Remembrance

The sermon I shall preach tomorrow afternoon at a little chapel not far from here:

Can I own up to something - a little bit of self-analysis here, really, I suppose?  I have always had a bit of a problem about gifts . . . about accepting gifts.  I’m not talking about the gifts you get at the times when gifts are expected - like Christmas, or on my birthday - so much as those times when someone just gives something to you, it can be just out of the blue, or maybe it’s in appreciation of something you’ve done for them.  When I’m given things like that, I do find that I feel, well, a bit uncomfortable, let’s say.

Now I’m not entirely sure why this should be.  Is it a sense of being thought too much of, that I’m not really worth that many thanks?  Is it perhaps a fear of being tied into a sort of contract, by being paid for something I’d wanted to do or to give for free?  Maybe it’s just that really I’m a fairly quiet and shy person and I’m happiest really when not too much is made of me.

Anyway, I doubt that I’m the only person who feels this way.  When I’ve been the one who’s given the gift, I think I’ve noted a similar sense of discomfort sometimes in those to whom I’ve given.  I don’t mean they’ve not wanted the gift, that they’ve not been delighted by it and moved and touched.  After all, I too am always pleased and touched when people give me presents.  But there’s always that other thing there alongside the delight and the gratitude, where I find myself thinking ‘you really needn’t be doing all this for me.’

Well, the big season of gifts and giving is coming up before long, our TV screens every night are full of gift ideas and suggestions, including one rather alarming one you might have seen that tells you ‘buy all these and you don’t have to pay for it until a year’s time.’  All of it so full of razzamatazz - but before we get into the Christmas gift industry we’ve a chance today to think about gifts and giving in a more honest and sober way.  For today is Remembrance Sunday.

I still vividly remember the Remembrance Sundays of my school days.  Since I went to a boarding school, I would be standing in the dusty school pews at the back of church on Armistice Day, and I was always so afraid that it would be me that broke the two minutes’ silence with a fit of coughing.  To be fair, I think it actually was me only on one occasion - but once you start thinking about a fit of coughing you’re already half gone: every year I was so full of nerves.

For I could see how much it mattered, that silence.  Back in those days, I was part of a small minority of people born after the War had ended.  Now I’m part of the great majority, and the remaining veterans with their caps and medals really are veterans, fewer each year.  For most people now, the two great world wars of the last hundred years are the stuff of history books rather than of recent memory.

But Remembrance Sunday is of no less importance now than it was then.  Not only because we’re very aware of those of our troops (and maybe of our families) serving in Helmand or in other of the world’s trouble spots . . . and of those who don’t return to their families and friends. Help the Heroes and other organisations - the military wives with their hit last Christmas, and those from this area who’ll be singing in the Square in Shrewsbury just before Christmas 2012 - all of them have helped raise the profile of today’s service men and women and of all they do.

But even without that, Remembrance Sunday is vital. It says something about the need we have to understand and appreciate and make good use of what has been given, and given at such cost, in those times when our freedom and that of others in our world has been so much at risk.  Democratic freedoms we can so easily take for granted - even our right this Thursday to go and elect a police commissioner, not that I’m convinced we need one: our freedom costs, and it costs lives.

It cost these lives, the names read at memorials up and down the country at different times today.  At the memorial outside St Agatha’s, Llanymynech, more or less as I speak to you this afternoon.  Young lives with much to offer, people who wanted to return home safely, and to live in peace, and to build a future, but it never happened, not for them.  But because of them, it still happens for us.

So every year I’m reminded that I’m given this gift.  And, yes, it does make me feel uncomfortable;  and yes, I think it should make me feel that way.  Am I worth it?  How do I handle it?  How do I respond?  What should I be giving?  One thing I feel very passionate about is that we shouldn’t take lightly the freedom that cost so much - and not just my freedom, but that of my brother and my sister, whoever and wherever they may be.  Good gifts are those given freely and unselfishly; certainly to respect a gift is to behave with an open and an unselfish heart oneself.  To be as ready to serve in my own way and in my own turn, and as opportunity presents, as these others have been for me.

Every year I’m reminded of the horror and the necessity of war.  The horror and the necessity of war - two opposite things, but they’re both true.  Those of my British Legion friends who served in the Second World War are to a man proud of their service and of their uniform;  but they wouldn’t want to go back there, nor would they wish it on anyone else.  One thing that Remembrance Sunday should never do is to glorify war, however much it may seek to glorify service and comradeship and bravery.  All war fills the heart of God with sadness and pain;  that is what I believe.  Theologians have often debated what would constitute a ‘just war’ - but, myself, I don’t believe such a thing ever could exist.  All war is wrong;  all war has its origin in human sin, in our rejection of God.  All war is horrible - not least because over the past hundred years the distinction between military and civilian has become less and less clear.

