ALL SAINTS MARGARET STREET

The Third Sunday before Advent, Remembrance Sunday 8 November 2009
Sermon preached by Fr. Julian Browning at High Mass

Readings: Jonah 3:1-5 & 10; Hebrews 9:24-28; Mark 1:14-20

The festival of national remembrance was instituted lest we forget. Our country still bears the scars of those two world wars, and the wounds are re-opened each week by the news of more casualties in Afghanistan. The danger is not that we forget what's happened, but that we forget our personal link with them, the link between the dead and the living, between past and present. Never forget. They were flesh of our flesh. they sat here like us and they hoped and they wondered, and they looked forward to long and happy lives. We forget that. We are the ones at fault because when we think about their deaths we see extinction, we see our loss, we forget that God loves them as well as us. So our dead become strangers to us instead of friends. Just because someone you know has died is no reason for you to withhold your love from him or her. Whatever we love deeply remains part of us for ever. And if that is true for us, then how true it is on a national level. A nation which forgets its war dead has lost the war. If we condemn the glorious dead to extinction, their sacrifice will have been in vain. Our religion demands remembrance. That's why we say prayers today; prayer is a way of embracing others.

Some years back some terrorists in East Timor swept down on a church and killed 150 worshippers. In time the church was rebuilt, and the only priest to escape held a little service of remembrance. He was asked how he was able to go back there. And he said, we believe that a memory or remembrance is the pulse of love. Thus the more we remember, the more we love. Remembrance Sunday is a profoundly Christian festival. At his Last Supper, Our Lord said, This is My Body given for you. Do this in remembrance of Me. Do this out of love for me. Do this so that I am part of you today, so that you can live with my life. The more we remember Our Lord, the more we can love like Him. On Remembrance Sunday it is Christian, it is Christ-like, not to forget, not to avoid, not to deny, but to enter the suffering of others and weep with them. It is Christian, it is Christ-like, to look for hope in the most unlikely places, among the wounded and defeated. It is Christian to see a unity, one body, where others see division and the barricades. It is Christian to disarm our personal defences, and to go back, frightened and proud, to where those men and women died, and be with them. It is Christian to seek out the lost, the Unknown Soldier who made the Supreme Sacrifice, because in our own way that is our calling too. The more we remember, the more we shall be capable of love.

Have you noticed how every modern repressive regime tries to abolish or re-invent the past? To stop people remembering, you see. It can be done by changing the calendar, announcing Year Zero, or simply by eliminating or dismissing those with memory and understanding. In Cambodia they did both. People are easier to govern if you can control their minds. Every year in London, there are lots of protest marches, right or wrong, usually in the name of freedom. The most urgent protest march of all is the one taking place right now, past the Cenotaph, in the presence of the Queen. It is a protest march for the right to remember, the duty to remember and say thank you. It is a protest march which brings back to our ignorant, forgetful times, the virtues of service, sacrifice and loyalty. It is, in its way, a call to arms, a call to reconsider our careful, selfish lives.

Some of us attended sung Requiems on All Souls Day. At the heart of a requiem is the little prayer, Libera Me. Set me free. It isn't just about the dead, it's about you and me too. Set me free. Set me free, O God, from the fear of death, set me free from the boundaries I have placed around my life. And set free the souls of the glorious dead, souls we have left imprisoned in time, although we owe them our lives of freedom. Set free, confirm in your love, The Unknown Soldier because we are unknown soldiers too, we fight battles nobody will know about, and we shall be called to die in our turn, perhaps on some battle field of our own.

I never know what to think during those two minutes's silence. Sometimes thinking has to stop. All we can do is go back down the years, to Passchendale, Arnhem, and up the years again to Korea, the Falklands, Ireland, to Bosnia, to Iraq, and to Afghanistan, to where those men and women died, and die with them. There is no other way. This is Christian remembrance, to find the Cross and embrace it, to see that bleak world of war not as forsaken by God, but as suffered with God. The Last Post seem so final at the going down of the sun. But in the morning too we shall remember them. And the more we remember, the more we love, and the greater their victory.