Sermon for the 23rd of July - Seventh Sunday after Trinity; Mars: War and Peace - The Revd Mary Gregory

Luke Jerram’s extraordinary Mars is just one of the more recent artistic responses to earth’s nearest neighbour.  You see, for well over a century, this planet has gripped the creative imagination and inspired novels, comics, films and music.

Often borne of great upheavals in human history, these creative engagements with Mars have been a way of exploring who we are; of considering how the red planet, and any life upon it, speaks into our story.  

No wonder, then, that Mars’ imagined creatures are strangely familiar.  The cartoon Martians of DC publications are—admittedly—pea green, but they are humanoid, too—arms and legs in their usual relation to a body; eyes and mouth protruding from an oversized skull.  The invading army of HG Wells’ War of the Worlds (1897) are not, in their appetite for slaughter, so very different from humanity: ‘We must remember’, a character urges, ‘what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought….Are we such apostles to mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?’  And Holst’s orchestration of Mars, written during World War I, echoes the irresistible drum-beat of an approaching army, whilst brass shrill the alarm and violins wail in lament for the slaughtered, just as, across Europe, women mourn their dead.

We think about Mars to think about ourselves; to explore our identity, our character, our beliefs, our tendencies—even to map our future.
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This, it seems to me, is part of Luke Jerram’s contribution to this artistic conversation with Mars: to set before us the planet’s natural history as a way of inviting us to consider earth’s future.  Jerram’s work, as you know, is formed of NASA’s detailed photography of Mars, each photo stitched to another in a spherical quilt of dust and desert waste.  On Jerram’s work we trace a topography at once strange and familiar—canyons like ones we may have explored, river beds that once flowed with water.  For Mars, the scientists tell us, was once warmer and wetter, capable of sustaining life.  And in that analysis we hear earth’s eulogy.

‘I don’t want to go to Mars’, a small child tells his Dad on a film on Jerram’s website.  ‘It has dust storms’, he adds.  Perhaps the awful genius of Jerram’s work in this, the hottest summer on record, is that that small boy, and each of us, are already there.  There, not only because we’re dependent upon an increasingly inhospitable planet, but also because it is as if Mars, Roman god of war, strides unstoppably across it, wreaking devastation.  Perhaps we’re all Martians now.

How, then, are we, as people of faith, to be in this drying, conflict-stricken planet, so remote from the homeland that God has promised us; so far from God’s kingdom of peace?  Or to put it as the exiled Israelites ask so plaintively, how are we to sing the Lord’s song in this strange land (Psalm 137.4); this overheating planet where people flee the war-torn desert only to drown just off the coast of the Promised Land?

Well there is, perhaps, a prior question: what is the Lord’s song?

Read Joshua’s horrific account of the slaughter of Eglon, Hebron and Debir, and you could be left thinking that the Lord’s song is an obscene hymn to genocide.  ‘Joshua left no-one remaining’, we read, ‘but utterly destroyed all that breathed, as the Lord God had commanded’ (10.40). ‘As the Lord God had commanded’: is this, then, the Lord’s song?

I think there are two possible answers to that question.  Yes: this is the Lord’s song—and so the Lord is monstrous, sanctioning the slaughter of whole people groups of his own creation.  Or—no: this is not the Lord’s song; this is, instead, a national anthem which cites the name of God to justify ethnic cleansing, just as, today, killers of their enemy’s children invoke God’s name in their songs of victory.
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If this, then, isn’t the Lord’s song—and, given the sweep of Scripture, the trajectory of salvation, how can it be? - if this isn’t the Lord’s song, then what is?  What is this song that we are to sing in defiance of the wilderness?  It is, I suggest, the duet sung by Isaiah and by John in Revelation; a song of the desert blossoming, of sorrow and sighing fleeing away; of people, reunited, building homes and living in them; of a river flowing through the middle of a city of peace, flanked by trees whose very fruit is life; of tears wiped away; of all that destroys being destroyed; of death, dying.

This duet was first sung by singers in exile, in strange lands that bore no relation to the song they were singing.  This song of homes was sung by the homeless; this song of sorrow fleeing away sung by the grief-stricken; this song of death’s demise sung by the mourning and the dying.  But still they sang, for this is the Lord’s song, both promise and prophecy, where the signing births the life it describes.
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As evening fell on 14th November 1940, and on into the early hours of 15th November, Coventry city centre suffered the most intense bombing raid inflicted on a British city during World War II.  Factories and row after row of terraced housing were destroyed; over 550 people lost their lives.  Famously, Coventry’s Cathedral was also razed to the ground.  That very morning, 15th November, the Dean of the Cathedral, Provost Dick Howard began to sing the Lord’s song in the strange land of the Cathedral’s ruins, promising to rebuild in defiance of the devastation that surrounded him.  A few weeks later, during the BBC’s Christmas Day service broadcast live from the Ruins, he sang the Lord’s song again when he said, ‘What we want to tell the world is this: that with Christ born again in our hearts today, we are trying, hard as it may be, to banish all thoughts of revenge…… We are going to try to make a kinder, simpler, a more Christ-Child-like sort of world in the days beyond this strife…’

On Christmas Day that year, like the rest of Britain, Howard occupied a strange and terrifying land: rumours of the horror of Hitler’s campaign against the Jews had begun to circulate; the Nazis appeared unstoppable; it would be another 12 months before the US joined the Allies.  In a city broken-apart and broken-hearted with little hope of rescue, everyone absolutely wanted to think about revenge, to talk about it, to enact it.  But still Howard sung the Lord’s song in defiance of the darkness and birthed a worldwide network of reconciliation that still sings today.
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On the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, we held a vigil in the Cathedral Ruins.  The BBC interviewed me and asked me what relevance Coventry’s story of peace and could possibly have at such a time.  I told them that we had to keep telling the story of peace, to keep it alive in people’s imaginations in order that it might be determinative of their future.

For this is our vocation: to sing of hope in the wastelands of despair; to sing of peace even as war wages around us; to sing of homecoming even as we are exiles on Mars — and then to wait to inherit the land of the song .  Amen.