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If each of us were asked what this day means to us, we would undoubtedly all give a different answer. Our age and circumstances will determine what we remember – what this Act of Remembrance means to us.
“They still serve. They still suffer. They still need us.” These are three statements published by The Royal British Legion in their Poppy Appeal literature this year, which remind us – sadly – that our Armed Forces are still in action. And The Royal British Legion still does sterling work raising funds to support families and to help those wounded in battle.
As time distances the First and Second World Wars, more recent armed conflicts in Korea, the Falklands, the first Gulf War, Bosnia, Sierra Leone and most recently Iraq, to name just a few, have all had their casualties. Our television screens continue to bring us all too vivid scenes of continuing bloodshed. There has, in fact, been only one year since 1945 in which no one was killed on active service and that was 1968. We remember today – and rightly - those people who were ready to die for this country, to whom we owe the freedom we now enjoy.
War memorials help us to remember. Being new to Epping I am still in a cycle of “first times” for things – Remembrance Day last Thursday being one of them. At the 11th hour, as Royal British Legion Epping & District Branch Chaplain, Geoffrey led a small group in an act of remembrance at the war memorial. We then moved off to the war graves at the cemetery for a similar act, where the Epping Forest Pipe Band trumpeter played The Last Post. It was very moving. Amid glorious sunshine a cool wind ruffled the petals on the poppy-wreathes that were laid there and it was not hard to imagine how hopeful a sight, live, flowering poppies were to those who were still fighting in Flanders in the First World War.
In my past work for The Mission to Seafarers, I became familiar with the Tower Hill Memorial in Trinity Square near the Tower of London, which commemorates those from the Merchant Navy and fishing fleets who died during both world wars – a total of 36,000 people with no known grave. Each year, the Mission works with the Merchant Navy Association and others to provide an act of worship on Tower Hill on Remembrance Sunday. I learnt it is often harder for those who are left behind to mourn the loss at sea of a loved one. It is hard enough to grasp that their relative has died but the lack of remains seems further robbery. Bereavement symptoms – especially denial – may become protracted, and a seafarers’ chaplain needs particular gifts in such circumstances.
We know that human memory is not altogether reliable. We may ask ourselves, “What lessons have we learnt?” “Why do we still go to war?” There are no easy answers. Historians, politicians, all of us rearrange, interpret and select what we remember of the past and what we choose to deny.
A few words from the English poet, W H Auden’s “Epitaph on an Unknown Soldier” honours the soldier but leaves a question which in history and in our own time has to be faced: this question comes in the two lines that read -
“To save this world, you asked this man to die,
Would this man, could he see you now, ask why?”
I think he might. Many men and women who have given their lives for a cause would be puzzled how things turned out.
So we honour today – Remembrance Sunday – against the muddle of war and the pain, the courage and endurance of so many, and the love in which they are held. We honour today against the backcloth of knowing that many have died hardly recognising the causes for which politicians said they should be prepared to die.
Remembering can be a painful experience but it can also be releasing and fulfilling. It may bring tears to our eyes but they may well be tears of happiness as scenes and people come back to life. As human beings, we also need to allow ourselves to remember harder moments so that even through the pain a sense of healing may come.
Remembering offers the opportunity for life to be refreshed and restored. Such are the contrasts involved in this wonderful gift – this gift of memory. Pain and joy form a deep well from which we draw water: bitter or sweet, depending on our experience and need. As we drink, our lives will be affected, changed.
Remembering is not a trip into the past, like a visit to an historic site or a walk around an archaeological dig! Remembering is one opposite of dis-membering. As in the case of Humpty Dumpty, it involves putting things back together again. What is broken needs to be reassembled. The past is used to re-create the present. In a sense, we are walking here with hints and glimpses of the mystery of remembering. God is a re-membering God – which is why we need to keep coming together, to re-member – to worship him. In this sense, every Sunday; every act of worship is an act of Re-membrance.
When we share Holy Communion, we re-enact our Lord’s Last Supper, when he spoke the immortal words, “Do this, in remembrance of me”. For those from our Team Churches who were Confirmed on Remembrance Day (19 in all), how fitting that they should make their commitment to become Disciples of Christ on that day! And now today – Remembrance Sunday - to receive the Holy Sacrament for the first time! Truly memorable occasions indeed.
At its very best, any remembering needs to be accompanied by new commitments to look at ourselves and the world around us in the light of the past, and to see how in practical ways what has gone before may shape the future. God is faithful. It is out of his activity in the past that he calls us to work with him in the present. Faith claims to bear witness to a living link between the past of things remembered, the present of things perceived and the future of things hoped for. Religious memory, memory of what God has done, is not in this sense simply a matter of accurately remembering the past; it is a matter of truthfully remembering for the future. The past matters not only as an account of what has been, but also as a promise of what is to be.
This whole month – as we have celebrated All Saints Day, All Souls Day and now Remembrance Sunday – has given us opportunity to remember with thanksgiving all those who in family and friendship, the community of faith, and in the life of our communities and country have been part of the shaping of our own life.
So calling to mind all that has been, we look to God’s future – the future envisioned by Micah [in our first reading today] – for a time of peace when all peoples will want to learn about the Lord our God and walk in his ways.
As Christian people, we are called to be peacemakers – as we are reminded in the Beatitudes. The Christian Gospel is about reconciliation with God. Only when we are reconciled to God can we offer reconciliation with one another. It is good to remember that the background of the Gospel is Jewish, and high on the list of Hebrew priorities was that of just relationships. To be reconciled to God is to be the agent of reconciliation in his world. To love God is to love one another. The lovely Jewish greeting, Shalom, means that you wish another person all that makes for his or her good. Peace, then, is a strong word. It means so much more than the absence of war. It means the establishment of a just society and it means compassionate relationships.
Each of us is called to be a peacemaker in the places where we live and work. Peace needs to start with ourselves. Our prayer needs to be, “And let it begin with me, Lord”. If we have a deep conviction about real justice and real compassion, then we need always to be on the lookout for ways of being part of the solution, not part of the problem. God calls us to be different, to stand up and be counted for what we believe in.
So, in conclusion, on this day – Remembrance Sunday - we look to God’s future with renewed hope, for the only true peace, as today’s Gospel reading reminds us. True peace - not as the world gives, but that which comes from God himself, through Jesus the Son and in the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen.