It is very good indeed to be gathering here today as a company of all ages, to remember those who have served our country and especially those who have given their lives in that service. Thinking of the younger of you here, I’ve been doing some remembering of my own, back into my boyhood days. One of my earliest memories is of wandering around on a bomb site by my father’s vicarage in Sheffield in the mid fifties, aged about five, picking up spent fireworks on the day after bonfire night. It’s funny how the very smell and feel of what must have been quite an exciting adventure can come back after all these years.
Of course I had no idea then, really, why bonfire night happened, or what a bombsite was, or why Remembrance Day must have been being kept around then as well. That’s just how things were.
Fast forward say five years and my memory is of the bustle of a junior school playground – one day a big game of cowboys and Indians, the next the Battle of Britain re-enacted by a score of boys with their duffle coat hoods up and sides held out as wings making machine gun noises at each other. War stories still filled the comics – but the reality of war and the reason for war was well beyond us.
Only with adolescence I suppose and the proper study of history at school, and an awakening sense of political life, would come any grown-up engagement with what all of this, the frame of so much of my childhood, had actually been about.
But I find it remarkable that even after years of such adult reflection, those early memories are still there, and in some ways more ‘me’ than the things that followed. Somehow, deep within the neural wiring of our brains, these key memories live on, and perhaps it is a combination of those and our deepest character traits that is most really ‘us’ – the bits we would want transplanting into a new brain and new body if ever that became possible, in order to have some continuity of identity, to still be ‘us’!
That isn’t something we can do now though, and perhaps never will be able to. So when we die, is that the end of us? Some people seem to be able to accommodate themselves to that bleak sort of reality, and we cannot prove in a scientific sense that that is not the case. But whenever human consciousness and culture have emerged, it is remarkable that with them seems to have come – in some shape or form – an imperative to make sense not just of this life, but of some sort of existence after it. The self that has emerged seems naturally to understand itself and other selves not as temporary phenomena or just an additional expression of the common gene pool, but as individuals of something more than contingent worth, as something, someone born, begun, created who is always going to have their own unique story and value.
Religions, philosophies and cultures have found a thousand ways of expressing this and enabling us to express it – and in a sense that is what we are doing here today. Every person we remember is unique, special, beloved, a beginning that we cannot simply declare has come to an end.
The Christian faith itself has developed more than one way of talking about this, but common to them all, I think, is the assertion that though we may and must die in this life, in Christ is a path to a greater life, bigger than death and beyond death, which we can start to experience now but will only fully know when creation is recreated in the new heaven and new earth of which the scriptures speak.
The fact that sometimes what we do in the name of that faith, whether in our worship or more importantly in the way we live our lives, does not exactly resound with that fullness of life is of course an issue. A small boy was taken into a Remembrance Chapel and shown the names on the wall. “Those are the people”, said his mother, “who lost their lives in the services”. “Mummy”, the boy replied after a worried silence, “was that the morning service that we go to, or the evening one?”
Nevertheless, life greater than death is at the heart of our faith. One way of thinking about it is to remember that our faith also teaches about a God who is more than the chilly extrapolations of virtues of Greek philosophy, a ‘who’ not a ‘what’, as personal as us, even if inconceivably more so, who also knows and loves and remembers each one of us, with inside knowledge, even with the experience of death. Perhaps we could say that it is in his remembering that the deepest things in each of us, the very ‘us’ that is us, can live in a way that death cannot destroy, and become part of the new heaven and new earth that we are promised.
God knows us. God loves us. God remembers us. But we remember too. We remember here, today. We remember family members and friends who died in the great wars of the last century. We remember those who have served and are serving in the many conflicts which have followed. We remember those in peril today and those who love them. We remember those who have not come back from that peril alive. We remember in our hearts. We remember on countless memorials, and in libraries of books. And….. we remember in the way we choose to live our own lives as we keep in mind the example of those who have gone before us. It would be invidious for me to name individuals at this point – we remember them all: there is not one whose memory cannot move and inspire us in some way. But one image is perhaps fresh in many of our minds, of a young and highly expert bomb disposal officer, dying in Helmand province in the course of his duty. All warfare is risky. But the survival statistics for those defusing these explosive devices have a grim inevitability about them. Such experts accept a vocation to lay down their life, whether in the demanding exercise of their skills or in the real possibility of death itself, so that others – every person who will passes that way – might live.
We remember. We salute such men and women and all who have given themselves in life and death that others may live. We commit ourselves to live the same sort of life ourselves. Amen.
Filed under: Christianity, Church of England, Sermons and Talks , Ely Cathedral, Remembrance Sunday
My first experience of this feast was in the 1928 Prayer Book, where it is kept as of “The saints, martyrs and doctors of the Church of England”. I rather like the broadening out from “Church of England” to “England”, which suggests that the Catholic martyrs are to be remembered, for instance, as well as the Anglican; but whatever happened to the doctors?
