Sermons from St Peter & St Paul, Seal, Kent: Now what? Remembrance Sunday

Audio version here

Micah 4.1-4, Rev 22.1-5

Four years ago, the nation embarked on a long project, remembering and marking the anniversary of the First World War. In different ways, communities and individuals have been telling and retelling the stories of those terrible times. We’ve heard that long litany of battles, Passchendaele, Ypres, Gallipoli, the Somme, and less familiar stories of campaigns on the Eastern Front, in the Balkans and the Middle East and Africa, where the colonial powers fought over their foreign territories. We’ve remembered over these last four years the four, far longer years when the war ground on, killing 11 million military personnel and 8 million civilians and ruining the physical and emotional health of many more who survived. Land was devastated, communities torn apart. The world would never be the same again.

But finally, finally, here we are, recalling the moment 100 years ago on this very day when the Armistice was signed and the guns fell silent.

But then what? For those who were there at the time, 100 years ago, the emotions on that 11^th of November were very mixed. Vera Brittain, a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse working in London at the end of the war, who had lost her brother, fiancé and closest friends during the war, wrote this: “When the sound of victorious guns burst over London at 11 am on November 11^th, 1918, the men and women who looked incredulously into each other’s faces did not cry jubilantly: “We’ve won the War!” They only said: “The War is over.”

From Millbank I heard the maroons crash with terrifying clearness, and, like a sleeper who is determined to go on dreaming after being told to wake up, I went on automatically washing the dressing bowls in the annex outside my hut [at the hospital]…”

The reality of the Armistice in her life hit her later that day: “For the first time I realised, with all that full realisation meant, how completely everything that had had hitherto made up my life had vanished with Edward and Roland, with Victor and Geoffrey. The War was over; a new age was beginning; but the dead were dead and would never return.”

She described how the war had “condemned me to live to the end of my days in a world without confidence or security, a world in which every dear personal relationship would be fearfully cherished under the shadow of apprehension; in which love would seem threatened perpetually by death, and happiness appear a house without duration, built upon the shifting sands of chance. I might, perhaps, have it again, but never again should I hold it.”

Her words could have been echoed by millions of others. Four years ago here at Seal, we gathered together some of our own family stories of WW1. I put them together in a file which you can see in our display here, and I’ve also put a link to it on the church website. I called that project “The Long Shadow” because I wanted to emphasize the way in which WW1 had cast a shadow far into the future which can still affect families today. There are stories in our collection of the effects on future generations of living with survivors who had come back with physical and mental wounds which never quite healed. One contributor talked about her father who died prematurely of lung disease caused by being gassed. My own grandfather suffered for the whole of the rest of his life from the emotional scars of having fought at Gallipoli. There are stories in the collection of relationships formed during wartime too. My husband’s grandfather and grandmother met in Valenciennes at the end of the war when he was looking for a billet in a place which would also take the army dog he had rescued. Her family took them both in and the rest is history. There are stories in our collection of pride and of sorrow, of opportunities destroyed, and opportunities created, of faith lost and of faith found, of the courage of those who fought, and the courage of those who refused to fight.

They are stories which began in war, but shaped the world that came after it for those families too. As the war ended, people found themselves having to make new lives. It was as if whole populations of people had been washed out to sea in the storms of war, and cast up as driftwood on what looked like a completely alien shore.

“Now what?” was the question people had to ask themselves. “What do we do, how do we live, from now on?” It was the question that faced individuals – war widows and orphans, those wounded in body, mind or spirit, the jobless and homeless. It was the question that faced nations and governments too. The Prime Minister, David Lloyd-George, in his post-war election campaign urged the creation of a “fit country for heroes”, a phrase that has passed into common parlance, War had had exposed the poverty and poor living conditions of so many in the country. “We have seen places we have never noticed before, and we mean to put these things right,” he said. Internationally, the “now what?” question led to the formation of the League of Nations – the precursor to the United Nations - the first really large scale attempt to find ways for all the nations of the world to hold each other to account and work together.

