Sermon for Remembrance Sunday 2023

The sermon preached by the Revd Canon Professor Sue Gillingham on Remembrance Sunday 2023 during the High Mass

A time to keep silence, and a time to speak; a time for war, and a time for peace.

When you know that walking or even standing for the cause of freedom and peace can be contentious, you know that there is something sadly wrong with much of our society. We have heard many voices speaking for the cause of peace over the last weeks - from the media, from politicians, protesters and the police - and sometimes from the church.

There is real problem when the church speaks out for peace, however. The church depends on the Bible, but many parts of the Bible are actually about warfare. Hebrew words for ‘battle’ and ‘war’ permeate the Old Testament. We read about battles won, battles lost, prayers for victory, and curses on the enemy. - So should the Old Testament be left out of the church’s response to the Israel-Gaza war, as it could been seen to legitimize the horrors of warfare? Absolutely not! Indeed, Ashkelon, Gaza and Jerusalem were frequently the scenes of military conflict. Yet we would be right to ask: why has this land - ironically called The Holy Land - been the scene of such bloodshed and misery, over the last 3000 years? Isn’t this where God so vividly and uniquely revealed his presence, both through the Jewish Temple and in the person of Jesus?

Part of the answer to this question is found in our Old Testament reading from Ecclesiastes, especially the last two verses. ‘A time to keep silence, and a time to speak…. a time for war, and a time for peace’. At first sight, this seems to say that we’re merely victims of time – caught up in a cycle of events (of war, of peace, and of war again) over which we have no control. But I believe the poet in Ecclesiastes meant something more than this: we need to hold these two apparent contradictions side by side. We are not to be swept away by the ebb and flow of the tides and times of life: this poem actually encourages us to engage actively in the vicissitudes of our world, learning when to be silent and when to speak, when to accept a time of war and when to work for peace.

Last year we were keeping Remembrance Sunday against the backcloth of the war between Russia and Ukraine. And that war of course goes on, with all its tragic loss of life - now of some 10,000 Ukranian civilians and some 70,000 forces. And other wars continue throughout the globe, though the media make less of them: the civil wars in, for example, Afghanistan, the Central African Republic, Ethiopia, Libya, Somalia, South Sudan, and Syria. But right now the focus is on Israel and Gaza, and the dreadful sufferings of those who were attacked by Hamas, and of those forced to remain in Gaza, have been on our minds and in our prayers for some five weeks.

So how do we keep faith this Remembrance Sunday? On the one hand, this day has still to be a solemn thanksgiving for the hard-won peace achieved after the two World Wars. We should not be distracted from that. This is when we need to keep silent - as we will do, shortly - as we remember with gratitude that our peace came at such a price. But on the other hand, today has also to be a solemn litany of repentance, because on a global scale we witness so many conflicts, and so much suffering, demonstrating that we have failed to heed those two words which emerged out of those two world wars: ‘Never Again’.

Through Ecclesiastes, let’s first reflect in thanksgiving on those words: ‘A time to keep silence… a time for peace’.

This is still a sacred time to remember, in silent thanksgiving, the peace which was brokered by the signing of the Armistice in 1918, and then again through the foundation of the United Nations after 1945. We ‘remember’ the sacrifice of the 70 million dead in both wars, and the lives of millions maimed and destroyed from one generation to another. To remember is an act of corporate, international gratitude for our freedom at their expense. This is also a sacred time to remember those who have given their lives in other threats on global peace since that time, not least those who fought in the Falklands War forty years ago, and more recently in, for example, Iraq and Afghanistan. As we remember, we’re again quietly thankful for every single individual sacrifice for the ongoing cause of peace.

Most of us have our memories set alight by what we see or hear or read, or the stories of those we know. Some of us might have been deeply affected by a visit to the battlefields of the world wars- the beaches of Normandy for the Second World War, and for the First, the Valley of the Somme, Passchendaele and Flanders Fields, where, in John McCrae’s words:

 ‘...the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below’.

