Remembrance

 The poem from which today's commemorative poppies began (written on the battlefield in 20 minutes):

In Flanders fields the poppies blow 

Between the crosses, row on row, 

That mark our place; and in the sky 

The larks, still bravely singing, fly 

Scarce heard amid the guns below. 

 We are the Dead. Short days ago 

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, 

Loved and were loved, and now we lie 

In Flanders fields. 

Take up our quarrel with the foe: 

To you from failing hands we throw 

The torch; be yours to hold it high. 

If ye break faith with us who die 

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow 

In Flanders fields

Unknown

These moving Bible words are found on the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior, just inside Westminster Abbey,

THEY BURIED HIM AMONG THE KINGS BECAUSE HE
HAD DONE GOOD TOWARD GOD AND TOWARD HIS HOUSE

It was the first such tomb in the world, though many nations have since followed suit. The soldier's corpse within was chosen by a series of randomisations to make sure he was absolutely unknown. The Tomb says so much about the impersonality of War and its random destructiveness of young and other lives.

It is an extraordinary place, and deeply moving.

Strangely, it is also one of the most astonishing misuses of the Bible to be found anywhere. For the text is adapted from the Chronicler's statement at the end of the life of a priest named Jehoiada who was responsible for God's temple in the days of King Joash. Sure, he was buried among the kings but once you get past that observation the text is vexingly inappropriate. For a start, he was not unknown.

Not only that, he was a man who spent his life in Temple service (while Joash went around killing people as a soldier-king). Jehoiada was the very opposite of a soldier.

Perhaps the weirdest thing of all is that Jehoiada lived to 130 years old - in the words of the text he died 'full of years' - which is the exact opposite of what makes the young soldier in that Abbey tomb a reason for poignant remembrance.

Indeed, the more I think about it the more I struggle to imagine a more inappropriate epitaph. It is as if someone selected words from the Bible in as random a way as they selected the corpse to bury. Which is sad because the Bible has plenty of poignant and meaningful things to say for such a place and for such a day as today when we remember the waste of human life.

For example, how about the following which combines both the meaning of the tomb and the meaning of the Abbey:

Gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more.
But the mercy of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting.

Top Ten Funeral Songs 2018: 7. Unforgettable (Nat King Cole)

2018:  The Co-operative Funeral Services list of Top Ten Funeral Songs (now containing no Christian songs or hymns).  I'm looking at the merits and demerits of the top ten, and this time number 7 - 'Unforgettable' performed by Nat King Cole  . . .

Why it's good for a funeral:

Funerals help us remember - to make someone more unforgettable.

Why it's bad for a funeral:

It's nothing to do with death, life in general, or life beyond death - just a sweet romantic song.

Line that's most like a Christian song:

It's incredible that someone so unforgettable thinks I'm unforgettable too.

Line that's least like a Christian song:

'Darling' [It's the one word in the song that means, however hard you try, you can't associate it with your relationship with God!]

A Quote from (singer) Nat King Cole:

'I'm in the music business for one purpose - to make money'

Why I don't want this song at my funeral:

I have no interest in being unforgettable - at least by humans. 

A better Christian alternative:

Known unto God

Earlier this year I stood thoughtfully and thankfully by this grave in Belgium - of a First World War soldier from the county in which, historically speaking, I now live.

Today we reflected on the large number of World War 1 soldiers whose memorial is either a name on a vast monument (because their body was never found in an identifiable form) or who, in the form of human remains, were buried without their name being discovered.

Walking around the battlefield cemeteries this sight is not a rare thing.  At Tyne Cot, the largest (but certainly not the only) British Empire cemetery for the Ypres Salient there are far in excess of 10,000 graves and over 35,000 names on the monument.

Yet on every anonymous grave - 'An Unknown Soldier of the Great War' - there is added at the bottom - KNOWN UNTO GOD.  No life, whether snatched in the womb, pulverised on the battlefield or expended in recklessly vain attempts to migrate to a better world is unknown to God.

Remembrance Day demands that we seek to afford human lives the dignity that they are owed as creatures of a Creator rather than as accidents of nature.

Big Ben and the Birds

Every Remembrance Sunday at the cenotaph Big Ben is heard.  The remembrancers fall silent as a representation that the guns fell silent on the original Armistice day in 1918.

At the same moment a set of guns are fired by the Royal Horse Artillery and after two minutes the guns fire again to mark its ending.

We do our imitation of this silence (without the guns) in church.  

Silence is quite empty on the face of it.  In church we often imply the value of perhaps praying.  we do not mind that young children can't stay quiet.

There are no children at the cenotaph.  But neither is there quiet (even though David Dimbleby usually says that silence has fallen).

Big Ben is not silent.  After striking the arrival of eleven it faithfully ploughs on eleven times.  Time does not stop for our quietness.  Whether the guns fire on or not time continues to march.  In war human beings seem so big (if they're winning), so small (when they lose).  But time makes every human being small.  For me it is impossible to imagine the cenotaph ceremony without the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh: what I cannot imagine, Time requires me to accept as inevitable.  Even our bloodiest wars are doomed to be dwarfed by the relentless march of Time.

