Remembrance Sunday 2015

In our Methodist hymn book there is this lovely hymn for Remembrance Sunday:

By a monument of marble, or a simple wooden cross, here we gather to remember, sacrifice and tragic loss. Blood red poppy petals flutter, each a symbol for a life, drifting in a crimson curtain, shadow of our constant strife.

Today we gather as a community here in Ore Village to remember. To remember sacrifice, service, bravery, self-abandonment for our freedom. We come to remember lives laid down to enable us to live in freedom today. We remember two world wars, and conflicts since, and war and injustice happening this very day. Sacrifice is not something in a history book only, it is a present reality. We live in a fallen world. In this place today, as we stand by our monument of marble, we shall lay our poppy wreaths and have our silence with the fallen locally in our minds, who are named. We pass by them as we do our shopping or rush to a meeting every day. Today we pause by them to remember.

On Wednesday, I took 16 children from Year 6 in our little Methodist School at Staplecross to London. We went to Wesley’s Chapel and then to Westminster Abbey. We gathered the children round the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior, a powerful place to pause and reflect. Remember that so many lives were lost in World War One, many fell and no one knew who they were. Loved ones back home never got any closure or peace as they grieved. There was no goodbye. A body was brought from France to be buried in Westminster Abbey as a symbol that everyone paid a price, and there is a gratitude to everyone we must show. The inscription on the grave is powerful:

BENEATH THIS STONE RESTS THE BODY OF A BRITISH WARRIOR UNKNOWN BY NAME OR RANK BROUGHT FROM FRANCE TO LIE AMONG THE MOST ILLUSTRIOUS OF THE LAND AND BURIED HERE ON ARMISTICE DAY 11 NOV: 1920, IN THE PRESENCE OF HIS MAJESTY KING GEORGE V

HIS MINISTERS OF STATE THE CHIEFS OF HIS FORCES

AND A VAST CONCOURSE OF THE NATION THUS ARE COMMEMORATED THE MANY MULTITUDES WHO DURING THE GREAT WAR OF 1914-1918 GAVE THE MOST THAT MAN CAN GIVE LIFE ITSELF FOR GOD FOR KING AND COUNTRY FOR LOVED ONES HOME AND EMPIRE FOR THE SACRED CAUSE OF JUSTICE AND THE FREEDOM OF THE WORLD

THEY BURIED HIM AMONG THE KINGS BECAUSE HE HAD DONE GOOD TOWARD GOD AND TOWARD HIS HOUSE.

We remember today with profound gratitude in silence. Lives given for us. Horrific yet heroic. It was powerful that round the tomb were parties of children from all over the world, a large school party from Germany especially, doing writing about it. We remember and we take in and we pause at our monuments today. Between 500,000 and 1 million people paid their respects at the tomb of the unknown warrior in a week.

But we also come to do something else – we resolve to do things differently. We say this every year but one year we might actually do it. The head teacher on Wednesday let me have some time for me while they went off and did a maths trail round the Abbey. Teachers will tell you school trips have to be fun packed with all sorts of subjects covered in them. I walked round the Abbey by myself and I wrote this sermon on my phone. I noticed six stained glass windows, the text of the passage about responsibility for others in Matthew chapter 25. I was hungry. I was thirsty. I was a stranger. I was naked. I was sick. I was in prison.

Jesus uses the vulnerable in society as those who need to receive genuine Christian care. Your Christianity, your neighbourliness, your resolution to build community is judged on how you live. We can do Remembrance Sunday, and remember the fallen, we are less good at resolving to be better people. Jesus in our Gospel promises peace, shalom, wholeness. And we are to give that to others in his name. The fallen of every conflict went out to build a better world, didn’t they?

I don’t want to be controversial this morning, but it was interesting those windows in the Abbey are by statues of former prime ministers of this country. We all need to work for a better world. That is our charge today. We shall hear these words in a moment “when you go home tell them of us and say “for your tomorrow, we gave our today.” We remember them, but how will we be remembered? We are fortunate in Ore in November 2015 to not be living in a time of war. But there are people in need and we are needed to make a difference, and we can all make a difference, give peace, this week, in often really small ways. Who is hungry, thirsty, a stranger, naked, sick, in prison in your world?

Then finally on my wander in the Abbey I noticed the altar on which it is written “the Kingdoms of this world are become the kingdoms of our Lord and of his Christ.” This reminded me of the journey we are on to make the world more like God’s world, God’s Kingdom. Rabbi Hugo Gryn, who survived Auschwitz wrote, ‘the goal of memory is love. To abide in love.’ The pain and pride coexist – weaved together, and we are shaken by the interruption into our comfortable lives.

Love, justice and peace must always be the intentions of Remembrance Sunday, because violence and death will not have the last word. No enemy will destroy love. Meanwhile, we must live with pain and pride, and be shaken by the interruptions into our comfortable lives to use his words.

We remember, we resolve, and we rejoice in God’s promise. In that passage from Isaiah, set for today, God, after a tough time for his people promises peace: “peace peace to the far and the near says the Lord.” Words of comfort and healing. Death, war, carnage, blood, bereavement, pain and loss will not be the end of the story. We live in hope – even if sometimes that is hard. After we left Westminster Abbey on Wednesday at teatime, the area was full of police and horses with riot gear on. The atmosphere was tense. There was a student demonstration coming down Whitehall. Some of our children were frightened, some of them had not been to London.

We got them out of there and on to the Embankment – we might have been kettled if not! As we were walking by the river, one of the children seeing helicopters circling, and hearing police sirens, said “is World War Three about to start?” She was very worried. I understood where she was. It is hard to preach peace when you are surrounded by war. It is hard to preach justice when you are surrounded by tyranny. But we see God’s long term view – those things will come, there is a promise and we are called to work for them, however daft it feels.

It is easy to forget. To do a day and then tomorrow act as though it never happened. I am like that learning anything to do with technology. My brain freezes at the thought of Windows 10 or a new Kindle still in the wrapper that a church enabled me to buy when I finished as their minister in the summer. Someone shows me how to work these things. The next day I haven’t a clue and I haven’t taken what I have been told in. It is worrying that as I put this together I was listening to Pick of the Pops on Radio 2 yesterday and seem to remember all the words from the songs played from the charts this year in 1978! We remember things that aren’t important and not things that are. Today we remember and we will be different. We will never forget.

So our hymn ends with a reminder:

“For the sounds of war still thunder even as we meet to pray. God we need your help and guidance in our constant search for peace, move on us to resolutions as we pray that wars may cease.”

Peace peace to the far and near says the Lord, and I will heal them.

In the name of the Prince of Peace, Jesus Christ. Amen.