Remembrance Sunday 10.Nov.2024 SJO. 8&10.30
Unto God be the glory,
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
Let me forget – Let me forget, I am weary of remembrance,
And my brow is ever wet
With tears of my remembrance,
With the tears and bloody sweat, – Let me forget.
If ye forget – If ye forget,
Then your children must remember,
And their brow be ever wet
With the tears of their remembrance,
With the tears and bloody sweat, – If ye forget.
(G. A. Studdert Kennedy, “If Ye Forget”)
So writes the World War One poet and military Chaplain, Studdert Kennedy, better known to the troops as Woodbine Willie, pleading with us not to forget but to remember “the tears and bloody sweat” of war – for our own sakes, but more, for our children’s.
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Why? Why is it so important for us not to forget, but to remember?
Three reasons at least.
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The first comes from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the young German pastor and leader of the Confessing Church resistance against the Nazis – tragically executed, as you probably know, just days before the end of the 2nd War, by personal order of the Fuhrer.
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War, and especially the wars of the last century, set a huge question-mark against every human pretension to self-betterment, every idealistic and optimistic, humanist program of reform.
For Bonhoeffer, such a question-mark is salutary.
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It’s not to overstate the matter if we say that Bonhoeffer railed against what he
provocatively referred to as the dreams and visions of self-righteous idealists, the siren song of ideological fundamentalists – religious and secular, that threaten the civility, not only of our Christian communities, but of the human community as such.
Idealists, visionary dreamers, Bonhoeffer insists, are proud and pretentious. They demand that their ideals be realised by God, by others, and by themselves. They speak and act as though the future of our communities depends on the realization of their wish dream. They stand adamant, a living reproach to all others…, contemptuous of those who differ.
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The antidote to such pretentious idealism – the salutary question mark represented by our remembrance of the tears and bloody sweat of war – is, according to Bonhoeffer (again provocatively), dis-illusionment.
He writes:
“Just as surely as God desires to lead us to a knowledge of genuine … community, so surely must we be overwhelmed by a great disillusionment with others… and if we’re fortunate, with ourselves…. Only that community which faces such disillusionment, with all its unhappy and ugly aspects, begins to be what it should be in God’s sight, begins to grasp, in faith, the promise that is given to it” (end quote).
(Bonhoeffer, Life Together [Harper & Row, 1954] 26f. [LT])
Perhaps we want, not to remember but to forget the horrors of war precisely because they are so disillusioning – subverting our optimistic naiveté, exposing the hollowness of our dreams and ideals.
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But Bonhoeffer hastens to add – such disillusionment, though salutary, is not an end in itself – an excuse to wallow in self-recrimination, or give way to cynicism and despair.
Rather, its effect is to set us free for genuine community – - community that begins, not in complaining about what we’ve not been given, but in thanksgiving for what God has already given us; - community that is sustained – not by wish dreams and illusions – but by forgiveness, compassion, and speaking the truth in love.
“Thus” he concludes – (and I quote) – “the very hour of disillusionment with my brother or sister becomes incomparably salutary, because it so thoroughly teaches me that neither of us can ever live by our own words and deeds, but only by that one Word and Deed which really binds us together – the forgiveness of sins in Jesus Christ.
“When the morning mists of dreams vanish, then dawns the bright day of [genuine community]” (end quote). (LT, 28f.)
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Not the idealists, the ideologues, the self-righteous, then, but the dis-illusioned, …the poor in spirit, …the meek, …those who mourn, …the merciful, …the peacemakers, …those who hunger and thirst after righteousness…, will save us from the horrors of war.
(Mt 5.3ff.)
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The second and related reason why we must remember and not forget is offered by Anne Frank, the young Jewish victim of the holocaust, made famous when her extraordinary diary was published posthumously.
In her own words: “I don't believe that the big men, the politicians and the capitalists alone are guilty of the war. Oh, no, the little man is just as keen, otherwise, the people of the world would have risen in revolt long ago!
There’s an urge and rage in people to destroy, to kill, to murder, and until all mankind, without exception, undergoes a great change, wars will be waged” (end quote).
(Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl - 3 May 1944)
A 1st Century Jew – St James, in his New Testament epistle – says something very similar: Those wars and disputes between you, where do they come from? Don’t they come from the cravings that battle within you? You want something and don’t get it, so you kill for it. You’re jealous and envious of what others have, so you fight to get it by force.
(James 4.1f.)
Remembrance of war’s tears and bloody sweat includes remembrance of the hard truth that the macrocosm of global conflicts is but the microcosm of our own restless hearts and divided homes writ large.
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Finally, and most poignantly, on this Remembrance Day, we refuse to forget and choose instead to remember – the combatants and civilians who, in the service of their country, have perished in time of war – parents, grandparents, siblings, offspring, neighbours, colleagues, strangers who paid the ultimate price – willingly or unwillingly – that we might be free.
“…short days ago We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields”.
(John McCrae, “In Flanders Fields”, May 3, 1915)
“They mingle not with their laughing comrades again; They sit no more at familiar tables of home; They have no lot in our labour of the day-time; They sleep beyond our nation’s foam…. At the going down of the sun and in the morning, We will remember them”.
(Laurence Binyon, “For the Fallen”, Sept 21, 1914)
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Amen.