Leicester Cathedral: Armed Forces Day
22 June 2013
“They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks”
Micah 4
Nearly 50 years ago, Senator Robert Kennedy, who was later assassinated like his brother, President John Kennedy, addressed a gathering of students in Cape Town in a divided nation:
“Each time a person stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centres of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”
Each of us in this Cathedral have benefited from those currents that have swept down the walls of oppression. I know what an extraordinary privilege it has been to spend my whole life in a country free from risk of invasion, where fundamental liberties are taken for granted.
I know that was not a privilege granted to my parents’ generation who lived through 2 World Wars and I know that it is not a privilege granted to hundreds of millions round the world today - for civil war, ethnic conflict, dictatorship or the collapse of the rule of law has been their life-time experience. And I know too that my freedoms and privileges have been bought at a price – a price which the Armed Forces have been prepared to pay over and over again. I know that the Veterans Associations gathered have read like a history book of courage and commitment in Burma, Korea, Normandy, Suez and around the world. I know that today’s regular and Territorial Forces bear an ever increasing burden of responsibility for preserving peace and protecting our people, while resources are stretched and threats become ever more unpredictable. I know that the many charitable associations represented here today support, encourage and heal broken lives and broken bodies of those who have paid an extremely high price for these liberties.
We honour you today, you and your families, and we are proud that this Cathedral is able to host a joint celebration between Leicestershire and Rutland and to mark the growing friendships between our two counties.
This day is a way of saying thank you to those who have given so much and to those who continue to do so today. But it also points to the future in the form of all you cadets, so ably represented by Jake Deeming and Molly Henson in the readings.
What can this day offer you to shape your future? I can’t help wondering whether, for most of you, Cathedrals feels like remote places, perhaps disconnected from the language, style and the real challenges of your lives.
And I can’t help wondering whether religion itself isn’t seen by many as the cause of so much of the world’s conflict, rather than a way of building peace. All too often in recent years, the face religion has presented to the world has been unlovely: either strident and aggressive, or weak and vague. A bit as the poet
Yeats put it:
“The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”
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In an age when murderous religious fundamentalists can hack a soldier to death in a busy
London street, and then justify their actions in the name of God, isn’t it time for religions to take a back seat? Can the great faith traditions offer anything more than platitudes in the face of meltdown in Syria, violent demonstrations on the streets of Sweden, Istanbul, Rio de Janeiro and around the world?
Well, all of us here can be pretty clear that the challenges your generation has to face are as great as anything in the past: the threat to the planet from global warming; the greatest extinction of species ever; the growing inequality between rich and poor; entire regions wracked by poverty, illness, drought, homelessness, illiteracy and despair. On top of that is the danger posed by failing states
– the sheer difficulty of building stable regimes in war torn countries such as Afghanistan, and the terror inspired by Al Quaeda which continues to be a global threat. Worst of all is the fear that those things might come together in the form of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons reaching the lands of those who have no scruples about mass murder in the name of God.
As we honour our armed forces, and in particular those who represent our future, we acknowledge the scale of the global challenges we have bequeathed to you. The question for us all now is this: how can you and I make a difference? Taken individually we are helpless; under such challenges the mind turns inward, seeking satisfaction within the self, within the narrow circle of family or friends, or salvation within the closed community of the narrow political party or the narrow nation state. That inward turn is visible in almost all
Western societies today – they are an attempt to create a safe space, a shelter from a threatening world, a haven from heartlessness.
Well, the message of our Scriptures today, especially to those of you who are cadets and possibly the Armed Forces of the future is this: Don’t turn inwards, turn outwards. The immense power generated by modern technology, medicine, instantaneous worldwide communication and a global economy calls for us to take responsibility for one another on a global scale.
You may not have heard that in the Scriptures, but it’s there. The prophet Micah lived 600 years before Jesus. He didn’t know about the internet or weapons of mass destruction, but he knew about swords and spears. He knew that technology could be used to destroy or to create peace and prosperity. He knew that people could choose their future and were not the victim of circumstances. In spite of living at a time when his country was assailed by the Assyrian Empire he offered a God-like vision of a future peace in which technology could be used to serve a peaceful future or the opposite. And he utterly rejected isolationism and defeatism.
Many other people have said the same in different ways.
“Everyone can be great,”
said
Martin Luther King, “Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile” said Albert Einstein.
Edmund Burke said, “Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little.”
Several years ago, a small group of people with connections with the charity Christian Aid began to discuss how the world’s international corporations could be held responsible for paying tax in the countries where their profits were made. It seemed a hopeless and overwhelming challenge: it was not on any political agenda; a constant world economic boom made it seem quite unnecessary. Yet 5 years later the persistence, the courage and the skill of that small group brought tax avoidance to the top of the G8 agenda in
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Enniskillen last week. T hat’s what beating swords into ploughshares and spears into pruning hooks looks like today.
That’s why it is so important that these days of celebrating our Armed Forces offer to our cadets a vision of hope and real possibility of a different future. Whether or not you end up bearing arms for your country, or serving your country in a thousand different ways, it is vital that you hold onto the idea that there are things each one of us can do which can be done by no one else. And that is essentially a Christian vision (although it is shared by many of other faiths and of no faith). It is based on a conviction about the dignity of every individual and the potential majesty of every human life. It is built on the conviction that no power on earth can rob us of our value in the eyes of God.
That is why Jesus, in the Sermon on the Mount, told us that we are blessed by God when we give up on egoism, when we long for justice, when we are reconciled to others and above all when we make peace. That is why he taught us repeatedly that God empowers us to take risks, forgives our failings, lifts us when we fall and believes in us more than we believe in ourselves.
If Armed Forces day provides us with an opportunity to thank our Armed Forces from our hearts, but also, if it does more than that, and inspires each of us to recognise the untapped potential within us, then indeed it honours the sacrifices of the past, supports us for the present and most importantly offers us all a living hope for the future.
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