Remembrance Sunday

The Sermon for the 10.00 Eucharist at St Bene’t’s on 10th November 2024, Remembrance Sunday

Richard Ames-Lewis

Remembrance Sunday is a complicated observance, and in the dark times in which we are living it seems increasingly multi-layered in its meaning. At one level we commemorate, and give thanks for, our war dead while we wonder about the horrors of modern warfare; at another level we grapple with our patriotism, our sense of nationhood and our place in the world; at yet another level we try to look theologically at what God has to say about remembering, and what part our Christian faith plays in all of this.

Remembrance Sunday has its origins in remembering the Armistice which brought to an end the First World War on 11th November 1918. It was known as Armistice Day and was first celebrated two years later in 1920, at the newly-built cenotaph in Whitehall, accompanied by the solemn burial in Westminster Abbey of the Unknown Soldier, the “Tommy buried among kings”, representing the 886,000 British servicemen who had perished.

Armistice Day was observed each year with a two-minute silence at 11 o’clock on 11th day of the 11th month, whichever day of the week, and it is said that through the 1920s and 1930s the whole nation paused at this moment. Everyone fell silent, and even the traffic in London came to a stop. Ironically, perhaps, it was during the Second World War that the government decided to move the commemoration from 11thday to the nearest Sunday, in order that the wartime munition factories should not stop work.

In 1921, the Royal British Legion, the newly formed armed forces charity, began selling paper poppies to raise funds for injured servicemen, and the poppy became the inseparable symbol of remembrance. Poppies flowering in the churned-up mud of Flanders fields were the first sign of hope for a new and better world.

But then just 21 years after the Armistice came the Second World War at which some 384,000 British servicemen died. It was decided in 1946 to establish permanently the Second Sunday of November as Remembrance Sunday so that proper remembrance could be paid to the fallen of the Second World War as well as the First. Since then, year by year, Remembrance Sunday has been observed, at the Cenotaph in London and at local celebrations in towns and villages, in cathedrals and churches, and the two-minute silence has been kept at 11.00am, as it will be here.

What do we do with the two-minute silence? Well, we offer thanks for those who gave their lives, thanks tempered by sorrow that our civilisation has come to this. We offer longing too, for a better world in which, metaphorically, swords may be beaten into ploughshares and spears into pruning hooks. We offer determination, that, if it is possible, we, or at least our leaders, might do things differently.

But I suggested that this is complicated. There are two problems. One is that Remembrance Sunday remembers our servicemen but not our civilians. We know all too well from modern wars in Ukraine and Gaza that civilian casualties are far greater than military, and the same was true sadly of the First and Second World Wars. One half of the war dead of the Second World War were not in uniform. But they have no memorial.

The other problem is that the observance of Remembrance Sunday can become militaristic, as though to glorify the war it is seeking only to memorialise. Cannons fire, trumpets sound, soldiers parade, and it can seem like a military exercise, perhaps all the more so in these present days. Furthermore, what began as a Remembrance Sunday, has become a whole Remembrance Season with public figures nowadays expected to wear the poppy from the beginning of November or even earlier. You may have noticed this year, it seems a profusion of poppies, not just of paper now but of knitted wool, cast iron, moulded plastic or ceramic. This easily becomes politicised, with poppy-wearing being associated with patriotism, and the season being an exercise in nationalism, even a nostalgic remembering of what our parents used to tell us life was like during the war; perhaps even an attempt to redraw our nation’s post-imperial place in the world in larger letters.

Of course, because Remembrance Sunday is a national day, the Church of England, as the national church, is deeply embedded in the observance. It seems almost surprising, in our secularised society, that our Church still has so prominent a part. Yet this position is fraught with compromise. In my years as a vicar in parishes I was always expected to join in Remembrance Sunday parades, often with soldiers and sailors and airmen; and scouts and guides and cubs and brownies; and sometimes the local town band. I never knew whether, as a priest of God, I should march in step or deliberately walk out of step. I have to say that I usually walked out of step. Because the danger is, the Church is seen to bless militarism, to convey the blessing of God on the sabre-rattling of war. And this is especially difficult in the turbulent times in which we are now living. We look across to Putin and his terrible war in Ukraine, and there we see all his actions blessed by Archbishop Kirill and the Russian Orthodox Church.

How are we to look at this theologically? Here today we are gathered, as we are every Sunday, around the Eucharist - the holy meal by which we remember Jesus, the Son of God, who, in St John’s Gospel, said “There is no greater love than this – that a man should lay down his life for his friends.” This wonderful saying, describing Jesus’s sacrifice on the Cross, is graven on countless War Memorials. We may, it suggests, draw a connection between the crucifixion of the Son of God and young men dying in war, though I find this hard.

But in the Gospel reading appointed for today we hear a different voice of Jesus, from the opening of St Mark’s Gospel. Jesus comes and proclaims the good news of God, and says“The time is fulfilled, and the Kingdom of God has come near.” And then he gives a command, and no word can be more theological than this. He says “Repent.”

To repent is to be sorry for our sins, but not just a bit sorry but deeply, remorsefully sorry. And not just for our personal sin, but for our national and international sin. To repent is, to use the Greek word “metanoia” from which it is translated, to prostrate ourselves in sorrow, and in doing so to turn around, to be re-formed, to be converted. Repentance is the gateway to new life in Christ. Repentance is meeting the love of God in Christ. Repentance is finding that that God cannot love us more and he cannot love us less.

This is our discovery, as children of God, and this is our calling in a darkened world, no different from those first disciples called at the Sea of Galilee. To be the leaven, to be the light, to be the salt, to be the fishers of people; and to find our food and our sustenance in the meal which Jesus gave us, and by which he comes again to us at every Eucharist, when he says, “Do this in remembrance of me.”

Every Remembrance observance gets meaning and significance from this remembrance. And every two-minute silence is charged with our repentance, our prostration in sorrow.