Then there's the birds.  As the artillery gun is fired every year there is the sound of scuttling birds.  Whether anyone notices I do not know.  It reminds us that whatever the immensities of human war, nature in some form, marches on.  Of course war ruins the natural world for a time, but all of us who have stood in normal looking fields or valleys or on normal looking hillsides and tried vainly to imagine that this was once where the battle happened know that Nature, like Time, dwarfs the greatest human conflicts.

How much more true this is of Nature and Time's Creator.

It's Missing: 4. The Cenotaph

Last Sunday Her Majesty the Queen and a great many others laid their wreaths at the Big Empty in Whitehall.  Jeremy Corbyn, Leader of Her Majesty's not-so-Loyal Opposition, Republican and Pacifist, was watched by the circling media in case he blew his nose at the wrong time,  His bow was deemed lacking in bendiness and an empty gesture.

The Cenotaph is, in its own stark way, an empty gesture.  Despite the momentarily heart-warming 'THE GLORIOUS DEAD' engraved on it, it is missing the dead.  Indeed, a cenotaph is by definition an empty tomb, associated with death but without a body or from which (in other cases) a body has been removed.  In Whitehall this Cenotaph makes manageable the otherwise unmanageable, for nowhere in Westminster is there room to bury the bodies of those who have died in the wars that Britain has fought.  Instead, a column and a grand description makes the multi-million life carnage seem almost homely.

An empty tomb that cannot accommodate the number of dead is one thing.

An empty tomb where the occupant has defeated death and lives for ever more?  That's Easter.  That's a cenotaph where the missing causes our heads to be lifted up in worship instead of bowed in thoughtful regret.

Mrs Green

A year and a half ago, not many miles down the road from my Mum, an elderly lady in a Nursing Home slipped quietly away to meet her Maker.  It was a predictable event, given that she was nearly 111 years old - by any contemporary reckoning her passing was almost overdue.

 

What made Mrs Florence Green's death into news was that she was the last living First World War Veteran.  This is a technical term in that as a 17 year old she joined the newly formed Royal Air Force right at the end of the war and worked a few weeks as a waitress in the Mess but this rendered her a servicewoman and therefore an official Veteran.  By starting late and living long she became the symbolic end of the living human story of the Great War, closing the book on the war to end all wars almost 100 years after it began as the reporter rather beautifully put it.

 So there you have it.

The unpalatable human fact that every single man and woman who served in the First World War died.  On Sunday at the Cenotaph Isaac Watts version of Psalm 90 was sung . . .  Time like an ever rolling stream bears all its sons away.

Some of us feel very blessed to have avoided the historically frequent shortening of life that war brings on the young.  How much more blessed the believer who realises that death itself has been subject to defeat in Jesus; that the sons of time can be the children of eternity in him. 

Name - Crofton Brown

One hundred years since the Great War began.  The amazing field of poppies by the Tower of London is quite a sight.  It is not easy to know whether it is good or not.

 

It is very beautiful.

 

Should the deaths of war be commemorated by beauty though?  Would we, for example (in reverse) commemorate the birth of a baby with the ugliness of birth leftovers?  It is hard to know if beauty helps or hinders. 

 

Memorialising is so hard because we interpret everything from our own place in history.  I have been extraordinarily blessed to live through wars only on television.  Even a cursory glance at the statistics of international terrorism indicate that at its worst it is a pale reflection of the Somme, Ypres, the Blitz, Auschwitz or Hiroshima to name but a few.  What do I know of the buzzing excitement of young recruits who often well realised that they might not come home?  How can I, who sees soldier's bodies returning in ceremonial procession from the back of transport planes at RAF bases imagine the slaughter that left tens of thousands of bodies unaccounted for?

 

This morning in Church we considered each of the men memorialised on the plaque in our Chapel building,  One of them is simply among the unknown who were never buried but never came back.  Would a ceramic poppy help?  No.  What helped was that we knew his name and that he was missed by name from the community that placed the plaque in his memory.

Likewise our value to God is not our equal part of a great number.  As the Scriptures teach, our names are written in the Lamb's book of life.  We are not valued as one of the many.  We are simply, personally valued.

Invaders

The other Sunday, by way of illustration, we noted in a service the countries of the world that Britain had not invaded.

NOT invaded.

I imagine this supposed fact is open to considerable historical controversy but it doesn't need to be exactly right to be very telling. Invasion includes more negotiated occupations of nations too.  Just 22 nations have avoided British boots.

Here is Stuart Laycock's short list of the only countries Britain has not invaded in case you haven't used the link above.

 Andorra

Belarus

Bolivia

Burundi

Central African Republic

Chad

Congo, Republic of

Guatemala

Ivory Coast

Kyrgyzstan

Liechtenstein

Luxembourg

Mali

Marshall Islands

Monaco

Mongolia

Paraguay

Sao Tome and Principe

Sweden

Tajikistan

Uzbekistan

Vatican City

 

Stuart, probably wisely, abrogated all moral judgment about his list and described it as a bitt of fun.   In doing so he was probably neatly reflecting the sense of responsibility most modern Britons feel for the past, though this Sunday we like to remember some noble victories over nasty enemies in the last century.

