Remembrance Sunday 2023

For my birthday this year, Philip gave me a year’s membership of the Westminster Abbey association for us both, which has meant we can potter in and out of the Abbey as often as we like, shortcircuiting the often enormous queues, and not having to pay the pretty steep entrance fees each time either. That’s been great, because there’s a lot to see in the Abbey, and in particular, a huge number of memorials . Westminster Abbey is, if I’m honest, a bit of mausoleum, so full of tombs that they threaten to crowd out the living. There are kings and queens aplenty, but there are also poets and musicians and scientists too – Handel and Tennyson and Stephen Hawking.  There are generals and admirals, earls and dukes, all of them trying to outdo one another in death with their spectacular monuments, just as they probably did in life.

 

But amidst them all is one tombstone – a simple one in design – which draws more attention than all those ornate memorials. It’s near the entrance to the Abbey, right in the middle of the aisle – a thoroughly inconvenient place – but that’s intentional. It’s meant to stop people in their tracks, force them to alter their path – it’s the only grave that’s never walked over, even by Royal wedding or funeral processions.

 

If you haven’t guessed – and the photo on the service sheet is a bit of a giveaway -  it is the tomb of the Unknown Warrior, a plain black marble slab, surrounded by flowers –remembrance poppies at this time of year -  inscribed with the words

 

Beneath this stone rests the body
Of a British warrior
Unknown by name or rank
Brought from France to lie among
The most illustrious of the land

…

The inscription finishes with some words from the Old Testament

They buried him among the kings because he had done good toward God and toward
His house.

 

The stone is surrounded by other Biblical quotations.

 

The Lord knoweth them that are his (2 Timothy 2:19)

Unknown and yet well known, dying and behold we live (2 Corinthians 6:9)

In Christ shall all be made alive (1 Corinthians 15:22), and, from the Gospel reading we’ve just heard, “Greater love hath no man than this” (John 15:13) which, as we know continues, “than to lay down his life for his friends.”

 

It’s an extraordinary memorial, not in its design or its wording, but in the fact that it’s there at all, and it’s that which I think makes the huge crowds of sightseers pause and be silent at it. There is something special, something holy about this memorial, and people sense that.

 

We owe its existence to one man, an army chaplain called David Railton. In 1916, while serving on the front line in France, he had noticed one evening, a rough wooden cross, marking one of the many graves dug in haste to inter those who had fallen. On it was written in pencil “An unknown British Soldier of the Black Watch”. It was common for bodies to be buried hastily like this as the battle swept on. There was no time to do anything more.

 

Railton, who was Scottish, said that as he looked at this simple grave of this unknown member of a Scottish regiment, and wondered who he was; a city boy from Edinburgh, or a shepherd from some Highland glen? A young lad newly enlisted, or an old soldier who’d seen many battles before? There was no way of knowing, but the seed of an idea lodged in Railton’s mind, that somehow an anonymous soldier, like this one, could stand in for all the others who’d never be identified and named, so that families who didn’t know where their loved one was buried, could still have somewhere to mourn.

 

Railton couldn’t do anything about it at the time. In 1916 the fighting was still too fierce, and the outcome of the war too uncertain to make plans. But when the war ended, and plans for commemoration were underway across the nation, he remembered his idea, and decided to write to the Dean of Westminster Abbey. He had very little hope that anything would come of his idea. It was the summer of 1920: on Armistice Day that year the Cenotaph in Whitehall would be unveiled, so there was very little time to act.   And anyway, who was he? Just an ordinary chaplain, who had become an equally ordinary parish priest – he was vicar of a church in Margate.

 

To his surprise, though, the Dean whole-heartedly took up his cause, and wrote to the  Prime Minister, David Lloyd-George, who was equally supportive. The King was initially reluctant, but swiftly came round, and after that everything moved very fast. Four unidentified bodies were exhumed at random from various battlefields in Northern France – no one knew where each had come from. They were laid in plain coffins and brought into a chapel nearby, where an army officer with eyes closed laid his hand on one of them. The other three were taken away again and reverently buried – where was deliberately shrouded in mystery, so that no one would know that these were the bodies that hadn’t been chosen. Then the body was brought back to England by train, and, after a full state funeral – the kind of funeral that was normally reserved for royalty – he was laid to rest. And there he remains. Of course, these days, a quick DNA test could probably reveal who he was, but no one has ever suggested that this should happen, and I am sure it won’t.  

 

The whole point is, of course, that this warrior is unknown, and remains so. He has to be unknown so that any grieving mother, child, wife or friend, who came to his grave could feel he might be the person they had lost, the person they had known, a unique and irreplaceable individual to them.

 

“No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends”, said Jesus to his disciples on the night before he died. He wasn’t, of course, talking about those who die in battle, but about his own crucifixion, which was motivated by his love for the people he came to help and to serve, individual people, people like you and me, not by some grand theological idea. His words are often quoted in the context of war, though, because they remind us that in war too, it is individuals who matter, individuals who pay the price, individuals who bring home to us the truth of its terrible cost, and that if we lose sight of individuals, we have lost sight all humanity.

 

One unnamed serviceman buried in Westminster Abbey represents that to us, but I think today we can also see it in the faces of those we see on the news, the ones we want to turn away from, but mustn’t – the father or mother grieving for a child killed by a bomb in Gaza, the children grieving for a mother killed by Hamas, the family who don’t know whether their loved one in Ukraine is alive or dead, the ones who, like all of us, just want to live in peace, everyone beneath their vine and fig tree, with no one to make them afraid, as the prophet Micah said. Whichever side they are on, if they are on any side at all, they are individuals to those who love them and to God, people made in his image who were meant to live and to thrive and to be a blessing to the world.

 

Today, as on every Remembrance Sunday, we are called to remember not just the grand and terrible events of history, but the individuals whom war destroys in body, mind and soul, and to remember too that we, as individuals, have the power to choose whether we will act in ways that lead to war, or to the peace God wants for all his children.

Amen