The Sub Dean's sermon on Remembrance Sunday 2024.

I served as parish priest of a small Yorkshire town for nearly twelve years and in the church there was a beautiful war memorial, carved by Thompsons of Kilburn with their characteristic mouse signature. It commemorated the young men of Gomersal who had died in the first and second world wars. And as I got to know the people of the parish you could identify the family names of those whose sons, brothers, lovers and husbands had been killed. It would have been easy to see that memorial as a pointer to the past and a terrible moment in our shared history when some of the youngest and most talented of our community had their potential and futures cruelly cut short. It was a thing of the past and that’s where it belonged.

But it wasn’t. Newly carved at the bottom of the memorial were the words: ‘Paul Oram, Northern Ireland 1984.’ Sargeant Paul Oram was 26 when he was killed by the IRA. He was four years older than me. Suddenly that war memorial came to life for me. Here was not history, but the present. I often saw Paul’s parents tending his grave in the churchyard. Remembrance is for now.

Tragically, there are now many war memorials around the country like the one in Gomersal which have been updated with the dead of recent conflicts. A few years ago, I visited the National Memorial Aboretum near Lichfield for the inauguration of the national memorial to nurses killed in conflict. At the heart of the arboretum is a staggering piece of architecture and sculpture, set on a hill. On top of the mound is a structure consisting of two curved wall and two straight walls. There is a crack in the external walls which allows the sun to pierce through the structure and illuminate a bronze wreath, on the eleventh day of the eleventh month at 11 am. There are two bronze sculptures within the memorial. They are beautiful and shocking at the same time. They portray both male and female soldiers caring for a dead comrade. But here we are not presented with soldiers from Flanders Field but 21^st century soldiers from here and now. The memorial recognises the sacrifice of 16,000 men and women who have been killed in the years since the end of the Second World War, from Palestine and Malaya in the late 1940s up to the present day.

It is so important that we keep alive the memory of those who died in the First and Second World Wars, for we owe them a huge debt of gratitude and they deserve to be honoured. Over the past 20 or 30 years there has been a subtle shift in the emphasis of our remembrance tide commemoration as the lessons of history go unheeded and we continue to lack the peace the world so desperately longs for. Our world seems more precarious and vulnerable today than at any time since the end of the Second World War. Shockingly, at the Armed Forces Memorial there are vast areas of blank stones with no names inscribed – yet. Space for a further 15,000 names. These empty walls hauntingly predict a lack of future peace. The First World War was described as ‘the war to end all wars’ and yet here we are preparing to commemorate unknown soldiers who have not yet been killed but who we expect will someday.

So how can we respond this Remembrance Sunday? During the First World War an army chaplain, Fr Timothy Rees, an Anglican monk of the Community of the Resurrection at Mirfield, saw the carnage of the Somme and Flanders as a continuation of the passion of Christ upon the cross. When he looked out at the dreadful waste of mutilated youth he could not believe in a God who would stand idly by, watching from a distance.  In the trenches, in the craters and the barbed wire, he saw Christ's thorn-crowned head.  God was truly suffering alongside humanity.  The spilled blood of teenagers, young men and civilians was also the spilled blood of Christ; their cries of distress were also his.  For Rees, there were no victors in war. Loss and waste was all around, but right at the centre lay the cross of Christ.  He wrote these words:

God is Love: and he enfoldeth

all the world in one embrace;

with unfailing grasp he holdeth

every child of every race.

And when human hearts are breaking

under sorrow's iron rod,

then they find that selfsame aching

deep within the heart of God.

This was the only way that he could make sense of the suffering. What was true at the beginning of the 20^th century must surely also be true for us today. God is crucified again and again in the suffering of humanity. But the Christian hope is that through the pain and waste of the cross comes the new life of the Resurrection. Our gospel reading points to the kingdom of God coming near if we would but recognise it in our midst and respond to the good news which Christ proclaimed.   

In our acts of remembrance, particularly today, we look back, remembering and honouring the dead of conflicts past and present. We also look forward to a new order where God’s kingdom of justice, righteousness and peace will flourish and where all humanity may find an honoured place in the heart of God.   

Southwark Cathedral is a member of the Community of the Cross of Nails, an international movement for peace and reconciliation which grew out of the ashes of the destroyed Coventry Cathedral. The guiding principles of the Community are:

• Healing the wounds of history
• Learning to live with difference and celebrate diversity
• Building a culture of justice and peace. 

Today’s political rhetoric which speaks of ‘the other’ and seeks to build walls rather than bridges underlines just how far we are from the values of God’s kingdom. The ongoing wars in Ukraine, the Middle East and in countless other places remind us that we have learned nothing from the wounds of history. But each one of us can make a difference to our world by the way we speak and act with one another and by our attitude to ‘the other’ in our midst.

As we honour our beloved dead and pray for those caught up in conflicts today, may we pledge ourselves anew to live and strive for a transformed world.