St John’s
8.11.15
th
70 years ago on September 12 , a naval chaplain stood on the steps of
what is now the City Hall in Singapore as the formal Japanese surrender
ceremony took place inside – marking the end of the Japanese
occupation of South-East Asia. I believe it was the following day that
that chaplain, my father, visited Bishop Leonard Wilson in Changi gaol
– witnessing the appalling conditions and the evidence of the harsh
brutality inflicted on the emaciated allied service men and interned
civilians in that infamous institution. My father never talked about it –
‘though he did write to the Archbishop of Canterbury complaining that
the church was not doing enough to support those victims of war – he
got a fairly snotty reply. Japanese goods were banned from our house
for the rest of his life. Its hard to imagine nowadays how you could live
without any Japanese products – their cars, their phones, their IT
systems – times have changed and the sheer brutality of their treatment
of prisoners has faded except for those aged men and women in their
90’s who still bear the physical and mental scars of that theatre of war.
Remembrance Sunday 2015
But it is perhaps wrong to say that times have changed – names have
changed from Japanese to ISIS, to the factions in Syria, Sudan, Eritrea –
the list of names could go on – so many areas of conflict in the world
today where mankind’s ability to inflict torture and death on fellow
humans is only too evident in our news media. The terrorist bombing of
a Russian holiday flight shows a callous disregard for human life. Death
and suffering inflicted by people who would claim that they are justified
acts of war, in pursuit of their legitimate goals. And that is where we
have a great problem.
I hope that you and I share the abhorrence of these actions, be it the
Japanese torture in their concentration camps or the blowing up of a
civilian airliner. We find it hard to understand how any human being
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could believe that they were justified, that they were doing the right
thing. But any decent soldier will tell you how important it is to try and
understand your enemy, to respect that they too have a belief in the
cause they are fighting for. In this country the value we put on human
life has been shaped by our Christian heritage; in our understanding
every human life is precious in the eyes of God and therefore should be
precious to us as well. The words of Jesus in the Beatitudes we heard
just now are foundational to our thinking; they are a strong call to social
justice, a reminder of the value God places on his creation and the
human beings who populate this world:
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will
be filled. Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy. Blessed
are the pure in heart, for they will see God. Blessed are the
peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.
But those are the values which our culture has taken to heart and wants
to live by; other cultures have different sets of values. In the case of the
Japanese in the second world war, the samurai concept of Bushido was
prevalent: it was honourable to die in war but to surrender was to lose
all honour and make you unfit to be called a person – such people were
no longer considered human and should therefore be treated accordingly
– their treatment of prisoners of war, to us horrific, was right according
to those values. To the ardent fundamental Islamist to kill an infidel is a
duty, they should be wiped out so that Islam can rule the world for Allah
– murdering 220 odd unbelievers was a small step towards their goal. I
know that I am over simplifying both sets of values, but I am certainly
not condoning them in any way, rather I am trying to understand
something of those values which are so at odds with the God given
values that we espouse.
By their very nature the Beatitudes also recognise that the world ain’t all
hunky dory, there are and will be people with no interest other than in
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themselves; no ambition other than power and the will to dominate; no
love other than for themselves, no concept that a set of values other than
their own could have validity – and these are the things that lead to war.
But the Beatitudes also stress the importance of standing up for those
values – those who keep them will be blessed. Today, Remembrance
Sunday, we remember before God those who stood up for those values
and paid for it with their lives – both service personnel and civilians, but
we should not forget those innocent bystanders who also suffered and
many died through man’s inability to live at peace with his neighbour.
There are those who refuse to observe Remembrance Sunday because it
glorifies war. But it is not a day celebrating victory, it is not a day of
glory; it is not so much a day of pride as a day of shame, and those of
you with campaign medals on your chest will know something of what I
mean. Yes, we wear our medals with pride, Northern Ireland, Bosnia,
Afghanistan – pride that we have done our bit in service of Queen and
country, but in another way those same medals say “I was there, I saw
the realities of war, its pain, its suffering, its inhumanity – I came back
others didn’t.” To say “What a shame” is not just a massive
understatement – it is also an insult to those who died or whose lives
were permanently scarred by their wounds. When I say that today is a
day of shame I mean that some 97 years after the end of the First World
War, the war to end all wars, it is to the shame of the world that that has
been untrue.
There are those who refuse to wear a poppy because it is political. And
in some ways they are right – it is about the polis – the people whose
lives have been lost or ruined through war. And it is about politics
because wars happen when politicians fail to find a peaceful solution to
the problem, when they fail to reconcile differing sets of values. The
wearing of a red poppy at this time of year should act as a reminder to
our politicians of the cost of their failure that is counted in human lives.
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But how can we remember when we weren’t there? Only a few here
today in church have seen action in a theatre of war, some of you will
remember the privations of rationing, I still have my ration book as a
reminder though I was too small to use it myself. Others will have
distant memories of relatives killed in the second world war, rather
more will have known people whose lives were torn apart by the loss of
a loved one. But the names we will hear read out shortly at the War
Memorial will just be names to most of us – unknown people from
some distant past. Yet they were all sons of Merrow, they were boys
who nicked apples from the orchards, some of them went to Down Road
or Merrow School, I suspect that quite a few of them will have been
cubs and scouts. They were real people, real boys, real young men who
whose lives were snuffed out during the first and second world wars.
So when the names are read out try to imagine each name as a person as
someone you played football with, some young lad you hoped would
ask you out on a date, someone you shared a joke with. Then you will
begin to understand what their death means, you will begin to
understand the tragedy of warfare and the sacrifice made by so many so
that you can play football, you can go out on a date – in freedom.
The vision of the prophets Isaiah and Micah that:
they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into
pruning-hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither
shall they learn war any more; but they shall all sit under their own
vines and under their own fig trees, and no one shall make them afraid;
for the mouth of the LORD of hosts has spoken. For all the peoples
walk, each in the name of its god, but we will walk in the name of the
LORD our God for ever and ever.
That is a vision of what life could be like and a vision that we can still
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hold and it is achievable if the message of Jesus in the Beatitudes is
taken seriously. It is a vision of what true peace should be like, a vision
that we should hold onto to make any sense of the death and suffering of
the wars and conflicts whose victims we remember today.
Armistice Day, the Day of Remembrance, the Act of Remembrance at
the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. And we use that idea of
the 11th hour to signify a last minute reprieve – the 11th hour is not too
late to put things right. We live in an age which is arguably one of the
most dangerous in history, the threat of terrorism and insurgency ever
present, the daily bulletins of deaths and injuries through mankind’s
inability to live at peace with those he disagrees with – how close are
we to the 11th hour of the 11th day?
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