 

It creates quite an alarming image when the nations stand before the throne of God's judgment.  In my mind's eye I imagine all these peoples being questioned about their responsibilities for the nationally and ethnically inspired wrongs amid humankind's history - and frequently seeing them pointing over at, er, us.

 

No wonder we stop and pray and think about the wars of the world.

Darkness and Light

Today we had the Annual Service of our local Hospice at Home.

It is a service full of deep emotion. 

[Extracts]
It is fundamental to the human experience that Light and Darkness go together even though they seem to be mutually exclusive.  Good and Evil, Rejoicing and Mourning.  In almost every book and film and sporting event these appear together in some way.

Light and Darkness. Today is so much about this as we reflect on our story and the story of others.  Stories that had dark times.  People looking into our stories from the outside – at least those parts of the story that bring us here today - thought it was one long dark time.  But it was not.  There were lights along the way.

People looking in from the outside to the work of hospice care probably often think it is a very dark area of service. There is no point in pretending that hospice work resembles a character at a Disney Theme Park where every day is light and bright.  It works with a backdrop that is often darker than we would choose if we could choose.  But with that backdrop hospice nursing helps people to paint in the beautiful colours of love a light in the darkness.

The essence of Christmas is similar here in Northern Europe - little lights against the backdrop of darkness.  This was the model that was deemed wholly appropriate to represent the real story of God’s love coming to us in Jesus of Nazareth.

In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind.  The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

The exceptional quality of this Gospel light is that it can offer something that no other organisation, way of thinking or kind friend can offer . . .  What is the true story?  Does it all end in darkness or does it all end in light?

All the evidence, sadly, points toward it ending in darkness: the edges of the universe, the end of the sun, the experience of life.

And that is what makes Christmas, and the advent of a Saviour, Good News for us all.  Soon after his birth the baby Jesus was presented in the Temple at Jerusalem to a man who was at the end of his life.  The man’s name was Simeon.   Having held the baby he said,

Lord, now you let your servant depart in peace; Your word has been fulfilled.  My eyes have seen the salvation You have prepared in the sight of every people, a light to reveal you to the nations and the glory of your people, Israel

 The end of the Gospel story is Light . . .

 

 

Eternal God, source of all light and life . . .Further from us you could not be, yet nearer to us you could not have come.  Thank you that light has come into the world, and love, and hope.  As we reflect and remember may we grasp more firmly the Advent of hope and the brightness of future glory . . .Through the love you have shown to us in Christ that is stronger than death 

 

. . . We thank you for the wonderful work the [Hospice staff] do and the special blessings that so many continue to receive from them. We give thanks for their patience, their empathy, their kindness and for the giving of themselves to ease the pain, the fear and the uncertainty of others.

Lord, help them to love their work and to feel that they are really doing your work . . . Grant them sympathy with the frightened and nervous; to never neglect those who are quiet and uncomplaining and to have a steady nerve when difficult things have to be done and tough decisions made.  Give them efficiency; but make them kind. Make them firm; but always understanding too. Bless them with gentleness in their hands and sympathy in their hearts.

In the name of Jesus, the Saviour of the World, Amen

The 14 Billion Question

Fine.  So the world is 14 billion years old possibly - and no-one really cares (Novenber 8th).  After all it is SUCH a big number.

 

Such a big number.

 

In fact, it is such a big number that it is the number of bullets produced in the world each year (approximately, but probably a safer statistic than the age of the universe one).

 

Such a big number.

 

So big, in fact, that it is twice the number of human beings on the planet.  So, in case you or I thought there was a bullet with my name on it . . .

 

 

. . . the bad news is that every year there are two.

Whitehaven

I only went to Whitehaven once.  Yet I clearly remember it without my memory being jogged by the killings committed by Derrick Bird last week.

Just as it has come into the media glare for all the wrong reasons, so I remembered it as such.  Before I drove there during a lakeland holiday the name Whitehaven somehow conjured a vision a little like its namesake in Queensland, Australia . . .

I drove over the hill down toward the town to be confronted by something like this, only wetter and darker . . .

A more depressing sight set between beautiful lakeland hills and the sea it was hard to imagine.  And I fully expected to maintain this personal prejudice against the rain-battered bricks of Whitehaven until the day I die for I have certainly never intended to return as a holidaymaker to reassess my view.

My view has been reassessed however as a result of Derrick Bird's actions.  For it was also in the rain that the people of Whitehaven gathered last evening to remember and respect those who were killed last week.   A thousand people.

What is beautiful about Whitehaven is a community where people care and support each other and, however stumblingly, turn toward the Prince of Peace.  Deliberately, or accidentally, they have reflected to us all the character of God in a world that they know better than most sometimes reflects the darkness of another prince.