Remembrance Sunday

Sermon

Remembrance Sunday 2023 

The Reverend Dr James Gardom

1 Thessalonians 5.1-11 The coming of the day of the  Lord

Matthew 25.14-30                   The parable of the Talents

What are we doing on Remembrance Day?

For those who chose to use it in that way, church provides a means to symbolise the inexpressible. For example:

Birth. The mystery of new life and the new relationships and responsibilities.

Marriage. Overwhelming givenness of Love. Sense of finding, perhaps for the first time, what it means to be human.

Death. The recognition of our finitude in the face of eternity.

For those who believe that religion spoils everything these symbolisations are deeply suspect.

 Baptism is Loading a child with sin

Marriage is Turning love into a contract

Funerals are Turning life into a rehearsal

This service on Remembrance Day gives us an opportunity to symbolise some things very hard to express.

We need to express The mystery of the human propensity for collective violence. Our customs of memorialisation go back to WWI, the War to end War. In total 13,878 members of the University served and 2,470 were killed.  The war memorial in Ely Cathedral commemorates 6000 from Cambridgeshire who died. Six in St Bene't's. Since 2006 I have kept this commemoration by the war memorial in Pembroke, which commemorates 350 young men, and I have always sought to remind our students, who are very much like those young men, of the humanity of those who died.

So let us remember today, from the St Bene't's Memorial:

MARTIN A ANDERSON

HENRY BROWN

HENRY C BULLEN

FREDERICK COOTE

WILLIAM L DAINTRY

STANLEY HARRIS

SIDNEY JONES

EDWARD V MATTHEWS

ROBERT W MICHELL

JOHN WH WOODS

All these had their lives to lead, and instead died in the First World War.

We need to express Our deep ambivalence about the fact that in 2023, more than a century after the Great war, the war to end war, we are constantly engaged in warfare somewhere around the globe. As we gather to commemorate on Remembrance Sunday, with the beauty of the building, and the liturgy, we need to ask what we are doing. Are we putting a beautiful face on something irredeemably ugly. Are we unwittingly glorifying war. Are we actually making it easier for a future cohort of young men and women to be lined up, ranked, numbered, and marched off to kill and to die. This is a real question. I have listened attentively to the speeches given by presidents and prime ministers in connection with the conflicts of my own lifetime. Notably among many others: The Falklands War. The First Gulf War. Bosnia. The Second Gulf War. Sierra Leone. Afghanistan. Libya, Syria, Ukraine, Israel and Palestine. In all of these speeches there has been a strong undertone of Christian themes and imagery. The concept of a Just War. The defence of the vulnerable by the strong. The liberation of the oppressed. The necessity for sacrifice. We have not, as nations, engaged in Christian wars, but we have gone to war with Christian themes in our minds and hearts and rhetoric.

These are good themes. Wars in the C19th were often fought with a rhetoric of glory which cannot be understood as Christian, and it surely better that we fight for the rights of the vulnerable than for the extension of empire and the spread of what we understand as civilisation. But are we, by expressing the inexpressible here, making it easier to bear? Is the image of Christ, such as that which you will see behind me, used to mystify the naked, bloody and power driven realities of warfare?

One element that is missing from the public rhetoric of warfare, despite its underlying Christian thematic, is the concept of Sin.

Sin is the label we use for the deep sickness and division in the human spirit. We will what is good and do what is evil. Both individually and corporately we find that we are not really free, that our best selves do not predominate, that we drift by steps of anger, compromise and selfishness into acts of which we would never have believed ourselves capable. War is corporate sin.

I think we may legitimately speak of sacrifice and of justice in war. We can reflect on the greatest love that lays down its life, and on the place this sacrifice has in eternity. But we can only safely do so if we acknowledge and bewail, to use the Prayer book phrase, the corporate sin that led to war. What did we as humanity do or fail to do that made this or that conflict unavoidable. What are we doing as a nation or nations to ensure that it will not happen again. What have we as individuals done or failed to do, by our lives, our votes, our choices, our silences, to prevent or promote war.

In every Remembrance Day sermon I have preached I have emphasised the three things I believe we need to do on Remembrance Day:

Remember those who have died in two world wars and innumerable other conflicts.

The be grateful for their courage and the freedom they bought for us.

To commit ourselves to ensuring that, as far as in us lies, such demands are not made on another generation.

This year I would like to add a fourth. We must repent. Repentance is the active and constructive rethinking of what we know to be wrong, so that we can put it right. In this sense, we must repent. If we are safely and wisely and justly to commemorate our war dead, we must also repent, individually and collectively. We must repent of, we must actively and constructively rethink the wrath, greed, sloth, pride, envy, and distraction which, individually and collectively, lie at the root of the human propensity for war.