I may not be the right person to be addressing you on Remembrance Sunday; I have I remain unconvinced that pomp and circumstance have a place in Remembrance;idealistic teenager I was a conchie at school and spent Thursday afternoons wheeling unfortunate wonky children around the grounds of their nearby school instead of shooting at bits of paper. I am not unpatriotic but I am ashamed of being British now precisely because I believe we have as a nation a valuable and honourable place in the world. I’m, not unsentimental and reach for my hankie at the Last Post. My special unsuitability to this task is that I can’t stand Elgar.
These however, are superficial and perhaps frivolous difficulties with Remembrance; more serious is that I do not know what I should be thinking in the two minutes silence and this sermon is me trying to work out what that should be,. I also have a suspicion that it might not be better to forget. Talleyrand the great French statesman, is said to have commented on the Bourbons (returning, effectively, from the horrors of the French Revolution) that “They have learned nothing and forgotten nothing” Can we be said to have learned anything from the horrors of two world wars and more recent deadly conflicts? It does not seem so. Rather, the lesson is surely that we learn nothing from history and that remembered wrongs only breed and feed the desire for revenge and yet further pain and grief.
I accept that may be an unfair characterisation of what we are doing today; remembering can have two positive purpose; gratitude and the foundation for reconciliation.
We have cause for gratitude and relief that we did not sacrifice our lives in defence of freedom and humane civilisation; we may question whether all the wars and all the deaths since the Second World War were justified by that high motive. Some were clearly not. But my point is more about the nature of gratitude and the need for remembrance as pre-condition for being thankful. Full gratitude requires as full as possible an awareness of the benefit received- in other words memory, whether first hand or passed down. And gratitude always asks for generosity as a response. Remembrance in this sense is not so much retrospective – to the pain of loss- but looking around us for what we need to give to make the sort of world we want to create out of that pain.
Remembrance is not, just any memory. We speak of the death of soldiers, especially at this time of year, as a sacrifice. We mean, I think, that their deaths served a purpose and were a necessary component in the process of reconciliation. In ancient Israel sacrifice was needed to secure atonement-the “at oneness” with God; Christianity is largely based on, the idea of vicarious sacrifice; we obtain the benefits of someone else’s, Jesus’, sacrifice. This is, or should surely be, the idea behind the remembrance of soldiers’ deaths; not maudlin pride, but an optimistic challenge. As Jesus’ sacrifice opens the new life of resurrection, and the possibility of a renewed creation, so we have the enlarged opportunity and obligation to build a new world. Our focus should be on the present and future, motivated by memory and gratitude, but not I suggest dwelling on them.
Jesus spoke in our gospel of loving our enemies and I have said that reconciliation, and the building of the kingdom of God should be the purpose of our remembrance. There can, of course be no true reconciliation, nor any peace without justice. Both justice and lasting reconciliation require a full understanding of opposing views; they require us to respect those whose views are contrary and even hostile to our own; they require us to understand
others’ opinions, how they arose and where they wish to go, and that entails memory and insight. Remembrance will that way be truly constructive.
None of this is to deny a place for private grief and indeed pride among family and friends in the loss of any life in the service of others. And it’s not inappropriate for the nation as a whole to express publicly it’s grief and gratitude, but less obvious that pride should be part of that reaction. I’m no longer a pacifist but war can only be regarded as a failure of policy. Sometimes necessary as the lesser of two evils, but even when conducted in accordance with the generally accepted rules of war (first articulated, incidentally, by that great Christian philosopher Thomas Aquinas) As we see now, tragically in Gaza and elsewhere, wars invariably cause incidental (to put it generously) destruction and death of innocent parties. Contrition rather than pride should be the response.
I have not lost my teenage idealism, and as you will have observed I have picked up not a few prejudices since then. I still think there is much that is better forgotten and that we have little to learn and much to deplore from the past. But I now think that remembrance of loss and sacrifice may motivate and enable us to build a better world. I remain unconvinced that pomp and circumstance have much of a place in that process.
I’m conscious that much of what I have said will seem to many hopelessly optimistic or downright wrong. I will try, I will hope, to respect contrary views and count it as a success if I have provoked you into thinking in some new ways about what remembrance could and should mean.
Amen