Sermon at Holy Trinity Church, East
Grimstead - Remembrance Sunday - Sunday 9 November 2014[i]
Amos 5:18-24; 1
Thessalonians 4:13-end
May I speak in the name
of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Amen
Whenever I stand in silence for those two minutes on each
Remembrance Sunday I not only remember those who have died in those two World Wars and other conflicts
since then, but I also reflect on the fact that I belong to a very privileged
generation for whom those great and devastating wars are no more than pages in
history books. Having been born only 8 years after the plutonium bomb was
detonated over Nagasaki, I have lived in a period of relative peace and
prosperity for which I regularly, through worship, give thanks to God.
When I was a child a regular event in our household was to
watch the Royal British Legion’s Festival of Remembrance from the Royal Albert
Hall on our small 9-inch black and white TV.
Back then in the 1960s a large number of veterans from World War I,
together with veterans of my own parents’ age (or slightly older) from World
War II, would march into the Arena. They
would include Chelsea Pensioners who had been at Gallipoli, Jutland, Ypres and
so on – servicemen and women who had real and vivid memories of the horrors of
those two global conflicts – who had seen, for themselves, comrades killed and
companions maimed and many who had seen the legacy of evil and inhumane regimes
in Europe and Asia.
As a child, the war held a great fascination for me and many
of my schoolboy friends and invoked a great interest in modern history –
especially as many of my friends’ parents and my own family members could
remember vividly the Blitz and Battle of Britain – when the Second World War
came to our shores. Today, whole generations have grown up having little or no
understanding of those horrors although, of course, here in Wiltshire there are
many families involved in the armed forces which, today, have personal
experiences of the effects of warfare in far off lands; where our servicemen
and women continue to fight for justice and peace.
However, for many of our younger generation, there is no real
concept of why those, whose names are engraved on our war memorials, gave up
their lives. Indeed, recently, during a
discussion with a school friend of my 13-year old daughter, it became clear
that she had no idea who Winston Churchill was, let alone the role he had
played for this country in those dark days of the 1940s.
Remembrance Sunday, then, is such an important occasion – not
just for those veterans to recall what they went through or to remember
companions who never survived the conflicts, but also so that those generations
from my own onwards may clearly understand why so many lives were given, and
are able to continue to give praise and thanks that so many stemmed the tide of
evil which could have so easily engulfed the world.
Today, those conflicts in which our troops are engaged are
largely in far flung parts of the world and the issues which have provoked them
are complex. Again many young people
have no real understanding or concept as to why or where these conflicts are
taking place – indeed many adults, including some politicians it could be
argued, don’t, either. Although these
modern conflicts may be remote, the battles now often fought with technology,
and the victims largely unknown to us, the horrors are still the same.
The true reality of those horrors perpetrated by the Nazis in
World War 2 was brought home to me and to my 17-year old son, Thom, quite
recently. He and I spent a short break
in Poland a couple of summers ago and
during our trip we arranged a visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau – the infamous
extermination camp about 50 miles from Krakow in the south of the country. In this terrible place, 2.3 million people
were sent to the gas chambers – many from Western European occupied countries
including the Channel Islands - and to
where an estimated 700,000 British Jews and other “undesirables” would have
been sent had the Germans ever successfully invaded and occupied the United
Kingdom.
Thom had read about the Holocaust in history books but I
don’t think had any concept of the scale of the atrocities committed in that
one single camp.
As we approached Birkenau in our minibus, the first thing to
be seen was the infamous Hell’s Gate – the railway gatehouse into the camp. His
face dropped and his complexion was ashen.
He turned to me and simply said “Dad
it’s in colour, it’s real!” Up to
that point he had only seen it in black and white photographs in history books.
In that split second, his perception of the horrors of that evil regime turned
from the recorded pages of history to the reality of the suffering and horrors
beyond that real gate.
And so, the importance of today cannot and should not ever be
trivialised. We owe it to forthcoming
generations to keep alive the memory of those brave fallen and the causes for which
they fell – to remember the evil which could have engulfed us. In the words of the Kohima they gave their
today so that we, all of us and the generations to follow, could have our
tomorrows.
In his later letter to the Thessalonians, Paul reminds us that
the return of our Saviour Jesus Christ will only come after the “lawless one”
is revealed through rebellion. In other
words, as Christians we are expected to uphold the ethics which we have been
taught by Jesus and should stand up against and expose all who would deceive the truth as revealed by
him. Throughout history leaders have
waged war and oppressed people either in the name of Christianity or by
pretending to be Christians themselves.
In Nazi Germany, Hitler and his regime tried to appeal to Catholics and
Lutherans alike that there was a score to settle against the Jews because the
Jewish leadership had been responsible for Jesus’s crucifixion.
Last year I read a wonderful book of sermons, lectures and
speeches by former Archbishop Desmond Tutu with the interesting title of “God is not a Christian”. In it he reminds us that there is only one
omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent God – creator of all thing and all
people, everybody, black white, and yellow.
He appeals to Christians and God-fearing people everywhere, just as Paul
does, to stand up against tyranny and oppression. He puts it simply – If the Church is not
going to stand up for the poor, the hungry, the oppressed, the discriminated,
then who is?
This brings me back to the two-minute silence. During those two minutes I try to recall all
the battles of the two world wars, all the sites of oppression, all those areas
of suffering, the blitz, the death camps, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Hamburg and so on
and especially members of the church like Bonhoeffer and Maximilian Kolbe. Two minutes is simply not long enough.
I praise and thank all those who have so courageously given
their lives to oppose tyranny and evil.
Let us never forget them.
Amen
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