11th November 2007TRINITY XXIII

REMEMBRANCE SUNDAY

Fr Julian Browning

Job  19  :  23 - 27a  ;  II  Thessalonians  2  :  1 - 5  &  13 - 17  ;  Luke  20  :  27 - 38

They have given up their lives so that we might have life. The festival of national remembrance was instituted lest we forget this. Not that we are going to forget the names of those who fell in war, because their names are known to God and are carved in stone. Our country still bears the scars of those wars, physical and mental. This somehow got through to me when I was growing up in the 1960's.

This is Christian remembrance, to find the Cross, to die with Christ, and see victory not defeat.

I don't know where it came from, and it might just be a middle class myth, and not historically verifiable, but I knew there had been a wonderful Edwardian Golden Age, the reward of four hundred years of empire building, and this had all been smashed by two cataclysmic world wars, and the evidence was around me in dignified but troubled elderly people, and silver photograph frames containing pictures of young servicemen and women. There's less evidence now, and the danger is that we forget our personal link with them, the link between the dead and the living, between past and present. Never forget. They were flesh of our flesh. They sat here like us and hoped and wondered, and looked forward to long and happy lives. We forget that. We see extinction, we forget that God loves them as well as us. Our dead become strangers to us instead of friends. Just because someone you know has died is no reason for you to withold your love from him or her. Whatever we love deeply remains part of us for ever. And if that is true for us, then how true it is on a national level. 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. Our religion demands remembrance. Christianity is not just about each individual's friendship with God. It is a mystical body in which we are all members one of another. That's why we pray; prayer is a way of embracing others.

Remembrance Sunday is a profoundly Christian festival. At his Last Supper, Our Lord 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. The more we remember him, the more we are able to live lives of self-giving love. 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, among the wounded and defeated. It is Christian to see a unity, one body, where others see division and the barricades. It is Christian to disarm our defences, and to go back, 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. The more we remember, the more we shall be capable of love ourselves, bringing hope into the lives of others.

Have you noticed how every modern repressive regime tries to abolish or re-invent the past? It can be done by changing the calendar, announcing Year Zero, or simply by eliminating or dismissing those with memory and understanding. In Cambodia they did both. People are easier to govern if you can control their minds. Every year in London, there are lots of protest marches, against one government or another. The most urgent protest march of all is the one taking place today, past the Cenotaph, in the presence of the Queen. It is a protest march for the right to remember, the duty to remember and say thank you. It is a protest march which brings back from oblivion the virtues of service, sacrifice and loyalty. Where did all that gallantry come from? We know, from our own lives, that on our own we are not very brave. But if you are part of something greater than yourself, one of a couple, a member of a family, a soldier in a regiment, or a baptised member of the Church of God, you are capable of doing great things. And yet, if we look closely at ourselves, we also know that when we become part of something greater than ourselves we are capable of inflicting immense harm. That was the cauldron of good and evil into which those unsuspecting millions were pitched in two world wars, and in which we find ourselves in the wars of our own time.

Is the sacrifice of those millions of lives worth while? We are right to feel a bit guilty about that. Is this a country fit for heroes? The only way to avoid the reproach of those who have died in the wars of the last hundred years, the way to bring them requiem, rest, the way to repay the debt, is to live our lives as lives of remembrance, lives of sacrifice, lives of love. Remembrance is not just a trip down memory lane. It is time for us to join that protest march at the Cenotaph, to see the dead as friends to us not strangers, to cross the boundaries of our lives and prepare for sacrifice ourselves.

Some of us attended Faure's Requiem here on All Souls Day. At the heart of a requiem is the little prayer, Libera Me. It isn't just about the glorious dead, it's about you and me too. Set me free. Set me free, O God, from the fear of death, set me free from the boundaries I have placed around my life. And set free the souls of the glorious dead, souls we have left imprisoned in time, although we owe them our lives of freedom. Set free, confirm in your love, The Unknown Soldier because we are unknown soldiers too, we fight battles nobody will know about, and we shall be called to die in our turn, perhaps on some battle field of our own.

The two minutes silence can be a bit confusing, as we try to marshal our confused emotions and make sense of it all. Sometimes the weight of the past is almost too much for us. All we can do is go back, down the years, to where those men and women died and die with them, just as we go today in this Mass down the centuries to a body broken on a cross. There is no other way. This is Christian remembrance, to find the Cross, to die with Christ, and see victory not defeat. 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 the more we love, the greater their victory.