The statistics may speak of collateral damage, language like that, but statistics these days come with illustrations: pictures taken on mobile phones and flashed around the world electronically, that show us what collateral damage really means: the woman mowed down while she tried to find food for her hungry children, or the child caught in the crossfire when his playground ceased to be for play any more, or the elderly couple blown up because they lacked the mobility to run from their home.  War is horrible.

But war is also necessary.  Not always, by any means, and surely every human conflict should be constantly up for assessment and scrutiny.  But remember what the Bible has to say about peace;  we heard some of those words as our Old Testament reading - shalom, the Hebrew word for peace, doesn’t mean that gap when the guns stop firing.  That isn’t yet peace.  Peace comes when people recognise each other as brothers and sisters, when people are able to be at ease in their own space, each under his own vine and his own fig tree, as the Bible words describe it.  You don’t find that peace by appeasing tyrants or by turning a blind eye to evil acts.

I’m sure God grieved over every death, every injury, every piece of destruction, that took place between 1939 and 1945.  I feel sure he grieved over Dresden and Hiroshima as much as over Coventry.  But when people act in monstrous ways, as did Hitler and his allies, when evil is let loose in the world in the dehumanising way it was at that dark time, war, however horrible, also becomes necessary;  and ultimately, freedom and peace, shalom, depend upon it.

Many many years ago, the Greek philosopher Aristotle said: ‘To win the war is not enough;  it is more important to organise the peace.’  Each life lost on the field of battle, and each name read out today at the time of silence, each is gift of such value, such magnitude, that, yes, it should challenge me, and all of us.  Peace cost all of this; so what must we do?

What must we do to organise the peace, to live the peace, to share the peace, to treasure the peace and to pass it on?  I don’t know whether you’ve ever counted up just how many wars and battles there are in our Bibles.  I haven’t either, so all I can say is that there’s rather a lot of it, mostly in the Old Testament which in places is chock full of it, but some in the New as well.  As Jesus himself told his disciples, wars and rumours of wars are (sadly) part of the standard currency of human existence.

But even in the warlike Old Testament you have the voices of the great prophets, telling the people again and again that peace requires that we live in harmony, that we look after one another, that we look out for and care about especially those who are weakest, most vulnerable, most easily exploited.  When we are disharmonious, we are at risk of war. What does the Lord require of you, the prophet asks?  Only this: that you do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God.

And in the New Testament we see in our Lord Jesus Christ that greatest of all gifts, and that all-sufficing sacrifice, in which we are shown up for what we are and shown too how much we are loved despite it all.  The cross both draws us and convicts us.  I suppose that as I look through the Bible as a whole - and some bits of the Old Testament make for rather tough reading - I trace the story of a developing awareness and understanding of God that takes his people on from seeing him as the one who will lead is tribe into battle right on through to the one who will empty himself for love to win peace and freedom not just for some people, not just for once race or tribe as against all the others, but for the whole world.

If I’m discomfited by the sacrifices made on the field of war that preserved our political freedoms - those ‘lesser calvaries’, as the hymn ‘O Valiant Hearts’ describes them - then the one true and eternal sacrifice, that perfect and all-sufficient Calvary, that should really knock me off my feet.

And it does.  How could I be worth as much as that?  Why would you ever, Lord, give that much for me?  What can I do with so great a gift?  Well, for what it’s worth, here’s what I think.  Today forces us to think about war and peace, and it’s helpful I guess to remember that those who marched off to war for the most part did so with dreams and a longing for peace in their hearts.  We do owe it to them to be serious about peace.

And being serious about peace I think means wanting to do more than is humanly possible.  It means not being content to stay safely within the boundaries of our own human sight and understanding.  For the peace we desire isn’t just our own peace, but God’s peace;  it is secured not by our human efforts at treaties and alliances and exchange visits and things like that (all of them vital and good, but even so) - but also in our active seeking out of God’s will.  There’s danger in bringing God’s name into this, I accept;  for it’s a sad truth that for far too many years of human history people have used God as an excuse for war, and yes, it’s still happening today.

But that’s what happens when people, some of them highly unscrupulous, seek to use and exploit God (or in reality their own narrow and nasty little version of God), rather than what should happen, let themselves be used by God, by the God who surprises us by his generosity, by the God who both convicts and challenges us as we stand or as we fall to our knees by the cross.  So much has been given for us;  and peace will happen when and where we are continuing to give, where we take every opportunity to give, where our giving is sacrificial and true. Do justly, love mercy, walk humbly with your God.  And only when we are doing this, and thinking and acting in this way, can we truly say, and mean, “We will remember them.”