Readings Micah 4, 1-5 and Philippians 4, 6-9
We will remember them.
It is 70 years ago this year that the Second World War began, and it is 90 years since we first held a remembrance Sunday – 91 since the end of the war, so 90 since the first annual marking of its ending.
But of course – and unfortunately - Remembrance Sunday is about so much more than that these days. It has been hard this week to frame in my mind what to say today after events first in Afghanistan and then in Fort Hood, Texas, in which virtues like honour and trust were discarded for personal and political gain at the cost of 18 lives.
I want to start with the obvious. Remembrance Sunday is ever more important year by year, as the number of living veterans of the first Armistice Day dwindles to almost none. It also remains important because in the news every day, and never more so perhaps than this week, conflict, death and injury are unavoidable, and we need to find some way of making sense of it all. I hope in what we do here today and what I say in this address we can try to do that.
In the three years we have been here there have probably been more deaths of UK service personnel than at any time for a good few years. But the conflicts that have taken their lives are far away from our lives; we do not see what they saw and we do not share their experience in any way really, in spite of the media coverage it all gets. This is a great contrast with conflicts of the past where the nation was under a fairly constant threat and the population as a whole considered themselves to be at war, even though it took weeks sometimes for news to get through. I guess that although we are constantly aware of what’s going on in Afghanistan, we do not actually consider ourselves to be at war – these days that is what soldiers do. So today of all days, we should not forget them.
The most significant thing I have learned in getting to know soldiers over the last few years is that they all love peace; they strive for it and long for it. That is why a reading like Philippians 4 is actually a good one for today; at first hearing these words do not sit well in a context of war, especially if you are a pacifist, but put yourself in the shoes of a soldier in Kandahar reading these words today from his or her special Armed Forces edition of the new testament. What better words could there be to both encourage and comfort someone like that? Yes it is true that there is very little that is true, noble, right, pure, lovely, admirable, excellent or praiseworthy in what we see on our TV screens from war zones around the world. All the more reason then for us, as for that hypothetical Bible –reading soldier to follow the apostle Paul’s advice to the Philippians and think about these things, because by their very nature they remind us of God’s Kingdom, and they focus our minds on trying to bring that to fruition.
Which is also what is going on in the prophecy of Micah 4. It has a short term fulfilment in the return of God’s people from exile, but when we reads it with our New Testament Christian glasses on, we see it referring metaphorically to the future rule and reign of God, with the consequence of peace and reconciliation. It is a famous passage often cited by people who oppose war, but I wanted us to hear it today because I believe Micah speaks into our current world as a voice of hope for the future, and as an encouragement to see the sacrifice of wars past and present not as futile, but as building towards a future in which the words of Micah speak of reality, not as a prophecy, and the words of Paul to the Philippians are more immediately relevant. We are not yet beating our sword into ploughshares, and there is still a lot of ugliness dishonesty, impurity, ignobility, and so on in the world, but our purpose in acting as we are called to, whether military or civilian, must be to work within God’s plan towards the goal these words spur us on to.
It is traditional on occasions such as today to draw a comparison between the sacrifice of Christ and the sacrifice of human lives in war, and in one sense my conclusion today is not going to deviate from that tradition. I will say as I always do that any comparison must point to the supremacy of Christ’s sacrifice, because its efficacy, as we are about to sing, means that God’s wrath is turned away form humanity – “On that cross as Jesus died, the wrath of God was satisfied”.
There is a painting that belongs to the Royal Corps of Signals in Blandford, Dorset. It is called “Through”, and it depicts the body of a signaller, lying in open ground it what is clearly a battle situation. The signaller has given his life to re-connect a severed signals line, thus enabling two separated groups of soldiers to communicate. To me there is no co-incidence in the fact that the soldier’s body lies with arms outstretched and knees drawn up to one side, in the manner of a crucified body. The painting tells a story about human heroism, but it portrays a more profound truth about the supreme sacrifice, of Jesus Christ, which restored the connection between God and humanity that had been broken by human sinfulness.
Paul wrote to the Philippians, telling them “the peace of God which transcends all understanding will guard your hearts in Christ Jesus”. The key words in that phrase are the last three – God’s peace is made available to us in Christ Jesus – through faith in him and by an acceptance of the validity of his teaching and the achievements of his sacrifice.
As we remember today all those in the past and in the present whose lives were spent in protecting our freedom, I feel the best way of making sense of the pain and the suffering of war today is to look at it all in the light of Christ’s own suffering. Not that we see Afghanistan as some kind of holy war, but that our understanding of what is happening in the world is always subject to the sovereignty of God.
