Remembrance Sunday Reflections 2019

We honour the fallen by rejecting all forms of violence, opposing expressions of nationalism and striving to live as one world - God's world.

On Armistice Day, 101 years ago tomorrow, crowds poured out into the street of our villages, towns and cities to celebrate victory, confident that good had triumphed over evil once and for all. Peace had “broken out”. “It will never happen again,” they said. Those who had opposed going to war were vilified, for it had now been justified. But amid all that partying, singing and dancing, there were other stories. The young Vera Brittain, who had been a nurse in France and herself wounded, had lost her fiancé, two close male friends and her only brother. 

As she walked away from the gates of Buckingham Palace can you imagine the questions and the torment in her mind? Trying to justify the suffering and sacrifice. Would she feel like dancing ever again? There were others too, many of whom had no body to bury. I’m sure, however, that even they were at least glad it was over, and that no more young lives would be lost. I have read some really sad stories of people who did not hear the news of the death in the last days of the war of their loved ones until after the armistice – their rejoicing was shattered weeks later.  And of course, there were those, men and women, who were poisoned in the battlefield or in the munitions factories who died years after.  We all know that a good deal of the pain was suppressed, often at personal cost to the minds of the survivors. PTSD was simply called “shell shock”

People did gradually make some semblance of sense out of the chaos of those celebrations; the gay abandonment to singing and dancing subsided and became more realistic as the national cost was revealed. The country was bankrupt of course, people’s homes had been destroyed, inflation soared, but life had to return soon to normality and productivity. 

It was a country that was discontented.  Extreme class division was more apparent. Stanley Baldwin, later to become Prime Minister, declared that the government was “comprised of hard-faced men who had done well out of the war”. Coal mining had been nationalised during the war, but was then handed back to the ruthless private owners to try to suppress the social expectations that had been rising before the war. Soldiers returning home needed jobs, so women had to return to menial work, even though those over 30 and with property had now been emancipated. 

But Lloyd George, sensing opportunities, declared that, “the nation is now in a molten state. We cannot return to the old ways, the old abuses, the old stupidities. The Great War,” he said, “was like a star shell flashing over the land and illuminating the country, showing up the deep dark places. We have seen these deep dark places and we intend to put them right.” 

Peace? Freedom? Certainly not for many, possibly not for most people. 

And also at the international table, Lloyd George again clashed with European leaders arguing that a true victory for good should not inflict penalties on Germany. The harsh option, wanted by so many other national leaders, would, he prophesied, lead to “the whole thing again in 25 years at three times the cost”. Need I say more? It was only 21 years later it all happened again. What an utter waste of life.

So, what are we doing today – Remembrance Sunday? Are we in danger, in our cosy part of the world, of perpetrating the myth that peace was won on Armistice Day.

Let’s pause to think. On this day just over a century ago there was a celebration of a unbridled nationalistic victory of good over evil. We “won the war” after all! Germany lost, they capitulated. 

But, in my opinion, there is no place for nationalistic triumphalism today. I think history has been re-written to declare the end of the war as a triumph of one lesser , though absolutely horrendous, evil, over a greater evil, not of a national victory. Most people are more aware than ever of our duty and obligations to each other on this fragile planet. We are interdependent on every other nation. Borders, as was apparent after the first world war, are all man-made. The air, the water and all resources on God’s earth do not belong to any one nation. While there is always a time and a place for celebrating our national culture and traditions, and always will be, today is not a time for echoing triumphalism and dominance.

Then, in the decade after WW1 many memorials included the words, “the supreme sacrifice”. When Jesus made The Supreme Sacrifice, he provided a solution, once and for all, to all the evil that ever was and ever will be – he offered eternal and real peace. The war did not do that. It did not provide a solution to the wrongs of this world; indeed, as I have said, there was more discontent and further suffering to come. As the years passed, those words were carved fewer times on memorials as people realised the folly. Yes, the lives were “sacrificed” for the cause, often in many hopeless and speculative assaults on the enemy, to gain inches of territory, mud, and sometimes simply to soak up enemy fire. We hear many tales of individual bravery, putting one’s own life at risk for the safety of another and indeed sometimes sacrificing one’s own life. But, history now tells us as we gaze upon row upon row of white gravestones, it was an horrendous waste of life and the peace won was only a temporary cessation of hostility. The potential of many lives went unfulfilled. It was selfless and often brave for the sake of our country, but, as a sacrifice, it did not achieve God’s peace. 

Then the word “Remembrance” means re-membering, putting the members together again, making sense of things. I don’t know how to do that. I can’t make sense of it. We can’t put back together bodies blown apart and lives wrecked. The poems of Wilfred Owen try despairingly to make sense of the reality of war and fail. Only our Lord can really re-member the dead.

And “Com-memorating” – remembering together, sharing a memory of the past together. How do we do that? We are getting to the stage of losing the living tangible connections, even to the second world war. With the archive of material, we now have, we can get only a glimpse of what it was like. 

Generations today can only grieve over what we imagine it might have been like, and our imaginations fall short, so I’m not sure that we can honestly claim the word “com-memoration” any more. Maybe that’s just semantics, but we mustn’t pretend we can know what it was like. 

And I fear the proliferation of poppy art installations can easily become a nicely sanitised, sentimental or emotional act and mask the need of a really sincere commitment to honour each and every individual person who has died in all conflicts and really change our ways.

I think that’s a good word, honour. My view is that our responsibility as Christian people is to honour the past as we stand in silence today as a world community, not as a nation that won a war, but as a wider world of sane, humanitarian people, in solidarity against any form of repression, domination and exploitation by big strong nations over smaller weaker countries, military or economic, against any form of war. So how do we best honour the lives that have been lost?

We, by influencing our leaders, must solve the dichotomy of this dualistic world - where a few rich nations call the tune over world trade. And the same select nations hold arsenals of nuclear weapons, using the fear of military power to intimidate and suppress. Mr Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, has said this last week that we should abandon all nuclear weapons. Posturing and threatening violence does a real disservice to those who have died in wars. It perpetrates the myth that military might can achieve peace. We see time and time again how arms’ sales dictate political policies, actually causing famine and suffering – that’s obscene. Current politics is all self-fulfilling and just repeats the mistakes of the past. It will all keep coming around again unless we find a fair way of working as one world. As it stands there will never be real peace, the peace of God, on earth.

Our leaders are only stewards and we pray they become aware whom they serve. It is the love of God, shown by the supreme sacrifice of Jesus, that can win a real victory and achieve world peace. If we don’t believe this and act on it, we collude with the status quo. If we believe prayer works and Jesus died to bring peace, we can change the world. Not overnight, but in time. Prayer always gives us hope, because prayer will change our attitudes.

As Jesus said in today’s Gospel Reading from Luke, God is Lord of the living, not of the dead. It is in praying for and actively campaigning for peace, rejecting all forms of violence, that we genuinely honour the memory of those who have died and serve our Lord for the world today.

Malcolm Guite’s Poem about Remembrance Sunday sums it up very well…
Click here to hear it...Silence