09/11/2025
Remembrance Sunday Sermon, 9th November 2025.
Job 19.23-27 a
2 Thessalonians 2.1-5, 13-end
Luke 20.27-38
The Pharisees believed in the resurrection. The Sadducees did not, and that is why they were sad, you see. Boom boom.
The Sadducees are trying to trick Jesus into illustrating how ridiculous for them is the idea of resurrection. Jesus has none of it, and deftly side-steps them. We too are resurrection people. We believe in resurrection, as we experience it in Jesus. For us, it’s incomplete for now, until the Kingdom comes in its fulness. Maybe we will meet each other again, but in a way which is unimaginable for now as we have bodies and minds that fail.
As Easter people, we believe that after a violent death, unjust but necessary for our salvation, Jesus rose from the dead on the third day. Utter sorrow to utter joy. This does not happen in human warfare; but this does not make HIS sacrifice utterly futile.
Our remembrance today is centred principally on the armed services, focused on the two ‘Great Wars’. In less than a generation there will be no one alive who has first-hand experience of those wars either as combatants or as those who were, as they say, ‘left behind’. We must never forget, but what does it mean to remember if we have no memories of our own of war, let alone those?
What, then is Remembrance? We have to use analogy and our imaginations. We can try to imagine the noise, and the stench; the violence; the fear. We have to extend our experience of sorrow, to the point where joy is utterly absent and unimaginable; no calmness and contentment.
In Remembrance we also use a restrained for form of thanksgiving to God for God’s mercies, which have spared us violent deaths and loss; and the knock on the door that relays the news that someone we love has died or is missing, feared dead.
Is it too much to say that these ‘Great Wars’ didn’t work? Evidence is not hard to find. I think I am desensitised now to the bloodshed and carnage from the Holy Land, even the Ukraine. Even so, I cannot watch the news – which on the whole I see on demand from Channel 4 - so skip over those in depth sometimes voyeuristic items. It seems those Great Wars to end all wars failed. Different kinds of suppression follow and then burst up, and out, into more bloodshed.
The wars in our newsfeeds are only a fraction of current armed conflict. Ones we don’t see or hear about much or at all include the Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where the losses and the damage are on a scale which eclipses even Gaza. It is an uncomfortable fact too that these others are the results, foreseen or otherwise, of the decline of Western European Imperialism and colonialism, with its often hasty withdrawals, lines in maps, and leaving the people we leave behind to get on with it, often resulting other forms of suppression.
Suppression where the skin colour of the suppressor and suppressed may be the same needs other strategic points of difference and otherness: tribe, religion, language and so on.
In the so-called peacetime of C21 there are other forms of suppression and war we ought to understand. Ironically perhaps, these kinds are the forms in which many people receive their news, which we often hold in our hands: our phones. It’s easier not to engage with in-depth, balanced analysis in a serious publication or TV programme, let alone find time for it.
Easier are clever, bite-sized podcasts, slick YouTube or Tik-Tok videos which blur or obscure the real causes of what we see, because it’s easier and more seductive to take and promote simplistic and dare I say populist views? Influencers pump out this stuff claiming or at least implying special, excusive, inside knowledge.
If we accept this uncritically, we have our version for today of what St Paul was addressing as he wrote to fledgling Christian communities, sometimes more than once.
With the prevalence of slick sophisticated social media, AI and Chat GPT – which can be powers for the good complementing the reasonable general knowledge we need so we can spot if we’re being led astray - we are ever more in danger of being gas-lit, duped, tricked, into existences described by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World, and George Orwell’s 1984. These are what we call dystopian novels. That is, where developments in science and technology to make lives happier, with less drudge and more leisure, morph from what ought to be a kind of eutopia (the prefix eu our first Greek word for the day being ‘good’) into a dystopia (where the prefix dys our second Greek word for the day means ‘bad’).
‘Tech’ can be the thing in our time which are thus the modern-day equivalents of what afflicted Job, yet more subtle, even mildly anaesthetic. Whereas Job sought justification, we are unaware that we are being abused.
Look up from, switch off those mobile devices; use your senses; see the world around you; think about what is good; visualise it, imagine it; plan, and live your lives towards the good.
We are sensory beings. We feel things. We respond to light and dark; hot and cold; wet and dry; calm and storm. This is why it’s wise to get out and about, stretch our legs, get some fresh air; look at the world around us, be it the built environment of the city or the suburb; or the patterns of the countryside. For me this brings something like a return to ‘factory settings’ on our electronic devices which get clogged up, dysfunctional, messed up by too much use.
We have the freedoms to do this, secured, largely, by the sacrifices of those we remember today.
We are spiritual beings. This aspect of us combines with our senses, and on a good day can inspire awe and wonder; and a sense of ‘other’, even an awareness of holiness and the divine.
In bodies and minds, we are the same as those we remember today; those who died in armed combat; those who died as civilian, collateral damage; those left behind waiting for news, especially women who also took up ‘men’s roles’ sometimes in munitions factories, poisons leeching into their bodies; storing up troubles for later.
We have the freedom to pray, and in public, whoever we are, whichever religion we follow. Do we not believe in the power of prayer? I got told off once for saying “All we can do is pray” when I thought we were powerless to do anything else, when it is precisely the thing we must do, if we believe in Christ crucified, risen ascended and glorified.
“We will remember them” may seem increasingly meaningless as we are further removed in time from the largely black and white images of war and newsreel footage associated with our cenotaphs. These were people who were in colour, who shared the same hopes and fears, doubts and loves as you and me; they felt the same; yet also felt the terror which, by God’s grace, we will never know, which is why we are forever grateful, and why we will remember them; and pray for those in our armed services today.
With thanksgiving and sorrow, as best we can, we will remember them.
Villa Palazzola, Rocca di Papa 8.xi.2025
