20241110 MCC Remembrance

As you can probably imagine, Remembrance is always a difficult and emotionally-charged season for me. While in the Navy I was blessed not to have known anyone who died in conflict or on duty, but I have often told the story of the moment the cost of war became real to me in the starkest possible manner.

Please indulge me one more time.

It was in the spring, and I was at home on leave. I got a phone call from my collegue giving me an address in the Peak District and telling me where I was to meet an officer from the Royal Marines. Time was of the essence if we were to beat the press.

I drove to the small town in Derbyshire and rendezvoused with my companion for the evening. After a delay which seemed to last an eternity, we were given the go-ahead to approach the house. This was a neat semi-detached house in a 1960s estate built on the hillside. The garden was well-kept and the driveway and footpath led up to a glass front porch. This could have been anyone’s house; this could have been your house, this could have been my house. Every detail of that evening is seared into my memory for eternity: the sitting room with the TV on and the glasses of wine - even the cat emerging from behind the curtain. But the moment which caused my heart to miss was the moment the woman answered the door. Truly, I tell you, I can hear her scream at this very moment. The scream only a mother can scream when she knows she will never see her baby again. I remember feeling totally inadequate and questioning what comfort I could possibly bring to the darkest moment this woman would ever experience. The words I thought I had seemed trite and shallow in the face of the enormity of the moment.

And for any of us taking any notice of world events for the past year, have we not heard that scream more times than human endurance can bear?

Politicians and pundits talk of the cost of war in pounds and dollars; campaigners speak of the military-industrial complex taking precious public funding and having undue influence over public policy. But the cost of war is measured in a currency not of pounds or dollars but in broken hearts - mainly, but not exclusively women’s hearts.

As if that were not enough - and you might have guessed with my choice of music this morning - we currently live in dark and troubled times. We all have many reasons to fear the term of the 47th President of the United States and this year our own armed forces - possibly some of my former colleagues - have been operational on what will undoubtedly be recorded as the “wrong” side of history. (Cue for jeers from Scotland, Ireland and many former colonies and cries of “Told you so!”) But I still believe, as I must, that the UK armed forces exist as a force for good.

As a Christian, a veteran, a minister and, today your preacher, this Remembrance season - more than any previous - causes me deep troubling emotions. As your minister you have charged me with the task of guiding you through Remembrance, bringing Scripture into our deliberations and celebrating the truth of the Christian Hope. That task has never been more difficult than this year.

Guided by the memory of that scream, I’m drawn back to the neat house in Derbyshire. How empty and futile any words of comfort might seem now - now that we know that the Afghanistan the young Royal Marine died to liberate is now more oppressed than ever. Women and girls have no value, no voice, no education and no hope. In one well-reported conflict this year the horrifying statistic is that 70% of the fatalities are women and children. Why is it the women who must suffer again?

This very spot where I am standing and the organ behind me once experienced the thunderous tones of Elgar’s Land of Hope and Glory sung by our very own Dame Clara Butt-Rumford. Staple of the Last Night of the Proms and an occasional guest at Festivals of Remembrance, this is the song appropriated to celebrate the victory over oppression won at tremendous and almost unquantifiable human cost in the two world wars.

Yet, this past week, we have seen our closest allies elect a new President with a declared programme which can only be termed as “oppression” and “authoritarianism”. To prove the point, those in his party in power in various States have already started the work - by denying medical care to women.

Has anyone noticed a theme?

I pity my counterparts across the pond as they too experience the trauma of breaking the news to families that their loved-ones are not coming home. From this time they will have even fewer words of comfort at their disposal than I had. There can be no talk of a grateful nation honouring their war dead - not with a President elect who has variously referred to serving personnel - the captured, the injured and the dead - as “losers”.

Heaven forbid! But can he be right?

In spite of one of the biggest combined military operations of recent times, Afghanistan remains savage and deeply oppressed. This year, as we commemorate 80 years since some of the key battles in the latter part of the second World War, credible challenges to liberty and humanity have again emerged triumphant in the West. The coup d’ etat we have just witnessed was almost bloodless. The stormtroopers didn’t march along Cable Street but sat at their keyboards tapping fake news, lies and disinformation into social media. What an acutely agonising irony which proves that the pen - or even typed word - is mightier than the sword.

