REMEMBRANCE SUNDAY 2015
Preached in Exeter Cathedral
The Right Reverend Robert Atwell, Bishop of Exeter
If, like me, you are an admirer of the art of Stanley
Spencer then at some stage you may have made the
pilgrimage to Cookham in Berkshire where he worked for
much of his life. His studio is now a gallery-comemuseum where you can discover the inspiration for
much of his painting.
What I had never visited until this August was the
Sandham Memorial Chapel in Hampshire. Now
maintained by the National Trust, the chapel was built by
the Sandham family as a memorial to their son,
Lieutenant Harry Sandham, who was killed in action in
the First World War.
The family commissioned Stanley Spencer to paint a
series of murals to decorate the chapel’s interior. Like
some Home Counties version of the Sistine Chapel or
Giotto’s Chapel in Padua, the murals are monumental,
though on a much more domestic scale than their Italian
counterparts.
I find the murals incredibly moving, in part because
Spencer chose to depict not the carnage of war, but
scenes such as soldiers drinking tea and frying rashers
of bacon outside their tents. Spencer had a gift for
infusing the mundane with spiritualty.
In the First World War Spencer had served in the Royal
Army Medical Corps. Far from being a soft option, it
exposed him to the futility of war, carrying mutilated
soldiers through the trenches to make-shift field
hospitals, assisting at operations while gangrenous limbs
were amputated by exhausted surgeons.
One of his murals depicts the interior of Beaufort mental
asylum in Bristol, complete with soulless corridors and
paint peeling off the walls, which in 1915 had been
hurriedly converted into a military hospital and where he
worked with soldiers suffering from shell-shock.
Unusually, Spencer also paints scenes from the Balkans
where he was posted in 1916. He paints a soldier
nursing his frost-bitten feet while in the background, like
some parade of ghosts, starving local people look on
bewildered. It is easy to forget that in 1919, weakened
and exhausted by the war, even more people died of the
‘flu than had been killed in battle.
Spencer’s murals remind us of what happens on the
fringes of war in terms of the destruction of families and
communities.
So too in our commemoration today, as we remember
with thanksgiving the courage and sacrifice of those who
died in two World Wars and in more recent conflicts in
Iraq and Afghanistan, it is also important that we
remember the co-lateral damage that war causes, if I
might use that term.
For example, in 1919 with the collapse of both the
Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires, a tide of
refugees flooded Europe. It happened again in 1945 with
the Russian occupation of Eastern Europe.
One of the scandals of the Church is that so many
persecutions have taken place in the name of Jesus
Christ. It’s not many years ago that there were
photographs of bishops blessing tanks.
War is never tidy and once again we are witnessing the
devastating effects of conflicts in distant places we
cannot control, with streams of refugees fleeing
oppression and violence. 'You will hear of wars and
rumours of wars,' says Jesus (Matthew 24.6). We do
indeed.
But to assert that religion is the source of all the violence
in the world is ludicrous.
In the myth of human progress it is easy to indulge the
fantasy that things are getting better and better. We like
to think that we are set full-square on the escalator of
scientific, economic and intellectual progress. In part, the
picture is true. The trouble is not everyone in the world
shares equitably in the benefits such progress generates
and it is a source of grievance and a stimulus to
economic migration.
Which is why Remembrance Sunday is important. It
disturbs our complacency. It confronts us with the
unpalatable fact that our moral and spiritual maturity
does not match our scientific achievements.
It is a frequent cry of atheists that religion is the cause of
more wars than anything else. Violence is undoubtedly a
fault-line through humanity and no religion has been free
of it.
In the twentieth century secular dictators and their
atheistic ideologies caused the death of more human
beings than in the whole history of humankind. It is
estimated that between them, Stalin and Hitler
accounted for the death of between 58 and 59 million
people, and Mao Tse Tung a further tens of millions.
Historians estimate that during the last century wars
killed between 167 and 188 million people. The twentieth
century may go down in history not as the era of
scientific progress, but as the era of wars.
In the teaching of the Bible, war and violence are not
part of God's design, but are products of our dysfunction
as human beings. It is no coincidence that in the Book of
Genesis, hard on the heels of the expulsion of Adam and
Eve from the Garden of Eden, comes the murder of Abel
by his brother Cain.
The lesson on page three of the Bible, as it were, is that
jealousy and violence breed in the human heart and can
poison even what should be the most nurturing of all
human environments; namely, the family.
It is out of the human heart, says Jesus, that thoughts of
murder, violence, greed and jealousy flow. It is why he
says that what is important is ‘purity of heart’. Only the
‘pure in heart will see God’.
So let this spiritual commentary on our human relating
inform our act of remembrance today.
We remember with thanksgiving the courage and
sacrifice of so many men and women, both known and
unknown, in whose debt we will forever stand. We pray
for members of our armed forces, particularly those from
this county who are currently working to maintain our
freedom.
We remember those who have lost limbs or who have
been maimed in war and pray for them as they try to
rebuild their lives. And we remember too the unforeseen
consequences that war causes and the tide of human
desperation that comes in its wake.
On Remembrance Sunday we remember lest we forget
the lessons that history is eager to teach us. We
remember not to nurse grudges but in order that the
seeds of forgiveness may germinate because in the end
only forgiveness will heal our fractured world. So today
let us pray for grace to forgive and be forgiven. So may
God give each of us purity of heart.
+ Robert Exon