Remembrance Sunday,
NT Lesson: Revelation 21.1-7
Gospel : John 15.9-17
Text: I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete (John 15.11)
It is an honour to be asked to preach on an occasion which means so much to those whose lives may have been scarred by war. Fewer and fewer of us have personal memories of even the Second World War. If I were moved to boast of my credentials, as St Paul does to the Corinthians, I could remind you that my great uncle Handley was awarded the Victoria Cross in 1916. He survived, severely injured, but his nephew, my uncle Handley, was not so lucky. In September 1940, whilst volunteering as an air raid warden, he ran to help what appeared to be an injured airman coming down on a parachute. It was in fact a dummy bomb, which exploded on hitting the ground. My parents were devastated, and I was conceived in their grief. It was many years before I knew enough about the sequence of events to make the connection, but you will understand why remembrance is so deeply imbedded in my DNA, along with all the mixed emotions – pride and joy as well as grief – which remembrance triggers.
I attended a moving performance of the War Requiem in Westminster Cathedral recently. In Wilfrid Owen’s words, so movingly set by Benjamin Britten,
… when much blood had clogged their chariot wheels,
I would go up and wash them from sweet wells,
Even from wells we sunk too deep for war,
Even the sweetest wells that ever were.
It’s the joy drawn at such cost from those deep wells of peace and love that I want us to focus on this morning.
Our gospel reading came from the teaching which Jesus shared with his disciples in the last hours before he was arrested, tried and executed. I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete. Knowing that he had very little time left, he put his teaching into picture language which they would be less likely to forget, the picture of the vine and the branches, one of the marquetry pictures which faces us as we kneel at the altar rail here.
The first lesson we can take from that picture is simply one of relationship. The Lord Jesus is the vine, we are the branches, and his Father is the vinegrower. Only if we are firmly attached to the vine will we have the opportunity to fulfil the destiny chosen for us by God our Father, bearing lots of fruit, as any vine grower intends. If the connection is severed we bear no fruit at all, the severed branch falls to the ground, is shrivelled up and put on the bonfire. I don’t think we need to interpret this as a message about hell fire – it is sufficient to be reminded that if we abandon or lose or wilfully damage our openness to the love of God, we risk cutting ourselves off from the sap of the vine, on which we depend for the flourishing of our spiritual life.
The second lesson we can take from Jesus teaching about the vine concerns the pruning. In order to get a good harvest the vinegrower has to take good care of the branches, tending each one carefully so as to maximize its potential as well as that of the vine as a whole. Every branch needs careful pruning. The sap which flows through the healthy branches is the all-sustaining love of God, and our response which accepts the secateurs, is what allows the vine to produce that plentiful harvest of good fruit, which in turn gives joy to the vinegrower as well as adorning the branches themselves. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love.
The third lesson we can learn from the vine and the vinegrower looks to the long term. The relationship of the branch to the vine is not just a matter for a single season of growth and pruning and harvesting. The old stems, gnarled and twisted as they may be, and seemingly barren, remain an integral and even a beautiful part of the mature vine.
And then there is the hint of martyrdom. No man has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends (John 15,13). There is no limit, either of duration or of intensity, to the commandment to love one another, as Jesus loved his disciples, as they were commanded to love one another. Our Lord himself did go so far as to lay down his life for his friends. He knew that his love for his friends, and his obedience to the loving purpose of his Father, for the salvation of us all, would require of him that ultimate sacrifice.
We remember to-day all those who made that same sacrifice in the great wars of the 20th century, military and civilians alike, together with those who are dying to-day in Israel and Palestine and Lebanon, in Russia and Ukraine, and elsewhere around the world. I am uneasy about applying Jesus’ measure of exceptional love – greater love hath no man than this – to all those who died in war and are named on our memorials. Their motives for signing up, and their experience of battle, will all have been more complicated than that. Listen to Wilfrid Owen again, in his poem Strange Meeting:
I am the enemy you killed, my friend,
I knew you in this dark, for so you frowned
Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed
There is a hint of peace and love in that moment of sad reconciliation beyond the grave, just as there was love and joy at the bottom of those deep wells sunk too deep for war. We pray that we – and all who are affected by war – may find, not just in remembrance with gratitude, but in our grief and through our tears, that peace and joy which is God’s gift to all those who pay the price of love, holding nothing back when they answer our Lord’s call to love one another as God loves us.