Sermon at St. John’s Church, West
Grimstead - Remembrance Sunday - Sunday 10 November 2013
2 Thessalonians 2: 1-5; 13-End
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
war – 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 12-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 can 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 16-year old son, Thom, quite
recently. He and I spent a short break
in Poland last summer 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.
And this is what, in effect, Paul is saying in our passage
from his second letter to the Thessalonians, read this morning. I could speak at great length about the
Christian ethical doctrines on the justification for war – but I’ll leave that
for the moment for my academic essay writing – there is also a good article in
this month’s Christianity magazine in the context of Syria. Instead I simply want to re-iterate Paul’s
thoughts here.
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.
I have just finished reading 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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