Remembrance Sunday
12th November 2017
Sermon
Genesis 12.1-3; II Corinthians 5.19-6.1
One hundred years ago this week the Third Battle of Ypres ended. In three months of brave, determined, and sacrificial conflict, beset with appalling weather and trench conditions, there were over half a million fatalities - more Allies than Germans. Although the Allies eventually secured Passchendaele, a small Belgian village, the battledidn’t achievethe major advance against the Germans for which Field Marshall Haig hoped. Three years into the Great War, it had reached stalemate, even if the Germans’ difficulty in replacing troops lost at Passchendaele made more inevitable the eventual Armistice a year later. The third battle of Ypres was grim; images and descriptions suggest it was the nearest many would ever see to hell.
So, when we gather on Remembrance Sunday, let no-one mock us as if we were glorying in war. We are here honouring both those who in the battle against injustice have made the supreme sacrifice, and honouring, too, those whose sacrifice was that they lived on, diminished by life-changing injury, by unrelieved mental torture, by desolating grief, or by haunting memories held forever in the secrecy of their own heart.
In truth, humanity has never taken an attitude of undiluted delight in war. The Iliad, by Homer,was written some two and half thousand years ago. On the surface, it graphically narrates the Trojan War. Some Greeks are attacking Troy, in modern day Turkey. The Greeks seek victory in order not only to gain the city, but also their king’s wife, who’s eloped with one of Troy’s princes. As so often in war, politics and passion become inextricably entwined. The Trojans are equally eager to win the war; losing would leave some slain and others enslaved, cities destroyed and freedom lost. But after years of brutality, like the Great War, the Trojan War seemed to have reached stalemate. A decade in, Homer depicts not a glorying in battle but a longing for peace. He described the conflict as ‘wretched, accompanied by many tears, bringing much woe and dread’. [1] Even those who believe in the cause want a better way to resolve it. And although most of The Iliad’s action is about war, the epic poem is consistently punctuated with powerful scenes of peace, evocations of nature and even such sympathy for the defeated enemy that the victors struggle to rejoice in their triumph.
2017 sees another interesting anniversary. it’s one hundred and fifty years since Alfred Nobel (1833-96) invented dynamite in 1867. Although we might know it more as an explosive for blasting rock, it was also a weapon of immense force, as its name suggests, the word ‘dynamite’ coming from the Greek dunamis, meaning power. But this Swedish arms manufacturer was not the unreconstructed ‘merchant of death’, that he was once called, in a premature obituary that was erroneously published about Alfred when his brother, Ludwig died in 1888. [2] Nobel hoped that dynamite would be so effective a weapon that it would deter people from making war; he wrote to Baroness Bertha von Suttner, a campaigning pacifist: ‘Perhaps my factories will put an end to war sooner than your congresses: on the day that two army corps can mutually annihilate each other in a second, all civilised nations will surely recoil with horror and disband their troops.’ And if that hope wasn’t enough to persuade us that he shared the Trojans’ heart for peace, how ironic that Nobel’s fortune funds the Nobel Peace Prize. The irony is only made more cruel by how over-optimistic his words have turned out to be.
There are brutes on this planet, whose excesses have to be curbed by our ‘determined, brave and sacrificial’ opposition. That’s part of history’s witness; tragically it’spart of life. But however inescapable war might be, surely it is neither where we can begin our understanding of civilised society, nor where it can rest. Which of us is not like the Trojans, longing for peace? Which of us is not like Alfred Nobel, wanting to celebrate peace-makers?
Depicting an era of history far closer to the Trojans than to us, the Bible has Abraham hear God tell him what God expects of people. So we heard ‘You are blessed in order to be a blessing.’ It suggests to us that a fundamental purpose for which God made us is to bless one another. Not to curse. Not to destroy. Not to dominate. But to bless – to enrich and build up, to protect and love.
And to the Corinthians, St Paul sums up what the life and work of Jesus was all about. Crucially, he uses the word ‘reconciliation’, which is about bringing things together. For Paul, Jesus brings people together with God, and together with each other. In short, the Christian’s primary purpose is both to be reconciled and to be reconcilers.
Regardless of what we think of religion or even of God, here are two ideas that speak directly to our contemporary world, blighted as it is by such determined separation, by too many indicators of self-preservation, and by too ready a resort to violence. The Bible has these insistently prophetic words for 2017: that we must unrelentingly intend to be a blessing for those around us, and tirelessly aspire to be reconciled to one another. Insofar as those we remember today were driven by such noble ideals, we honour them, and in order truly to honour them, we follow their example. Perhaps it is this commitment to bless and reconcile by which we best demonstrate that God’s grace toward us ‘is not in vain’. So it is that our willingness to bless and to reconcile is also the real ‘dynamite’ that is worth remembering today, surpassed in strength only by the love of God, which is how we describe the light that exploded into the world at the resurrection of Jesus Christ and that shines on inextinguishably through the darkness, triumphantly dispersing the shadows, sustaining us with hope and even renewing us with joy. May it be so. Amen.
N. P. Uden
12th November 2017
[1] Alexander, Caroline 2015 Homer - The Iliad: A new translation by Caroline Alexander London: Vintage Introduction, page xii
‘Lugrós, polúdakros, dusȇlegȇs, ainós - wretched, accompanied by many tears, bringing much woe and dread: These are the adjectives The Iliad uses for war.’
[2]Le marchand de la mort est mort("The merchant of death is dead")A description of Alfred Nobel in a premature obituary, erroneously published by a French newspaper when his brother, Ludwig died in 1888.