SERMON – REMEMBRANCE SUNDAY
“BUILDING A BETTER WORLD”
JOB 19:21-27 / LUKE 21:5-19
NOVEMBER 8, 2015
Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our
hearts be acceptable to you, O God, our strength and our redeemer.
Amen.
Some years ago, a woman, whose name was Anna, took a friend to see a
war memorial at a church in Offenbach, Germany. There among the many
names found on the memorial were those of Anna’s sister and brother.
Her friend looked surprised that her sister’s name would be on the
memorial. Anna explained, “Yes, my sister was killed in the war as well as
my brother. It was her wedding day, and they were getting things ready for
the reception. When the sirens went off. The rest of the family went into
the air raid shelter. But she and her fiancé said they would just go down to
the cellar, so they could go on getting things ready. And there was a direct
hit on the house.”
Anna paused. “We didn’t know what had happened to
her for two years. And when we found out where she was buried and I
went there, she and her fiancé weren’t in a grave together, not even next to
one another. They are on opposite sides of a path.”
One of the central teachings in the Christian faith is that we are to love our
neighbour as ourselves.
Christ teaches us to love one another, and that includes those we consider
our enemies.
Anna’s story is a stark reminder of the way in which war
opposes that teaching, that commandment. The failure to love as Christ
loves leads to such terrible waste of life, to deep scars that deaths in war1
time leave in the lives of those who survive. The loss of all that those
lives, cut off, might have meant to their families, their society. War brings
with it death, loss, often on a huge scale, and yet, each individual death is a
personal loss and bereavement to all those connected with that person.
When I was a young boy I used to enjoy so very much, each summer,
traveling to the farm of my aunt Marion and uncle Darrius.
Marion was
my father’s sister who had married a Michigan farmer. For a city boy it
was always quite an adventure to visit the farm.
My cousin David, eight
years my senior, would go out of his way to entertain me and play with me
– quite something for a teenager to willingly spend quality time with a little
kid.
I idolized David.
And then the vietnam war happened.
David
joined the American armed forces and ended up on a tour of duty in
vietnam.
David died in battle.
war far from home.
My aunt’s youngest child died fighting in a
And things were never the same.
No one ever talked much about David.
Trips to Michigan ended and
contact with that side of the family ceased. While there were other
reasons for this happening, war, and it’s far flung influence was certainly a
major factor.
On November 11th, it will be ninety-seven years since the end of the First
World War, at 11 o’clock on the eleventh day of the eleventh month. For
ninety-six years, since 1919, people have stood silently – at that time, or on
the nearest Sunday – to remember the dead of that war that was to end all
wars, of the world war that followed it, and the wars that have followed
those. There has been a shift in the last century. In 1919, those who had
died were almost all –yet, even then not all – servicemen, those who had
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gone to the front to serve their country and fallen. And a big part of it is
still about that: remembering those who joined – and join – armies and
navies and air forces and are sent to fight, and who have given up their
lives. We remember those who died, for their sacrifice, but also we
remember all those who fought, for the terrible cost to them personally
because of the things that society requires them to do in its name in war.
But because in war, society requires of its servicemen and women that they
do these terrible things, and because through the 20th century the
consequences of those expectations have increasingly been experienced
also by those who are not members of the armed forces,
It seems to me fitting that we remember today also all those others who
died in war: those civilians who lost their lives simply because they were in
the wrong place at the wrong time. It seems right to me that Anna’s sister’s
name is on the war memorial.
Perhaps my aunt and my uncle, who in a
way, died, that day their son David died, should have their names on a war
memorial.
There is a popular African proverb that says when elephants fight, it is the
grass that suffers. It is the reality that too often while nations fight amongst
themselves, the common people suffer the most. It is an historical truth
that those who make the decision to wage wars, often have the least to
lose. Sure, they may lose their prestige, position, or power, but in the end
their essential well-being and access to basic necessities are maintained.
