After the First World War when so many soldiers had been lost and their bodies never recovered, it seemed appropriate for them all to be symbolised by the single grave, in Westminster Abbey, of an unknown soldier as a monument to all their sacrifices. Nowadays we seem to fight wars in which no dead British soldier remains unknown; every time a member of our armed forces dies in Afghanistan he or she is named in the press and on the television, a photograph is shown and sometimes a family member or friend is interviewed. And often in such interviews we hear someone struggling to honour the choice made by their loved one to fight for their country, while at the same time expressing doubt about the government’s decision to send them to Afghanistan or Iraq or wherever. And in its way this is good – it means that leaders of government have to justify their decisions much more clearly than they had to do in the past. An unknown soldier can be honoured, glorified, or even manipulated to justify and idealise the cause for which he fought. There is no difficult human particularity about him – he can be remembered safely. But when we know the face and name and family of a dead soldier remembrance becomes more difficult, more painful. We share in the loss of a particular family as all their complex feelings of anger and pride and grief are shared just that little bit with us.
The modern war dead become much more clearly both heroes and victims. Our modern remembrance is becoming more uncomfortable and more morally ambivalent. And it’s important to remember that because there is an element in our celebration today which might help us to forget this uncomfortable fact. Behind the poppies and the march past of old soldiers and the tunes which go back eighty odd years, and old black and white war films and the voice of Vera Lynn – behind all that there may be a kind of nostalgia for a past in which our values seemed clearer and more universal, where the country was united behind a great man in defence against a common foe. But if our remembrance includes the much more recent dead that nostalgia dissolves and we become aware again of the pity and moral ambiguity of all forms of war fare. “To remember war, for Christians, is to come face to face with the reality of sin, and the web of failure and compromise which surrounds our best intentioned collective action.’ (Eamonn Duffy) War may sometimes be the necessary choice of a lesser evil, but it always represents a culmination of past failures at communication, understanding, and national self awareness.
True acts of remembrance in church are therefore also always acts of repentance. For we remember at the foot of the cross. We remember in the context of a victory that was marked by humiliation and defeat. Christ victorious is a victim and his followers are therefore the allies of all in every nation who are weak, despised, persecuted, victimised and manipulated by principalities and powers. When we remember in the presence of the cross then we remember not only our own dead but all those who died fighting one another. And we do that because we know we live in a world where our judgements are only ever penultimate, depending on the final judgement of God. Yes, we are right to recognise certain acts as evil – our moral system depends on our having a basis for telling the difference between right and wrong. And yet we know also that in the context of war this knowledge of right and wrong is always compromised.
The prophet Isaiah recognises this deep divide between the now and the not yet of divine judgement, when he pictures the wolf dwelling with the lamb in the kingdom of God. To us this seems a fantasy – how could the wolf do such a thing and remain a wolf, how could a lamb ever not flee in terror from those jaws? And yet in the kingdom of God super-nature will transform nature in ways we cannot possibly comprehend as the earth is filled with the knowledge of God. Everything will have its place, for the Father’s house has many rooms; and the redeemed will find themselves in communion with a far wider diversity of humanity than ever seemed possible under the present broken order of the world. All that is in the hands of God and we have to remember that, as it were, in advance, if our remembrance of the past is not to defeat our hope. So when next we stand at the tomb of the unknown soldier we should grieve that he is unknown and that as a human being with a history and a family and a face he is a forgotten victim of war, as are all the soldiers in all such national tombs around the world; but we should also hold firm to the faith that they are all known to God, cherished by God and that in their Father’s house they have their place. Amen
REMEMBRANCE SUNDAY 10.30AM 2009 Preparing for the future
When Neville Chamberlain made his agreement with Hitler at Munich in September 1939, the news was greeted by the Church of England with tremendous enthusiasm. On the following Sunday, for example, the Dean of Lincoln held his congregation spell bound, ’by ascribing the turn of events to God’s wonderful providence.’ The Archbishop of Canterbury told Chamberlain ‘that he had been enabled to do a great thing in a great way at a time of almost unexampled crisis’ and he thanked God for it. A diary entry by Harold Nicholson, however, hinted at scepticism: ‘The Church of England responded very largely as if the men of Munich had been guided by Almighty God.’
It’s all too easy to mock Church leaders of the past when they get things wrong. And given their memories of the first war it’s perfectly understandable that people should have longed for there not to be another war. They prayed for peace and for a moment their prayers seemed to have been answered. Nevertheless given this precedent it seems unlikely that preachers of today or in the future will ever again be quite so ready to see the providence of God at work in political negotiations. We have perhaps learnt Jonah’s lesson – God’s providence doesn’t necessarily work in the way we would want or expect.
