only to discover he is an embittered alcoholic with a penchant for telling hurtful truths. On returning home, Augustus reveals he has has relapsed into final stage cancer: it will now be Hazel who is left to mourn. 

The big questions are all there - mortality being the one which frames all the others, of course. Rumbling away in the philosophical background is how we deny our own mortality, until inevitably faced with it. Hazel observes 'whenever you read a cancer booklet or website or whatever, they always list depression among the side effects of cancer. But in fact depression is not a side effect of cancer - it's a side effect of dying. Almost everything is, really.'

Religion is present but shaded: the support group takes place inside an Episcopal church, described by Hazel: 
'We all sat in a circle, right in the middle of the cross, right where the boards would have met, where the heart of Jesus would have been'. 

It's noteworthy that John Green was a hospital Chaplain before becoming a writer, which he refers to at the back of the book: 'I was a terrible chaplain - for one thing I often fainted at the sight of blood. Also I never knew what to say to anyone, or how to comfort them (...) I kept the Book of Common Prayer in one pocket and it was always banging against my knee'. 

I can't help thinking that writing this book was Green trying to come to terms with what he couldn't do as a twenty two year old Chaplain on a children's cancer ward - make sense of the apparent randomness of an illness which can prematurely and cruelly end the life of a young person.

There is no 'problem' of suffering unless we start from the premise that life should be happy, meaningful and whole. If we're all here by chance and heading for oblivion, 'suffering' is just normal existence: 'the fault is in our stars' (a quote from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar). But if we're here looking for purpose and some higher good, then we will continue to grapple what CS Lewis called 'the problem of pain' and people will continue to write novels that either dabble in the subject, or plunge in with abandon. 

Green has done the latter, and having laughed and cried my way through it, I do get a sense (admittedly with ministerial antenna out) that at the centre of it all, and at the centre of all Christian explorations of suffering, albeit often hidden from many participants, is the fact of the crucified one. 

Re-imagining Remembrance

They say that everyone has a  good novel inside them. Similarly I had one good Remembrance sermon inside me ...but I gave it last year ('Blessed are the peacemakers'). That was it.

But now it's that time of year again I have to come up with another one. My heart sinks.

I find it so hard thinking about War.  I'm pretty against it, to be honest. I look at it almost entirely from a mother's point of view and mothers do not generally want their sons and daughters to go off to fight, kill and die. 

I'm getting the feeling the rest of The Church of England has a somewhat ambivalent relationship to Remembrance. It's a time of year when a peculiar alliance of Church and State brings thoughts about the war dead into focus for many who have no specific religious views at all. I don't know many clergy who relish it, and quite a few who dread it. One friend found himself in conflict with a uniformed society who wanted to lay their 'colours' on the altar during the service. The altar is only for remembering Christ's sacrifice, right? Or wrong? How can the church be prophetic about the horrors of war, preach Christ as the 'ultimate sacrifice' and at the some time fulfil its role as national church, providing a liturgical framework for honouring the dead?

This ambivalence is reflected in the confusion over readings. The Lectionary has Jonah 3, Hebrews 9 on sacrifice and Mark 1, the calling of the first disciples. Rosalind Brown in the faith section of Church Times this week writes: 'Today's readings make no special concessions to Remembrance Sunday, which is appropriate, because war makes no special concessions to our lives'. All very fine but what is a preacher supposed to do? Preach as though it isn't Remembrance? She then tries to link the Remembrance-inappropriate readings to Remembrance.

The Anglican on line 'Visual Liturgy', by contrast, offers 'Remembrance Readings' from Micah 4's vision of peace, something from the Apocrypha that my Protestant self has never read; Romans 8: nothing can separate us from the love of Christ  - and no gospel.

And herein lies the exact problem for a Minister of the gospel. Is it just another Sunday where we are preaching the Good News, with whatever reference to Remembrance feels appropriate, or should all normal preaching be abandoned and the preacher 'preach' on war and the 'pity of war'? 

Should I be wearing a white poppy as well as a red?

What if you're a pacifist? Can you still 'do' Remembrance?

Perhaps as fewer people alive actually remember either World War, we will have to re imagine remembrance somehow. What will that look like?

Remembrance

Of all the services I have presided over and preached at, Remembrance Sunday filled me with the most disquiet. Something to do, perhaps, with being young (ish) (who am I kidding, but it's all relative...); being female (?) and having come from a long line of Wesleyan pacifists. 

Then I was conscious that Remembrance is one of those unique confluences of civic, religious and local life which, if done well can bless many and enhance the gospel; and if not...Well, we prepared for possibly 50 attending the local War Memorial - perched precariously on a hill which is also the busy main road between two village settlements. Cars ground to a halt and all around, people could be seen walking down the hill and up the hill to converge at the Cross. We ran out of service sheets and still they came. In this tenth anniversary of Afghanistan, perhaps we were even more conscious of the need to honour those who are dying there every week, as well as those lost in the two World Wars. 

The theological and liturgical challenge was to be a Minister presiding over a community-owned Act of Remembrance, whilst also being a Minister of the Gospel. Not all decisions about war can be uncritically baptised by anyone wearing a cassock and surplice. But pacifism and politics aside, people clearly still wish to honour the memory of the fallen, and 'it is meet and right so to do'. And so we made the most of this annual propitious mingling of church and state; gospel and harsh reality of war.