Remembrance Sunday

I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen.

Hope without remembrance leads to illusion, just as, conversely, remembrance without hope can result in resignation (x2).

We all know those frustratingly positive people who seem to have a strange way of remembering the past. No, Geoff, or whatever their name is, we really were outplayed on the football pitch by that team when we played them last. No, that project really didn’t go as well as it could have done. No, we weren’t okay back then. We all know those people who are perhaps overally hopeful, who don’t moderate hope with a true remembrance of how things really where, with a good dose of reality. But we also all know those people who, conversely, remember very well how badly things went but have no hope. Sometimes, when those people can’t shake memories of the past and really don’t know where to find hope, this can result in trauma, where the person is stuck in the experience of that memory. Hope without remembrance leads to illusion, just as, conversely, remembrance without hope can result in resignation.

Today, we remember. We remember the lives lost in the Great War at the beginning of the Twentieth Century, and all the lives lost in conflict before and since. We remember the lives lost at home, the lives lost abroad, and the lives lost here, in this parish. We remember those who we might have family or community connections with, and we remember all those unknown to us, especially those who have no one to remember them and pray for them.

Armistice day, the day the fighting of WW1 ended, is a day of remembrance and a day of hope. At the Imperial War Museum, as part of the Armistice Centenary events, an immersive exhibition includes a sound recording of the actual moment of the ceasefire. It was created from an original graphic document made at the time, with graphic recording of sound onto photographic paper being used during the war to work out the exact location of enemy artillery. It records the moment of the ceasefire, at the River Moselle (Mowzel). A barrage of continuing heavy gunfire is heard at 10:58 in the final moments. By one minute past the hour there is silence. The gunfire has stopped. And into that great silence you hear the sound of birdsong, the first remarkable sounds of peace. The war has ended. Peace has come. It is incredibly moving. Do listen to it if you can, you can find it online.

A few quotes from people’s experience of armistice: Dolly Shepherd, a 31 year-old driver mechanic with the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps in Calais, declared, “Strangely enough, we wept, because the silence was so awful. You see we’d been used to the noise of guns, all day long, all day long, all day long… it was so strange, to have silence.” In contrast, Clara Thompson, a 13 year-old school girl at the time, remembered the celebrations that followed the ceasefire: “They brought out a piano into the street, and they set up tables all down the middle of the road and everybody danced and sang and, oh it was amazing.”

Every Sunday, as we receive the bread and wine in Communion, we remember and we hope. We remember that, in Jesus, God showed us who God really is - a God who says to those who suffer, to those who are treated unjustly, to those who have no one, God says, I am with you. On the Cross, God chose to be the God humanity wanted him to be, the God who suffers humanity’s judgement of him. But on the Cross, God is there with all those who have suffered at the unjust treatment and ungenerous, destructive judegment of humanity. God was there with those soldiers in the trenches who were caught up and unable to escape the ungodly game of power played by warped human beings. We might ask, what difference did it really make to those soldiers that Jesus died on the Cross? In what sense was he really with them?

This life is a bit like a dream, or, as we remember today, like a nightmare. In a dream, a person passes through a whole constellation of events in the time it takes for a curtain to rustle. So in this life, as in a dream, it might feel like day to day events are moving at a normal, drawn-out pace, but when we wake from our sleep, we realise that this life was but the blink of an eye. Every Sunday, we remember that God showed us who he is, united with those who suffer, but we also remember that we have hope and we remember what that hope is. Just as Jesus woke from the dead, so we remember that our hope is that we also will awake from this life, we will be born from the womb of this world. That is not to say that this life doesn’t matter, it really does matter for who we are and who we will be. This life is a school of love and when we know that Jesus was with us in our suffering, we will really know what love is. Not just know but really really know.

Hope without remembrance leads to illusion, just as, conversely, remembrance without hope can result in resignation. Let us remember those fallen and pray for them, pray for their birth into new life, and pray that they and we might really know we are loved and how to love in return.

I will end with a quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor who was killed by the Nazis just before the end of the war for defying Hitler. He writes, “Remembrance Sunday is particularly moving this time because, after all that has happened during the past months, one feels such a tremendous longing for real peace at last, in which all the misery and injustice, the lying and cowardice will come to an end, in which the struggle is over and all is quiet, resting in a strong hand... Life in a prison cell may well be compared to Advent: one waits, hopes, and does this, that, or the other—things that are really of no consequence—the door is shut, and can only be opened from the outside. For God alone my soul waits in silence, for my hope is from him. He alone is my rock and my salvation, my fortress; I shall not be shaken. On God rests my deliverance and my honor; my mighty rock, my refuge is in God. Trust in him at all times, O people; pour out your heart before him; God is a refuge for us” (Psalm 62).

We remember.