Jonah is probably the most reluctant prophet in the Old Testament because he is ordered to speak to people he would rather have nothing to do with. Deep down he also suspects that God’s plan for the Ninevites is not at all what he, Jonah, would want. The Ninevites are Israel’s enemy but with just one word of warning, delivered to only a third of the people, the whole city turns and repents and finds favour with God – a miracle of grace in comparison with the infrequency of repentance amongst the so called chosen people. Jonah would have preferred a God of wrath rather than compassion when confronted with the Ninevites.
And yet of course repentance like that of the Ninevites doesn’t happen on such a scale in real life. The book of Jonah is a work of fiction designed to teach a powerful lesson – that God is the God of the nations and Israel should not presume on its chosen status; God can have compassion on the outsider and the enemy. Jonah provides a lesson but not perhaps an example. The lesson of Jonah is not that Archbishop Cosmo Gordon Lang should have gone to Berlin to preach repentance in 1939.
So what in the end is to be the Church’s reaction to crisis, what principles should guide Archbishops, Deans, and Vicars in dangerous times? A general call to repentance might be considered; our reading from Hebrews provides another possibility. There we see a community with its eyes eagerly on the future, inspired by the past, and enduring the present. Christ on the cross has dealt with sin once for all; he will return to save those who are eagerly awaiting for him. In the meantime the community should keep on loving one another as brothers and provide hospitality for strangers. It would be interesting to know what the Church of England’s record was in the second war of supporting aliens, strangers and refugees.
At first sight our gospel readings seems to have little connection with Remembrance Sunday. Jesus calls the first disciples to join the task with him of fishing for the kingdom. The bait takes the form of a message ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent and believe in the good news.’ Is that how the church should respond to crisis, by proclaiming the kingdom?
Of course crises don’t happen in a vacuum – how the Church of England responded in 1939 depended on the way in which it had responded or failed to respond to all the changes in society since the first war. How the church responds in future will depend on what we do and think now. We have some inkling as to what those future crises might be. Global warming could lead to greater competition for the world’s resources of food and water, it could lead to massive shifts of population and increasing social instability. If the gap between rich and poor goes on growing then future financial crises could led to social resentment and disturbance on a far greater scale than we saw at the time of the poll tax. If capitalist democracies fail to address the question of what makes a good society, with shared values and a deep concern for the common good, then our moral bankruptcy will only exacerbate all the other factors which encourage global terrorism.
How the church will respond to any such crises depends on what we do and think now. It depends on how we use the freedom won for us by those who gave their today for our tomorrow. How do we prepare ourselves beforehand to face a crisis? And by that I don’t mean planning to cover every eventuality, the doomed attempt to control every outcome. Preparing ourselves beforehand is much more to do with shaping character, and learning the somehow instinctive right response to a difficult situation. And to be so prepared we need communities in which to be prepared, communities of those who have been gathered in through repentance, a change of heart and the promise of good news. We need kingdom communities – churches whose life hints at the possibilities of God’s future even when the human present is very bleak.
So we might ask ourselves, if there were a crisis which led to the break down of many things that we rely on, to what extent would our membership of the community of the church help us? To what extent would the churches of Hampstead have the resources, skills, character and organisation to become a focus for survival? Would we be in a position to care for the most vulnerable, to organise a sharing of all that we had so that no-one went without and no-one had more than anyone else? Would we become sanctuaries of calm and confidence, where all our natural fears were contained and not projected outwards onto scapegoats and enemies to be hated? Would we discover unexpected traits in one another that enabled us to surprise one another with our courage and sensitivity? Expressed like that perhaps it might sound a bit naïve, and yet it was the expectation and experience of many of the earliest Christians. They lived in anxious times, they didn’t believe in progress but in the coming of the kingdom. The fact that it was near at hand did not preclude the possibility of social break down, war and disaster. They saw their task in terms of holding firm to their faith, encouraging one another, and building up the community, the body of Christ so if tested it could survive as a beacon of light in a darkening world.
In 1939 the Church of England was still very near the centre of political and social life in this country. It provided and still provides pastoral and spiritual care for our armed forces wherever they go. But it is no longer the case that Archbishops have a part to play in government propaganda in times of crisis. In some ways that makes them even more vulnerable; and yet it also enables all church leaders to rediscover a more prophetic voice – a voice which will warn and challenge as well as encourage and console. And the warning and the challenge to the church is this – are we living the life of a kingdom community subject to the just and gentle rule of Christ and prepared beforehand to face the crises of the future with courage and magnanimity? Amen.