Remembrance Sunday

As we gather together this Remembrance Sunday, we gather, as we do each year, to remember. To look with honesty at the truth of the agonies of war, and to bring that truth back into relationship with the truth of our desire for a world of peace where all are valued; and back into relationship with the truth of God’s broken heart when witnessing the violence of God’s beloved children towards one another.

The horrors of war; our desire for a world of peace; and God’s broken heart, brought together.

And seeking to make this remembering possible, we come together, because we need one another. This remembering is the work of people in relationship with those whom they count as allies and friends, as well as being the work of people courageous enough to come together with those whom we might in times past, and in times present, regard as our adversaries, our enemies.

Remembrance Sunday gives us a very helpful liturgical structure:

we remember and honour those who died in what we in the UK know as the First World War, the Second World War, and in all conflicts around the world since;

we hold silence. This silence creates space, for our thoughts, for our sorrows, and for God. And emerging from this collective holding of silence this day each year we make space for an opportunity

to commit ourselves to being peacemakers, followers of Jesus Christ, creators of the Kingdom of God. To seek not separation and division, but community. To work not for retribution or revenge but for forgiveness and reconciliation. To seek not to conquer but to work for peace built on recognition of the value of every human life, as God sees.

Some years ago, the Imperial War Museum created a very powerful immersive exhibition which included a sound recording of the actual moment of the Armistice ceasefire. This sound recording was created from an original graphic document made on 11th November 1918, near the River Moselle in France.

The technique of the graphic recording of sound onto photographic paper was used during the war to work out the exact location of enemy artillery. To create the Imperial War Museum exhibition this graphic recording was then converted back into the sound it had recorded. The recording is available online, and is extraordinarily powerful.

It begins with the sound of a barrage of continuous heavy gunfire. It is 10:58, on the 11th November 1918; the final minutes of the war. The recording, and time move on ... the gunfire comes to a stuttering end, and by one minute past the hour, there is silence.

And then after just 10 seconds, into that great silence, comes the first sound; the sound of birdsong. The war has ended. Birdsong announces the dawn of a new day.

Silence, the harbinger of peace.

It is a powerfully evocative sound recording. (You can find it online.)

But silence is complex. There are so many different ways silence is experienced after war. Yes, silence can signal liberation, as it did on the front lines in 1918. But silence can also be other things in different times, in different circumstances, and for different people.

For each war is in reality many wars. World War 1 happened in many places to millions of people. Every soldier was a person with a life before they ever were in the trenches. And every one who died, lived their last days with their own memories, and hopes and fears. One war happens, one could say, millions of times.

The Imperial War Museum sound archive also holds the stories of individuals who were directly involved in the end of the war and that transitional time between war and peace.

Within the sound archive is the voice of one man who survived the First World War, and he speaks these words about the silence that fell on that day;

“Well do you know, strangely enough, we wept, because the silence was so awful. You see we’d been used to the noise of guns, all day long, all day long, all day long…it was so strange, to have silence.”

“We wept, because the silence was so awful.”

Communities back home in every country involved in the First World War wept at the awfulness of their own silence. For them the silence of peace was also the silence of loss. The Lost Generation who never returned to their communities, their voices and laughter never heard again, their lives never lived, were silenced.

Each person is an individual life lost in the tragedy of war, and in many communities after World War 1 those killed were a whole generation, who had gone through school together, shared their youth together, challenged their elders together, now fallen silent, in death, together.

And those who returned, many of them, were also silenced. The traumas experienced became walls of silence, too traumatic to be talked of; locked inside the minds and bodies of many survivors.

We will hold two minutes silence today in honour of that generation; a generation silenced by war, by loss and by trauma, and in honour of all lives lost in conflicts across the world since.

Speaking to a friend recently, he told me of his grandfather who was a signalman in the 1st world war. He was on the front line in November 1918, and although he remained silent about his experience that day, my friend spoke of his imagined story for his grandfather.

He imagined him receiving the stuttering morse code signal giving the order for ceasefire at 11am, and passing that signal on to those in command. What a message to receive, and to pass on, and then to live through. My friend wept as he told of his grandfather, and his story. One life, out of millions of lives.

From the horrors of these experiences, and the war experiences of those who have fought since, in World War 2, and in the hundreds of wars across the world, the question quite rightly arises: Where is God? And there is no glib answer. The horror is real. And these sights and sounds of conflict seem to be a far cry from the God of love, the God who seeks to relieve suffering, the God who counts the hairs on our heads.

Holding this vital question, ‘Where is God?’, we can, in prayer and humility, try to imagine God in that land of horror and death.

I see God weeping, heart broken, seeing their beloved children inflict such suffering on one another;

I see Jesus, giving all he had, his human life, as the widow gave her last two pennies, alongside every person killed on those and every battlefield, breathing his last in solidarity with every victim of war; and I see the Holy Spirit, stretcher bearing, bringing aid, whispering the idea of a game of football on Christmas Day into the ears of those on the front line, and working tirelessly to enable reconciliation and peace.

God the Trinity is right there, weeping, offering all, and working to relieve suffering, and for peace.

So today, I pray that God will be at the heart of our two minutes of silence. And that when the time comes to move on, we will know God’s presence with us, as we gather round the altar, to remember Jesus’ passion and death, to share in the living bread, broken for the life of the world, and I pray that renewed we will continue our journeys through life, living by faith, walking in hope and renewed in love to be God’s peacemakers. Amen.

Addendum

Having heard the above sermon, a member of the St Mary’s congregation shared with me Siegfried Sassoon’s poem, Everyone Sang. It was written by Sassoon at the end of the First World War, and speaks very beautifully to parts of the above sermon, and so I add it here.

Everyone Sang by Siegfried Sassoon

Everyone suddenly burst out singing;
And I was filled with such delight
As prisoned birds must find in freedom,
Winging wildly across the white
Orchards and dark-green fields; on - on - and out of sight.

Everyone's voice was suddenly lifted;
And beauty came like the setting sun:
My heart was shaken with tears; and horror
Drifted away ... O, but Everyone
Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.