Isaiah 43. 15-21, Romans 8.18-25
If I were to ask you how hopeful you feel about our world, our nation, life in general at the moment, on a scale of 1 to 10, I wonder what score you would give? Minus numbers are permitted!
There might be some optimists here who believe that everything is just fine but my guess is that many of us are disturbed by the political instability and uncertainty we see around us. Debate between political parties and individuals is increasingly polarised and vicious. Truth seems to be an optional extra. Trust is thin on the ground. Even experienced commentators, who’ve seen governments come and go for decades, haven’t got a clue what is going to happen next.
And it’s not just domestic politics that worries us. The climate crisis is already having an impact on communities around the world, especially those already prone to flooding, drought, hurricanes or wildfires. People are losing their homes, their livelihoods, and even their lives, and its effects aren’t limited to the places directly affected. Climate change is causing mass migration, both because land can’t support the people who live on it anymore, but also because conflict is erupting over access to water and other natural resources, driving the refugee crisis that is touching us all. That’s why climate is relevant on this Remembrance Day, because it’s becoming a cause of war.
War doesn’t come out of nowhere. It starts with small arguments, petty disputes and resentments often rooted in greed and fear. It is fuelled by lazy stereotyping which demonises others, carelessly hurtful language, a lack of respect for the humanity of those we disagree with, which leads us to feel that we can ridicule and speak ill of them without it really mattering. These impulses lurk in all our hearts all the time– they are part of being human – but when they start to become an accepted part of our public discourse, as they seem to be doing now, we are on dangerous ground.
But what can we do that will make any difference?
One hundred and sixty years ago, on 24th June 1859 to be precise, a Swiss businessman called Henri Dunant arrived in the town of Solferino in Northern Italy. He’d come for a business meeting with Napoleon III, the Emperor of France at the time. But France was at war with the Austro-Hungarian empire, and Solferino had just, rather unexpectedly, become the front line. The day before Dunant arrived a huge and bloody battle had taken place there. Twenty three thousand men, from both sides, lay on the battlefield, injured, dying or dead. No one was doing anything for them. That was how warfare was at the time. If you were injured you just had to take your chances. Armies provided very few resources to care for their own wounded, and no one felt they had any responsibility at all to care for their enemies.
Dunant was horrified at the scale of the suffering he saw. But instead of turning tail and running away, he decided to do something about it. He went to the nearby towns and villages and mobilized the women who lived there. He organised medical supplies, food and water for the injured of both sides. The women who responded to his appeal, inspired by his vision, called those whom they nursed “tutti fratelli” – all brothers. It didn’t matter to them which side they’d fought on. If they needed help, they got it. We might take this for granted now, but at the time it was revolutionary, something completely new
That traumatic, life-changing experience inspired Dunant to found what is now the International Red Cross. The Geneva Convention was born from it too, setting protocols for the way nations should behave in war, protecting those who are injured or taken prisoner. Indirectly it was the foundation of the whole idea of international standards of justice, but it all started with one man who decided to do something new, something loving, in the face of evil.
Dunant was one among a long line of people who’ve chose hope over despair in times of war, who have refused to settle for “business as usual” - the endless cycle of retribution – and who’ve changed the world for the better as a result.
Around the same time as Solferino, Florence Nightingale was revolutionising the care of the wounded in the Crimean war, and, in the process, transforming the whole idea of nursing from a haphazard business which no self-respecting woman would want to be part of, into the respected and skilled profession it has become. A century later, the peoples of Coventry and Dresden, both bombed almost to obliteration, chose a path of reconciliation after World War 2, and still work together for peace. Our own welfare state and NHS grew out of the darkness of war, when rich and poor were thrown together and saw each other’s lives more clearly. At the darkest moment of the war, when there was no guarantee that Britain wouldn’t end up under Nazi rule, William Beveridge chose to believe in a better future in which what he described as the “giants” of Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness, were defeated. The system he created may not be perfect. It may be creaking at the seams. It may need reform. But it is a whole lot better than what went before it, which was nothing for many people. In more recent times, Nelson Mandela chose to forgive those who had imprisoned him, an almost unimaginable act of generosity and courage. He paved the way for a new beginning for the people of South Africa. None of these people had a magic wand to wave over the suffering of the world. None of them was perfect. But when everything around them spoke of despair, they chose to open their eyes, and the eyes of those around them to a future that could be different, to do something new.
In a few minutes the choir are going to sing a setting of some words from the book of Isaiah. “How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace.” Those who act hopefully in the face of hopelessness are messengers like that, people who announce good news to us all, the news that the future doesn’t have to be the same as the past, that there can be another way to live, that love is stronger than hatred. .
Our Bible readings today gave us the same message. The cubs read us another passage from Isaiah’s prophecy. Like most of the Bible , it was written in times of trouble. Jerusalem had been destroyed by the Babylonians. Its people were in exile in Babylon. It looked as if it was all over for them, that they would never go home. But Isaiah tells them that God is “about to do a new thing.” “Do not remember the former things” he says. Don’t get caught up in revenge, locked into old patterns of hatred and fear. This is the God who can make a new way, a way in the wilderness, a path through the sea – roads where we would never imagine there could be roads.
In the New Testament, St Paul talks about a new creation coming to birth. Giving birth can be hard work, and painful too, but at the end of it, if all goes well, there is new life, a new beginning, a new future. Paul, and those he wrote to, had every reason to despair. They followed a man, Jesus of Nazareth, who’d been crucified by the Romans as a troublemaker, but who they said had risen from death. They were committed to living a way of equality, love and respect for each other, breaking down the social order which separated slave from free, Jew from non-Jew, male from female. None of this was likely to endear them to those in power – the same people who had crucified Jesus. Many were killed for their faith, including Paul himself. This new Christian movement had no money, no buildings, no armies, no influence, no seat at the tables of power. It ought to have been doomed before it started, and yet here we are still telling the story of Jesus two thousand years later, still inspired by his life, death and resurrection, still finding in it wellsprings of hope for our own lives and for the world.
Hope might sometimes feel fragile and hard to find, but in reality it’s remarkably difficult to kill off entirely. It’s a bit like bindweed or ground elder, weeds which you can dig up, poison, burn year after year, but which grow back, and even multiply, from the tiniest root! Speaking as a gardener I don’t much like bindweed or ground elder, but you have to admire their stubborn tenacity, and I think hope is a bit like that. Just when you think it is all wiped out, there it is rising again in the lives of those who keep on keeping on, the often unsung heroes who build community, care for their neighbours, staff foodbanks, man helplines, care for those wounded by war, work for reconciliation, protect the environment, steer troubled teenagers away from crime. It’s there in everyone who “publishes peace” and “announces good new” as the song we’re going to sing puts it, reminding us that there are other options than war and hatred.So, to go back to the question I started with, on a scale of 1 to 10, how hopeful are we this morning? The answer, it seems to me, is in our own hands. The hope that God calls us to roots itself in our hearts and lives, when we choose to act hopefully, to listen respectfully, to speak of others in the way we’d like them to speak of us. It grows in us as we learn to look for God’s new creation in every situation, however bleak, and treat everyone we meet as a child of God, beloved and precious to him, just as we are. If we can do that, then hope will never die.
Amen
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