Sermon for the 10th of November - Remembrance Sunday
I want you to look at the front of your service sheet.
https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/tea-at-furlongs-258150
A watercolour of a table set for tea in the garden of a downland cottage. It’s summer. The corn is ready for harvest. The field in the distance has already been cut with serried ranks of stooks.
Furlongs Cottage nestled in the South Downs. It belonged to the artist Peggy Angus who entertained her fellow artist friends there.
The playright Alan Bennett has said the picture could easily be renamed “Munich 1938”
If you look at the artist’s dates, you will see Eric Ravilious died in 1942. He became a war artist and died when the plane he was in was lost off Iceland. He was thirty nine years old.
The picture was painted in 1939 – perhaps with post war perspective, the stooks remind us of rows of gravestones.
Another example of the work of an artist who died in war is closer to hand. The stained-glass window of St. Andrew in our All-Saints Chapel is by Hugh Arnold. He was a parishioner of St. Georges and was killed at Gallipoli in 1915. He lived with his wife Mary at 85 Bedford Gardens and his name is to be found on the war memorial here in St. Georges. There’s a Wikipedia entry on Hugh: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Arnold He was 42 years old.
Hugh Arnold and Eric Ravilious are two of the many who gave their lives in war, so that we who come after may live.
Today, across the country, we commemorate the fallen across the country. It’s a national outpouring of grief for the pity of war. It’s a reminder of what Archbishop Temple said in the aftermath of the outbreak of the Second World War:
“War in itself never creates a positive good, though it can restrain worse evils.”
Remembrance Sunday is our annual thanksgiving to those who paid the price, so we might live in freedom.
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, reflecting on the Armistice Day ceremony, puts it like this:
“If we seek an example of social cohesion – a nation united in dedication to an ideal – it is there… (the dignitaries) gathered around the Cenotaph and above all, the large contingent of ex-serviceman and women who fought for the freedom we now enjoy.”
We hear again in the public silence, the call across the generations:
“When you go home, tell them of us and say
For your tomorrow, we gave our today.”
To attend a Remembrance service is a powerful experience. It is a service in the annual calendar like no other. Its impact is hard to put into words.
Here is Rabbi Sacks again:
“The ceremony tells us that there can be no identity without a sense of history. To be British, whether by birth or adoption, is to be part of a story, honoured and enacted in rituals, symbols and ceremonies of remembrance.
A nation is not merely a place where we happen to be. It is also a narrative of which we are part. A society is more than an aggregation of people in a given space. It has a dimension of time as well. It is woven out of the gossamer strands of collective memory: learned at school, embodied in institutions, reflected in a country's art and literature, poetry and music. Lose these and a nation will suffer the collective equivalent of Alzheimer's disease.”
Today is the third Remembrance Sunday since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. This weekend in particular, the post war Western alliance holds its breath. The “restraint of worse evils”, to refer back to Archbishop Temple, is at the forefront of our minds and prayers.
The narrative of nationhood has been bequeathed to us by the sacrifice of past generations. This gift has enabled us to foster and thrive and allows us to worship in freedom and without fear, to live with the shackles off. It is the narrative of nationhood that the people of Ukraine and other oppressed peoples are fighting for.
Rabbi Sacks reminds us that freedom needs the active cultivation of national memory.
In the words of Moses from Deuteronomy:
“Remember the days of old,
Consider the years long past;
Ask your father, and he will inform you;
Your elders, and they will tell you.”
(Deuteronomy 32.7)
So we must cultivate national memory in the younger generations.
The sacrifice of those who have gone before us should remind us of the ultimate sacrifice of Jesus on the cross, and that through his death, Jesus taught us how to live.
Jesus taught us to love God and to love our neighbour. His commandments remind us of our interdependency, both at local and international levels. Let us do all we can to foster interdependency, and give thanks that we can live and worship in freedom and without fear and pray and support those who can’t.