Is our Remembrance this year doomed to be a commemoration of the human folly of confronting evil?

Not so! And the answer has been in front of you all this time...

If we come back to our passage from Micah here is an expression of Hope for the faithful - notwithstanding the fact that it delivers the Lord’s rebuke to me, having spent four years of my time in the Navy, actually teaching war.

As I might hope that the music we brought you this morning is of the moment, so I present to you Micah as the Scripture of the moment (and, while we’re about it, in the light of this week’s news you might want to dust off your understanding of the theologian, Bonhoeffer! Just saying). As we might describe ourselves now, Micah lived in the darkest of times. A contemporary of Isaiah, he prophecied in the years leading up to the Exile. Popular he was not. We might think of fake news as somtheething recent, but Micah was fact-checking fake news and disinformation before we even had words for them. While known as a “minor” prophet, it is his book which contains some of the most profound words in Scripture. I have frequently told you to look out for the words of John’s Gospel which bring us the explanation of the incarnation at Christmas; the second part of your homework is to look out for the words of the prophet Micah. For those who can’t wait, read Micah 5:2.

Micah’s utopian vision as we heard this morning tells us two things: firstly, nation fighting nation is not God’s purpose; secondly, darkness and conflict are only for a season and - rather like in last week’s passage from Revelation - the fulfilment of God’s purpose is something new and perfect.

But is there the prospect I’ve been reading this wrong for however many years? The well-known phrase “swords into ploughshares” is one of the few turns of phrase we don’t owe to Shakespeare. Let us look forward to a time of peace where we can recycle instruments of war into productive tools for peace. This is part of the utopian future of the Kingdom of God. This is the day we long for. This is the day celebrated and foretold as we recognise the poppy as a symbol of remembrance and celebration of peace - growing as it does on the chaos of former battlefields.

But in preparing for this morning I was forced to ponder if I - and, to be fair, most people - had completely missed the point.

Again, I tell you, the answer is in front of you! (There would have been a time when I would have said: “Can you tell what it is yet?” - but no longer!)

As Christians we are vulnerable to the accuation that we are “too heavenly minded to be any earthly use” as we look forward to the coming perfection of the Kingdom of God. Yet it only takes a few moments with the letter of James, which we looked at in our harvest a few weeks ago, to realise that we acre called to celebrate and live the Kingdom now in how we take up the responsibilities of discipleship. Micah has these words for the people of God:

Micah 6:8 “He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”

That’s not for some utopia in some undefined future - that’s for now. This is not after we have transformed our swords into ploughshares, this is how we transform our swords into ploughshares. Tools of death and destruction become tools of life - and life abundant as Jesus himself promised. This is not some woolly daydream of someone who can’t see the reality of the evil in the world, this is following a verified worked example.

The answer is in front of you - can you tell what it is yet?

What is the cross but both the tool and symbol of death and destruction?

What is the cross but the cause of life and life abundant?

How did this genuinely world-transforming miracle take place? The one who transformed the cross lived the life that was good, did justice, loved kindness and walked humbly with God.

We are called to do the same.

And on this day of Remembrance we also hear the call from John McRae - the man who wrote the poem In Flanders’ Fields. The last stanza reads:

Take up our quarrel with the foe:

To you from failing hands we throw

The torch; be yours to hold it high.

If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

In Flanders fields.

At this Remembrance season we recognise that this is the same call - to continue to battle evil with the tools of justice, kindness and humilty. Rather than sadly remembering those “bought it” and never returned home, Remembrance honours what they died for and should redouble our efforts to fight the darkness with the weapons of grace we have already been given.

And this is for real.

We have seen that today’s tools of destruction are Facebook and Twitter; how do we transform them into tools for life and life in abundance? This is not a rhetorical question.

“We will remember them” - now honour them and continue the work.