ALL SAINTS MARGARET STREET

Sermon preached by Fr. Gerald Beauchamp at Solemn Evensong and Benediction on the Third Sunday before Advent (Remembrance Sunday), 8th November 2009

Readings: Isaiah 10. 33 - 11. 9; John 14. 23-29

Last Monday (All Souls' Day) I was invited to a day of reflection for chaplains. There were all sorts of chaplains: hospital chaplains, university chaplains, chaplains to shops and railway stations. The day was hosted by an army chaplain at Wellington Barracks not far from Buckingham Palace. We met in the Guards Chapel. I've never been to the Guards Chapel before.

As I walked down Birdcage Walk I had mixed feelings about the day ahead. I've had a number of roles in ministry but I've never wanted to be a chaplain in the armed forces. It's just not my scene. My prejudice is that army chaplains go native and owe more to the army than to the church. But the day affected me more than I expected.

First, there's the chapel itself. If you've seen it you'll know that it's a rather uneasy building. The east end is opulent. Built in the 1830s the apse is covered in mosaics and the altar is of rich marble. But all that stops at the nave because most of the chapel is a stark, modern sugar cube built in the 60s: the reason being that it was bombed in the war. On 6th June 1944 it received a direct hit from a V1 rocket.

It was a Sunday morning not long after 11 o'clock. The chapel was full of worshippers. Around 120 people died and many more were injured. They had gathered to pray in a time of war and the war had come to them. Such are the vagaries of bomb blasts that the high altar was left intact. The six candles remained in place and continued to burn as the dust settled.

The altars in the side chapels are dedicated to various regiments. A light burns on those altars when the regiment is on active duty. Where soldiers have died recently a poppy wreath is laid at the base of the altar. Since I was there last Monday more wreathes would have been laid at some of those altars.

So our theme is war. Not just war in the past but war now. It's fascinating how the chatter of the gun inspires poetry. A golden age of British poetry was the First World War but that tends to overshadow more recent war poetry. Conflict continues to move soldiers to write.

Here's a poem written last year by an American soldier serving in Iraq, Lt Col JB Brown. His poem The Boneyard (Taji and Baghdad, 21-23 October 2008) is a meditation on a battlefield in Taji. Taji is an area twenty miles north of Baghdad. During Saddam Hussein's regime it had a major military base.

The Boneyard at Taji
Holds the detritus of war.
Lost and dangerous toys, skeletons
Seeking their previous owners,
Whose stories are embedded
In the rusting metal,
Just as metal was embedded
In them.
If only the silent hulks
Could speak of the
Interior terror, the sweat,
Of glad hails of fleeting victory,
And the darkness and
Sporadic tracer light,
Before their own demise.
Burnt and scoured by the sun,
The messages of aftermath
Are written on their sides,
With a graffiti of love,
Hope and comedy.
But the broken toys
Would weep if they could,
The same as their ancestors
At Normandy and El Alamein.
And they would speak of fragility
And honour,
And furious pain.

War is about furious pain. The thing about pain is that we often try to deny it. We put off going to the doctor. We hope that it will just go away. In so doing we give up hope. Some people go to the other extreme. Hypochondriacs think that if there's no pain then there's no life. Sadists on the other hand like to cause pain out of sadistic pleasure. But the furious pain of war is not to be denied, despaired about, manipulated or enjoyed. It is to be taken seriously because it is deadly serious.

Contemporary war requires a seriousness that perhaps is different to the past. I grew up in the aftermath of World War 2 during the Cold War. The enemy and the allies were easy to tell apart. Nations had borders. So, too did politics: fascists and communists were clearly defined. We knew that we were at war when tanks rolled across borders carrying national flags or political emblems.

But modern war admits no such easy classifications. We're caught up in a War on Terror and a War on Drugs and perhaps other forms of war as well. Borders in many parts of the world are not so obvious. The easy demarcations of 'us' and 'them' are less easy to make. The acts of terror thought up in Afghanistan are partly funded by those misusing heroine here at home. As tax-payers we're caught in the middle.

Let me be clear. This is not an anti-war sermon. Neither is it a pro-war sermon. It's an exploration of what war has become and how we might respond to it. It's a plea that we do not deny the furious pain but bring our profoundest spiritual resources to bear upon it. And we need to do that because modern war is a manifestation of Original Sin. Original Sin: the state in which we know that there is something awful yet we're unsure both about its cause and its solution: a sort of moral fog, a blindness, darkness visible.

This ghastliness needs more than discussion about justice (talk about right and wrong), important though that is. And it needs more than political skill and military courage, important though they are. In modern war we need to be bearers of hope of the sort of 'hope against hope' variety. That's why we heard from Isaiah this evening.

These majestic words about the acts of the Lord, the lopping of boughs with terrifying power ... the hacking down of thickets of the forest with an axe is followed by the sublime hope of the shoot arising from the stump ... the branch growing from the roots and the coming of the spirit who graces One Unknown with all the things that war seems to set at naught: wisdom and understanding, counsel and might, knowledge and the fear of the Lord.

Virtue lead to justice and justice leads to paradise in which even the conflicts within the created order are resolved: The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid ... The cow and the bear shall graze and their young shall lie down together.

This 'hoping against hope' is not mere fantasy. Chaplains in the armed forces give expression to it just by being there. Chaplains either in the field or back in barracks are the walking embodiment of a message that stands in sharp contradiction to the activity all around them. Chaplains and the chapels in which they minister are not simply about glorying in past victories but also about the deaths of civilians: non-combatants, 'collateral damage'.

On Tuesday mornings at 10.30 in the Guards Chapel the chaplain leads prayers for the serving regiments. Sometimes they're joined by as many as sixty people: families and friends of servicemen and women. They're confronting furious pain head on. Their prayer coincides with dawn in Afghanistan, the most vulnerable time of day for a soldier on active duty.

The Christian at prayer is a witness that not every dawn breeds a threat. There has been a great dawn. The resurrection dawn is the bearer of hope. The furious pain will be assuaged. The medicine of God will bring peace. All people and all things will be held together in harmony one day, a day that we must hasten.