Remembrance Sunday

Remembrance Sunday 2022

Psalm 85, Isaiah 61.1-4, Luke 21.6-19

I don’t know about you, but I’m tired, and I don’t suppose I am alone in that.  We’ve staggered through two and a half years of the Covid pandemic and its knock-on effects, the uncertainty, the isolation, the disruption to education, health care, jobs, community life. We’re in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis, with many fearing the rising prices,. There has been political turmoil at home, with government ministers and even prime ministers coming and going at what feels like dizzying speed. And, of course, this spring war broke out on European soil as Russia invaded Ukraine. It looks as if it could drag on for a long time, bringing sorrow and devastation to the Ukrainian people – and also many in Russia who don’t want this war too – and displacing many hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians from their homes. It is destabilising Eastern Europe, and reviving the fears of nuclear war which so many of us grew up with. The Russian invasion of Ukraine affects those beyond its borders in other ways too, causing grain shortages and price rises around the world. And on top of all that, we are already seeing the consequences of climate change, which is fuelling some of the conflicts happening now, and could increasingly do so in years to come, as people compete for ever more scarce fertile land and water.

This Remembrance Sunday we aren’t just remembering wars past; our minds are full of wars present, and possibly future too.

If we’re tired, it’s no wonder. We wouldn’t be human if we weren’t. It is all too much for us to cope with. But we wouldn’t be the first to feel like this.

We got used to hearing the word “unprecedented” in the early days of the pandemic, but the truth is that there’s nothing really new under the sun. Throughout human history, people have faced things that were unprecedented to them; wars and natural disasters, hardship and illness, things that seem to strike out of the blue ripping away life, health and security. It’s just that until they hit us, we don’t really understand what they feel like. We see people suffering on our television screens, but they are a long way away. We read about them in our history books, but they are a long time ago. When it happens to us, though, we discover we aren’t as strong and self-sufficient as we thought we were. In the words of Stevie Smith’s poem, we are “much further out than we thought, and not waving, but drowning.”

The people who wrote the Bible passages we heard today were people like us. The challenges they faced felt unprecedented to them. Most of the Bible was written by people who lived under the cloud of war, persecution and oppression. The Jewish Scriptures, which we call the Old Testament, were largely drawn together either during or just after a long period of exile, when Jerusalem had been destroyed, and its people deported to Babylon.  It was devastating; everything they knew was wiped away, just as it must have felt this year to Ukrainian refugees, just as it does to refugees who come to this country from other places too.

And in our second reading today, Jesus warns about persecution his followers will face from often fickle and frankly insane Roman Emperors, of families betraying each other, of hatred and destruction.

Sometimes people think of the Bible as an old, dusty book, irrelevant to modern life, but it’s the testimony of people like us who lived in times like ours, people who knew that their world was in a mess, who knew “the devastations of many generations”, as Isaiah put it, the “wars and rumours of wars” which Jesus speaks of. 

Our Biblical ancestors were frightened. They had no idea what to do next. They were exhausted by the trials of life, too, by the ever-present violence, just as we are. They felt as if they were living at the end of the world.

But in the readings we heard today they tell us that, despite all of that, we can find hope, if our eyes are open to it. It depends, according to them, on learning to draw on strength beyond our own strength, trusting that what we see is not necessarily all there is to see, that suffering and war don’t have to have the last word. 

They found that strength and vision in God. ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, says Isaiah, because he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed,  to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and release to the prisoners…’ There will be garlands instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning. Just because something looks hopeless doesn’t mean it is hopeless. Jesus read these same words to a rather shocked crowd in his local synagogue at the start of his ministry, applying them to himself. His audience was scandalised – who did he think he was. But those who encountered him found that this was just what he did do. People oppressed by poverty and discrimination, as well as by the occupying forces of Rome – found liberty and dignity in him. Broken hearts were bound up, people were set free. People found hope that broke through their despair and life that burst from the graveyards where their dreams were buried.  And so do many who follow Christ today. They find new life, new birth in the midst of death.

Sometimes that new life emerges in the stillness of prayer, but it can also be discovered through the love of others. And we in our turn, can be good news to them – channels of God’s peace, as the song puts it – inspired to play our part in our community, doing the little things that make life better for others – the kind word, the small act of care, the willingness to take on responsibility for things that might seem dull or trivial, but need to be done if our community is to thrive.

It's ok to be tired, and its ok to say we are, to admit that we have no magic wand, that we can’t solve the world’s problems, that we have no grand answers. In fact, if we can’t admit that, we won’t get far at all. It’s only when we know our hands are empty that God can fill them. The Bible calls us to stretch out those empty hands, to lift up our heads, to open our eyes, and look for the love and kindness which is, in reality, just as real and present as the hatred and sorrow are.  

In a moment, the choir are going to sing a setting by Philip of some words written by Amy Carmichael, who worked in India in the early twentieth century, among the poorest of the poor. She often felt despair, just as we may do when we see the devastation of war, still, again, tearing lives apart in our world. She wrote of her despair, but also of her trust that God heard her. That was what gave her the peace she needed, that gave her strength to go on.

On this Remembrance Sunday, God invites us to bring our despair and our tiredness to him, so that we can find his peace within our turmoil, the peace that passes understanding, that comes from knowing that in life and in death, he is with us and will never forsake us. Amen