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.

Martyn Saunders, our Stewardship Adviser, gave a good presentation on Christian Giving at our last Diocesan Synod. You can download the presentation here, and contact Martyn at martyn.saunders@ntl.world.com.

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?

The icon is one at the Orthodox Chapel at Walsingham: details here.

Collect

God, whom the glorious company of the redeemed adore,
assembled from all times and places of your dominion:
we praise you for the saints of our own land
and for the many lamps their holiness has lit;
and we pray that we also may be numbered at last
with those who have done your will
   and declared your righteousness;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

November 8 – 14 Deanery of North Stowe

Rural Dean: Canon James Blanford Baker 3 before Advent/Trinity 22

Lay Chairman: Mr Adrian Wright Lulea, Church of Sweden

8 Remembrance Sunday

Men and Women of our Armed Services and all organisations supporting ex-service personnel, and for the Chaplains to all the Armed and Emergency Services. For World Peace. Meeting this week of Schools Executive.

Uyo (Nigeria) – The Most Revd Emmanuel E Nglass

I was over at Ferrar House at Little Gidding this week, speaking at a Quiet Day for the clergy and readers of our Bourn Deanery.

It’s a great setting, and they are making great plans for the future at the moment. They see their ‘USP’ as silence, and are also looking to offer fully supported private retreats for clergy, writers and others needing private space. They are looking for parish group bookings for Saturdays too, especially in the quiet January/February time.

Here’s what they say about themselves:

Ferrar House offers quiet days and accommodation in Little Gidding, Cambridgeshire, and is adjacent to the original site where Nicholas Ferrar and his household came in 1625 and next to Little Gidding church, which they restored to daily use.

Little Gidding is also famous for the visit, in 1936, of the poet T. S. Eliot, who published "Little Gidding" as the conclusion of his "Four Quartets" in 1942. Other historical figures associated with Little Gidding include King Charles I and the poet George Herbert, a contemporary of Nicholas Ferrar.

We offer

• Hospitality to visitors
• A peaceful space for personal retreats
• Facilities for group meeting
• Overnight accommodation

For booking and general enquiries contact the wardens at: info@ferrarhouse.co.uk

Telephone Enquiries
Tel: +44 (0)1832 293383

Postal Enquiries
Ferrar House, Little Gidding, Huntingdon, Cambs PE28 5RJ UK

Temporary Warden
The Revd Allan Bell

Willibrord was a Northumbrian, brought up in WIlfrid’s community at Ripon, but he became “The Apostle to the Frisians” (the north coast of Holland and Germany) and the patron saint of Holland, with a base at Utrecht in particular. Echternach Abbey was one of his foundations among many bishoprics and abbeys.

Two memorable moments:

1. He failed to convert the pagan Frisian king Radbod, because the king backed off when he was told that he would not be able to find any of his ancestors in Heaven after his death, preferring to spend eternity in Hell with his pagan ancestors than in Heaven with strangers.
2. When his relics were transported, “Five bishops in full pontificals assisted; engaged in the dance were 2 Swiss guards, 16 standard-bearers, 3045 singers, 136 priests, 426 musicians, 15,085 dancers, and 2032 players."

Collect

God, the saviour of all,
you sent your bishop Willibrord from this land
to proclaim the good news to many peoples
and confirm them in their faith:
help us also to witness to your steadfast love
   by word and deed
so that your Church may increase
   and grow strong in holiness;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

Diarmaid MacCulloch’s History of Christianity TV series got off to a great start this week. You can watch the first episode here. Fascinatingly, and I think wisely and helpfully, he went east before he goes west (the next episode), and highlighted both the eastern origins of our faith and its eastern spread. I suspect many viewers won’t have known this material, and as well as giving good context for the later history it should be very helpful in reframing some perceptions of the East vs West Muslim vs Christianity debate.

I was moved by the shots of worship in near Eastern churches. Their singing drew me in immediately, and their focus on orthopraxis – presenting the liturgy correctly, with a lot of attention to gesture and movement as well as the words – was revealing. We are very word-based and doctrine-focussed over here, and it is challenging to be implicitly asked whether what we do and how we do it is as important as what we say and how we say it.

I wonder if someone reading this knows of someone who had researched and written in the area of the history of actual liturgical presentation in the early church and how it and Jewish and Muslim practice relate. We were told for instance that Islamic worship may have taken its practices of removing shoes and prostration from Christian predecessors. And how do these and the robes and headcoverings and movements of the liturgies we saw relate to the practices of the Temple and Synagogue. I suspect that there may be very large elements of persistence indeed.

The programme finished with a trip to China, where people were being converted and congregations and churches founded at much the same time (seventh century) as it was happening in Anglo-Saxon England. The pagoda in the picture below is the earliest known surviving Chinese church!

There was something of a ‘line’ that the near-eastern churches can teach us how to be Christian without an army behind us, and the far-eastern how to be Christians who are listeners to the varied culture around them. I am glad of that, though I hope we are not without having made some steps on those journeys ourselves.

I hope next week’s programme is as good!

Yaxley St Peter

Vicar: Jon Randall

Rtd Priest: Gordon Limbrick

LLM: Joyce Shotton

ALM: Pauline Salmon

Link: St Andrew’s, Maseru, Lesotho

We give thank for the commitment of our congregation as we continue to step out together in faith. Also for the Ministry of all our young people at home and in communities around the world.

William de Yaxley Church of England Junior School

Utah (USA) – The Rt Revd Carolyn Tanner Irish

Well done everyone! Ely is now a Fairtrade Diocese. This does not mean we now stop trading fairly … Bring on the chocolate.

Have you signed up for the 10:10 Carbon Challenge (10% reduction for 2010)? I’m not entirely sure what I make of  a landmark ruling from the employment tribunal court in favour of 10:10 Health coordinator Tim Nicholson that belief in the need to do something about man-made climate change will now receive the same protection in British law as religious beliefs enjoy.

But do you fancy a Picasso for £10.10? 10:10 are running a competition for one (shown above – it’s a linocut and worth a few thou) and you can enter as many times as you like at 1010uk.org/picasso. Each entry does cost £10.10 though …