But just 21 years later, the world was at war again, on an even larger scale. And for all the worthy intentions, war has been a constant reality somewhere around the world ever since. India and Pakistan, Korea, Vietnam, Northern Ireland, the Middle East, Afghanistan, Iraq, Congo – people have been killing each other, communities have been torn apart, nations have been impoverished by war continually, and always it is the most vulnerable who suffer most, children, women, the elderly and disabled. We dream of peace, just like the people who wrote the Bible readings we heard today. We dream of a time when people will beat “swords into ploughs” and never prepare for battle again, of a time when “there will be no more night”, as the Book of Revelation put it. But we wake up to conflict, insecurity and fear just as we always have done. We are living now in what seem like particularly frightening and dangerous times, where the threat of nuclear war has been revived, where the ties that have bound nations together in peace are being dissolved, where charismatic, in love with their own power, seem to be gathering followers.

Perhaps part of the problem is that, swamped by our own personal concerns – the school run, the job, the mortgage – we tend to outsource the business of making and keeping peace to leaders and governments. It’s nothing to do with us. We can’t do anything about world events. We forget that we are all called to be peacemakers. We forget that, in fact, if we don’t make peace where we are, there is absolutely no chance that governments will be able to make peace for us, because peace and war are born in the human heart.

War is born out of the small acts of vengeance and anger we commit every day, out of the rage that rises in us when someone pushes in front of us in the supermarket queue, out of our suspicion of those who are different from us. It is born out of our greedy desire to have the latest gadget at the lowest prices, and never mind who gets exploited as a result or what conflicts are triggered in finding the raw materials. But peace is born when we take the time and trouble to listen to one another, to get to know each other, to assume the best rather than the worst of one another. It’s the day to day actions of ordinary people which make or break the grand plans of the world’s governments, because together we create the climate in which war or peace can grow.

But in the short term, at least, it often feels easier to live in ways that lead to war than in ways that lead to peace. Becoming peacemakers means confronting our greed, our laziness, our insecurity. It’s hard and uncomfortable work, and we human beings – frail, fallible, mixed up, damaged – are never going to be able to do this by ourselves.

That’s why those Biblical images of peace that we heard today don’t focus just on what we should be doing. They talk too about what God can do for us and with us. It is God who teaches and leads us in the right paths, God who gives the strength we need to settle disputes rather than letting them spill over into war. It is God, these readings say, who is the light that never goes out, who heals the nations.

Later on in this service we are going to sing the hymn “I vow to thee my country”. It’s a stirring anthem which reminds us of the sacrifice of those who have been prepared to give their all. But it also talks of “another country” where things are very different from the ravaged and torn battlefields we recall at this Remembrancetide. It’s about the “other country” which Christians call the Kingdom of God. That’s not just a kingdom which we find after death, according to the Bible, but one which can be built where we are, in this present moment, if we are prepared to walk in the ways of gentleness and the paths of peace. It is built “soul by soul”, day by day, as we become the change we want to see.

“Now what?” was the question that people asked, when WW1 ended. “Now what?” is still the question for us.

Now what are we going to do about the rage in our own hearts?

Now what are we going to do break down barriers and build bridges rather than walls?

Now what are we going to do to grow into the people we need to be if we want to build a world of peace, that “other country” we dream of, the Kingdom of God?

We’ve remembered, over the last four years, a century old conflict as it unfolded. It’s good to remember, but if that’s all we do, we’ll betray the very memories we think we are treasuring. What matters is that we let those memories challenge us in our own time – to care for those who suffer the effects of war, to learn, teach and value the things that make for peace, and, most of all to ask God for the help we need to become peacemakers in our daily lives, so that we can see that “other country” grow in our midst, and the guns can fall silent forever.

Amen

It was great to have Seal Cubs and Beavers with us doing a reading and carrying flags .Some of Year 6 at Seal Primary School shared moving and imaginative poems they had written, imaging what it might be like to have been a soldier in WW1.