Earlier this year I bought an illustrated booklet published by English Heritage called ‘Ration Book Recipes’.  I was drawn to it because it dealt with that period between 1939 and 1954 when Food in Britain was rationed. To make sure that such food was fairly distributed, the ration books – with their coupons – were an essential mechanism in food distribution.  One of my most vivid early childhood memories was the visits to the local sweetshop where I handed over my own personal ration book so that I could buy a handful of sweets.  That was my direct involvement with the Second World War – though strictly, as one of the first post-war generation, it was a scant involvement.  Yet, it is a part of my story about the War.

Being brought up in its aftermath,  the Second World War had a big impact; war stories, films and personal reminiscences of relatives ensured that the War was a vivid experience.  Added to that was the personal stories of family who had served for ‘King and Country’ – and, because the First World War was also in living memory, the personal stories of people like my grandfather who survived the battle for the Dardanelles with a body still full of shrapnel. Listening to his stories of trench warfare it was as if I had been there with him in that most horrific form of warfare.

I was lucky, I guess, because, unlike many families, no one close to us had been killed. On Remembrance Days like today we did not have to go through a personal mourning for a lost loved one.

When I look through the history of Epping War Memorial and this year’s War Grave service and I read of some of those –whose Names we shall shortly hear. John Duffell, who has painstakingly researched the information, gives us more information each year about those from the Epping area who died in War and whose families still remember them.

At the moment we are having a series of school visits to the Church from St. John’s School. On every visit, children spot the war memorials on the wall and quite often one of them will spot their own surname – a member of their own family whose sacrifice is recorded. Those deaths are still part of their story.

War, being about human conflict, is ultimately a human story and behind all the strategies, campaigns, battles there are human beings.

People like Sergeant George Crabb who, on November 27^th 1915 at the age of 29, died just as the ship bringing him back from Gallipoli, docked at Southampton.   He had been married just 6 months. He was an Epping lad who had played in the Town Band, was a member of the volunteer Fire Brigade and a local footballer.

Or Feliks Gmur who died far from his homeland in Poland when his Hurricane was shot down over the Thames Estuary and crashed at Jacks Hatch in August 1940. His body rests in a War Grave in Epping Cemetery.  Somewhere in Poland today, members of his family will mourn his loss.

 Human stories, Human tragedies, Human loss.

 War is about causes – about struggles for justice, freedom, new beginnings but it can never be just about principles. It always involves people.  Whatever we may think of the present War in Iraq – however we may argue about the right or wrong of the action there – what holds our attention is the danger that our troops are facing minute by minute.  For some it will be their last minute on earth. Some will become another human sacrifice in the story of humanity.  And it is this sacrifice we remember today.

 This is not a day for theorists to debate whether War is right or wrong, Just or unjust.  This is not a day for ideology or for weighing up whether strategies taken were good ones or folly.  This is a day for remembering human beings. Human stories.

Of course we must pray for peace.  Of course we must try to learn lessons about man’s inhumanity to man.  We must take seriously those words of the prophet Micah who tells us to beat our swords into ploughshares and turn our spears into pruning hooks. We must heed his words that nation mustn’t lift up sword against nation and not learn war anymore.  We must break down the barriers which divide nations and speak and live peace, and justice and freedom – and love.

Those noble aims are the same aims of those who left this town to go to war in 1914 and 1939. We would fail their memory and their cause if they were not our own aims. Without them we might have to say that they died in vain.

John McRae, the soldier, War poet, urged us, did he not, to take up the quarrel with the foe, and not to break faith with those who die.  It is our duty – and certainly the duty of those who claim to follow the Christian way – to strive against all that is evil and sinful in our world.  For Christians, that struggle is always bound up with that of Jesus Christ who at the age of 33 walked towards his death on Calvary and gave himself into the hands of evil on a Cross - and there defeated it.

And defeats it still – in those who are prepared to take up the struggle against evil and recognise that it is battle for the human heart which begins with our own.  When we pray, then, for peace, we are praying that we shall be changed. Our prayers are not just for some cause in a far off land but also for ourselves.

Our own human stories include a call to sacrifice – a self-offering of love. A self-offering for what is right, what is true, what is just.  That is at the heart of these human stories we remember today. They were not people who wielded power or influence over the outcome of events. They were not policy-makers or talkers of ideology. They were ordinary men – and women – who simply obeyed the call to give themselves that the human race might live together in peace and harmony.

But they gave more than their obedience and more than their duty. They gave their freedom – that we might be free.  Let us never doubt the richness of that gift.

'Dying' says the poet Rupert Brooke who became one of the victims of World War 1,  'has made us a rarer gift than gold.'  And what is that gift?  Rupert Brooke again: 

These laid the world away; poured out the red
sweet wine of youth: gave up the years to be
of work and joy, and that un-hoped serene,
that men call age: and those who would have been
their sons, they gave their immortality.

They gave their immortality.  That is what is common to all these human stories we remember today.  And yet, in giving their immortality they gained it.  Not just in our remembrance but also in that place where now they rest for all eternity – in the heart of God 

I do not know what faith these men had in God. I can only speak from my own faith. And that faith tells me that when men die in the face of evil for the cause of freedom and justice they are joining in a struggle which takes them to the heart of the Cross of Christ and that Cross speaks to us not just of death but of Resurrection – of transformed life, of an eternal victory of love, goodness and freedom. That is their immortality. And that is ours.

Today, inevitably, we are thinking of death. We are thinking of human stories which ended in war zones of various kinds but if we are to really to honour their memory we should be thinking of life. That is the gift they gave us – that we might live.

When you go home, tell them of us and say,
For your tomorrow, we gave our today.

We cannot, must not, waste their gift. It is tomorrow that we have been given. For them, tomorrow, like today is a Resurrection day. They have their eternity.   If we are to have ours – then today, tomorrow, and every day – we must strive for peace, for justice, for freedom and for love -  their legacy to us.

It doesn’t begin in Iraq, or the Sudan, or Palestine or Israel, or Beslan or Kosovo, or Chechnya or Ireland; it begins in our own hearts. It is the thread on which we must weave our own human story.

Only so is the gift they gave to us honoured and used.