We must all have some image of a war cemetery with the interminable rows of crosses. Even in their stark anonymity, we feel deeply moved as we realise each was somebody’s lover, someone’s father, somebody’s child. Only by looking at the horrors of history can we find the motivation to say ‘Never again’ and look to a future which, in the words of Ecclesiastes, is

a time to plant, a time to build up, a time to heal…
a time to laugh, a time to embrace,
 a time to gather stones together...

But secondly, through Ecclesiastes, let’s also reflect in penitence on that other pairing of words: ‘A time for war, and a time to speak’.

Over the last twenty months, we have seen far too much of the destructive elements of humanity at war. It has often felt that watching the images first from Ukraine and now from Israel and Gaza we are seeing again, albeit at a distance, the horrors of the Blitz. The bullet-splattered doors and derelict houses of the Kibbutz Kfar Aza, and the cratered landscapes and flattened buildings of Gaza are a vivid reminder that ‘Never Again’ has not yet come to pass. It sometimes seems that we are living in apocalyptic times as we view the trauma of the children in fear of their lives, the tears of bereaved parents and the pain of those bearing forever physical and mental scars.

Using the words of Ecclesiastes again, we are witnessing a time of plucking up and breaking down what has been planted, a time of weeping, a time of mourning, a time to throw away stones, a time to refrain from embracing. This is ‘a time of war, and it is a time to speak’.

But how do we, as Christians, ‘speak out’?

One obvious way is to join a Vigil for Peace, such as the interfaith gathering a week ago in Broad Street; for it is peace we yearn for. We need to speak out for more relief in humanitarian aid. We can give to the many NGOs whose medical and emergency personnel risk their lives to give that aid. Of course we can also speak in prayer: and here in church we have a place where we can light a candle and do just that, for the people of Ukraine and Russia, for the people of Israel and Gaza, and for less publicised civil wars world wide.

  But what can we actually say, without being naively political in the light of the complex history of warfare everywhere? Onoe thing we can say, as Christians, is that the suffering of war-torn humanity is about the suffering of every single individual, and this takes us back to the suffering of God in one single individual, Christ on the cross. It is not insignificant that his death took place in the Holy Land, overlooking the city of Jerusalem (whose name ironically means ‘city of peace’). Although this was a death of cosmic significance, it was just 75 kms from Ashkelon and Gaza - which existed, too, in Jesus’ day. The cross is about humanity at its most vulnerable, most cruel, most raw, and innocent suffering at its most poignant. We read in John’s Gospel, ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.’ It is not coincidental that the crucifixion took place in a war-torn country, at that time under Roman rule. It tells us that – perhaps despite appearances - God is not absent from human suffering, and that in Christ even now God suffers with each individual, in a way we will never comprehend.

‘A time to keep silence… a time for peace’. ‘A time for war, and a time to speak’.

 John McCrae’s In Flanders Fields was composed in April 1915, during the battle in Ypres in Belgium, after the death of a close friend. This was the poem which inspired the adoption of the poppy as the Flower of Remembrance for the British and Commonwealth war dead. In Flanders Fields reminds each of us, as we now watch so much individual suffering from afar, that we have a responsibility to speak out in whatever ways we can, now the dead are silent:

‘To you from failing hands we throw
the torch; be yours to hold it high.     
If ye break with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
in Flanders fields.’

TWO MINUTES’ SILENCE

If the words for ‘battle’ and ‘warfare’ permeate the Old Testament, Hebrew words for ‘peace’ occur twice as often. The greater the bloodshed, the greater the universal desire for peace. The more we see the suffering of the innocent and weak, and the courage of those who give their lives for the service of others, the more we cry out for world peace, not only in the Holy Land, in Ukraine, but in every area of our globe where we know even now people are dying as victims of war.

As Christians, we have to see with eyes of faith that God is still present in our world. Jerusalem not only witnessed the crucifixion of God’s only Son, but it was also the place of his resurrection from the dead. Our poppies are a reminder that where there is death, there is also new life. Suffering is not in vain. The resurrection of God’s Son, in Jerusalem, reinforces this cycle of life over death, speech over silence, peace over war. I end with some words we heard earlier in our Epistle.

Who will separate us from the love of Christ? …Will hardship, or distress, or peril, or sword?
No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.
For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers,
nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Amen.