Sadly, the same cannot be said of many of those who are the instruments
and casualties of war and armed conflict. Remembering those who died,
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those who were killed and those who killed, those whose lives were turned
upside down by the killing –
Points us beyond remembrance Sunday as an act of national pride and
reminds us that war brings indescribable horrors and suffering. One of the
most terrifying things about war is how it brutalizes and dehumanizes. In
his book,
“berlin: the downfall of 1945” , Antony Beevor writes of the horrifying and
brutal events of the last weeks of the second world war on the eastern
front. He describes the appalling propaganda used by the Russians
against the Germans and the Germans against the Russians. Beevor tells
of the revealing remarks of Russian general Maslov when he noticed
German children crying as they searched desperately for their parents in
the aftermath of their town destroyed by weapons of war. Maslov said,
“what was surprising was that they were crying in exactly the way that our
children cry.”
After Nazi propaganda had dehumanized the Russians,
soviet revenge propaganda had convinced its citizens that all Germans
were ravening beasts.
Such attitudes are common to most wars. Accounts of the ritual humiliation
and torture of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan remind us that the
dehumanization of the enemy is not confined to other times and peoples.
Well, what does our faith say to those who find themselves in a
predicament of suffering caused by powerful forces beyond themselves?
What tools do the oppressed of society have at their disposal to endure the
harsh realities of injustice and inequality? And where is God in all of this?
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In our gospel reading today, we find Jesus having a conversation with his
disciples that may help us in thinking about these questions.
Luke,
chapter twenty-one begins with Jesus commending the sacrificial offering
of a poor widow at the temple and declaring that the opulence and
lavishness of the temple will one day be destroyed. Jesus further tells his
followers that the temple’s destruction will take place as a result of the
ensuing socio-political crisis between Rome and Judea. In light of this
pronouncement, Jesus vividly offers warning signs so his followers might
be aware and ready when the time comes. It’s easy to read his words and
miss the fact that the events described will make life quite difficult for many
ordinary people.
The fact is many people did then, and continue today,
To suffer greatly as a result of religious and socio-political conflict that is
beyond their control. Many persons in our day and age, like those in
biblical times, are victims of events that are beyond their control.
Finding out where God is in all of this is, for many, very difficult. Jesus
says those who suffer are not without hope. He encourages those that will
face such horrifying events beyond their control, to put their faith in a God
who is in control, who ensures that not even a hair of one’s head will
perish! I imagine the disciples were both comforted and chagrined by
Jesus’ words to them. Finding the courage to derive strength from one’s
faith despite the looming threat of distress and despair from violence and
armed conflict is no small feat.
Nonetheless, for countless numbers of
people over the centuries, their faith and religious convictions did comfort
and strengthen them; their trust in God’s goodness and ultimate victory
over evil and death sustained them.
Standing firm and resolute was and
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is, often, the only immediate, viable option, as Jesus suggests, for people
that suffer like the grass under the feet of the fighting elephants of political
and military oppression.
But it must also be said that it would be wise not
simply just to stand but for all of us, to stand and take action to make
concrete Christ’s commandment to love others as ourselves - - in the
ongoing, not to be extinguished hope that one day our world will be just,
equitable and peaceable.
During the First World War, theologians on both sides wanted to claim that
God was on their side.
But in 1916, in the midst of World War I, theologian, P.T. Forsyth gave a
series of lectures called ‘the justification of God’.
Forsyth warned against
any simple attempt at finding God in the events of war.
“an event like war at least aids God’s purpose in this,”
He wrote, “that it shocks and rouses us into some due sense of what evil is,
and what a saviour’s task with it is.” In war he suggested, “we are having
a revelation of the awful and desperate nature of evil.”
For Forsyth, the
horror of war pointed to the redeeming love of God, not to a partisan God
who would be claimed by one side or the other. War can point us to that
conviction that lies in the words of job: “I know that my redeemer lives, and
that God will stand upon the earth at last. And after my body has decayed,
yet will I see God! I will see God for myself. Yes, I will see God with my
own eyes...”
So many who have lost their lives in war, so many more whose lives were
twisted, crushed, diminished by war, and we remember them today. If
their death, their suffering, can awake in us an understanding of our need
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to break down barriers of hate and the call to all of humankind to discover
in each other our common, God-given humanity, then we are remembering
them as they should be remembered. And remembering what they gave
for us. That we might build a better world. May it be so. Amen.
Major Sources:
“Jesus, Poor Veterans and the Grass That Suffers,” by Billy Honor in TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
www.twitter.com/criticalcleric, 2013.
“Remembrance Sunday,” by Charlotte Methuen in Wings of the Morning,
https://cmethuen.wordpress.com/2012/11/
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