12th November 2006Remembrance Sunday

Fr Julian Browning

I  Kings  17  :  10 – 16 ;  Hebrews  9  :  24 – 28 ; Mark  12  :  38 - 44

There are fewer old soldiers left now, I mean the ones from the first and second world wars. I'm interested in military history so I read their obituaries. For all those who came back and talked about what happened to them, many more came back and and didn't say anything at all. They just refused to talk about it. Strange really, because they had great tales to tell. But they knew they couldn't get across to us how dreadful the whole thing was. We would not understand, and I think they were right. 

We can not really understand the pain of it, the terror, the humiliation, the deprivation, the mental and physical exhaustion, the despair, the total loss of world war. Those men and women found themselves in a world which must have seemed God-forsaken. These were not sentimental deaths, Scott Holland just going into the next room sort of deaths. These people's lives were smashed. They died so that we would not have to live in that God forsaken world. But once a year we go back there, to the battle fields, to say thank you.

It isn't the glory of victory over others, it isn't the glory of triumph, it is the glory of great courage and love.

I've never been to war, and there are few of us now who have, but I watch all the old newsreels and those TV interviews with old soldiers. Harry Patch of the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry, who is now aged 108, told how he and a few others had come across a young Cornishman along the front. The boy had been cut to ribbons from shoulder to waist by shrapnel. He begged the soldiers to shoot him. Before they could shoot him, he died, calling for his mother. That was a story to be told and remembered. The heroes are always remembered. Those who came back could tell their stories. Today we reach across to those who did not come back, who were trained to kill for 1/6 a day or its later equivalent, all those who became victims on the home front or overseas before they could become heroes, those who were just overwhelmed by the machinery of war.

Today we are asked to do more than just take an interest. We are asked to do our duty, to play our part in those many wars by remembering those who died. I mean duty. A nation which forgets its war dead has lost the war. If we condemn the glorious dead to extinction, their sacrifice will have been in vain. We do not need to have personal memories of what happened. We don't have to have been there. It's their experiences we are remembering today, not our own. Today we represent the national memory, the memory, if you like, of Great Britain and the Commonwealth; that's why we all gather at the same time to remember and say thank you. I'll give you an example of what we're doing. The trenches, those hellish pot holes and dugouts, are still giving up their dead. Boots and bones and bullets turn up. Crashed aeroplanes, with the bodies still strapped in, are found in forests and jungles.

Unmarked graves are found in Eastern Europe. Wrecked merchant ships turn out to be graves. It's a grisly business. Then the tags are found, and the research is done, and these bodies are given names, if possible, and a decent funeral. We're doing something like that today, remembering, bringing back to the light the Unknown Soldier. It's the least we can do, to show in some way that those mangled bodies have in our eyes a dignity and a lasting memorial. They are not forgotten; they are still part of the national family. They were flesh of our flesh. they sometimes sat in churches like us and hoped and wondered, and looked forward to long and happy lives. Our promise, our commitment today, is that their lives mean something to ourselves and to God. And we would like to think that they would proud of us, just as we are proud of them.

It's a national commemoration. If all those sacrifices are to mean anything, it has to be about a Land of Hope and Glory. It's certainly about the defence of a land, a land we love above all others. It's about a land of Hope, because by remembering past conflicts, we hope that never again will sacrifices on such a scale be required of us.  But where is the glory? Where is the glory in those neat white lines of tombstones?  It isn't the glory of victory over others, it isn't the glory of triumph, it is the glory of great courage and love. It's the glory of the Cross of Christ. That mangled body also died a victim of the forces of human evil, but we proclaim the glory of the one who laid down his life for us. Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.

Being Christian in war time can't be easy. In fact being a Christian isn't easy, full stop. St Paul says that faith is not given to everyone. That's rather a sobering thought.  We assumed that by becoming a Christian we'd be given faith on a plate, as part of the deal. But it doesn't always feel like that. We're just beginners, faith has to be worked at. What God has given us, without any doubt at all, is time to do exactly that. Seven decades, more or less, and those men and women gave up their time on earth, died young, so that we could have our allotted time in peace, free to worship as we please. That's what we're grateful for, isn't it? But shouldn't we do something about it? We have been given time, a lifetime, and a place on earth, in which to work out our salvation, to catch hold of what God gives to all who love Him, an eternal life, the life which goes beyond this time, this place, our life and our death. Eternal life begins now, in this life.

Some years back some terrorists in Indonesia swept down on a church and massacred 150 worshippers. In time the church was rebuilt, and the only priest to escape held a little service of remembrance. He was asked how he was able to go back there. And he said, we believe that a memory or remembrance is the pulse of love. Thus the more we remember, the more we love. Remembrance Sunday is a profoundly Christian festival. At the Last Supper, Jesus said, This is My Body given for you. Do this in remembrance of Me. Do this out of love for me. Do this so that I am part of you today, so that you can live with my life. On Remembrance Sunday it is Christian, it is Christ-like, not to forget, not to avoid, not to deny, but to enter the suffering of others and weep with them. It is Christian, it is Christ-like, to look for hope in the most unlikely places, and to see glory where others see defeat. It is Christian to see a unity, one body, where others see division and the barricades. It is Christian to go back in time, frightened and proud, to where those men and women died, and be with them. It is Christian to seek out the lost, the Unknown Soldier who made the Supreme Sacrifice, because in our own way that is our calling too, to give up ourselves for others. The more we remember, the more we love. The more we love the closer we get to God. And the closer to God, the closer to each other, across the boundaries which sinful human beings like to draw around themselves.

I don't know what you are going to think about during the two minutes's silence. I never know what to think. Sometimes it's better not to think at all, just be there for them. I know what we could try to do. We could go back, in our mind's eye, down the years, as far as we can go, to Passchendale and the Somme, and back again, to Arnhem, Korea, the Falklands, Northern Ireland, the terrorist attacks on our own Kingdom, to Bosnia, and into the present, to Afghanistan and to Iraq, to where those men and women are dying and die with them. There is no other way. This is Christian remembrance, to find the Cross and embrace it, to see that bleak world of war not as forsaken by God, but as suffered with God. The Last Post seems so final at the going down of the sun. But in the morning too we shall remember them. And the more we remember, the more we love, and so the greater their victory.