A Remembrance Sunday Reflection

Remembrance Day

May I speak in the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

Remembrance Day is a day unlike other days. It is a day to stop and reflect beyond our daily lives. Many of us may know of family members or others who died fighting in war. My grandfather was captured after Dunkirk and survived the second world war, but his brother was killed aged 21.

On the first day of the Somme in the first world war around 20,000 British soldiers died. In one day.

Nazism was defeated in the second world war, but 60 million men and women died in the Second World War. What response can we make in reaction to that, to the extraordinary effect of the war dead on this country, on all the people who knew those who had died, when otherwise they would have lived.

On the 11^th November in 1919 the first Remembrance Day was held, and the first reports of that day note how unusual an event it was. The journalist reporting from London [https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2013/nov/12/armistice-day-first-world-war] was moved by the crowds streaming out of the offices a few minutes before eleven to stand on the pavement. Shopkeepers came out of their shops, workgirls out of their factories, sailors came on deck, tubemen came out of their lifts. The crowd standing bareheaded and the vehicles motionless. And it was like stopping a clock for two minutes. A space for reflection out of time.

There was a Jewish psychiatrist called Victor Frankl who was held at Dachau concentration camp from 1944 till the end of the war. And while forced to dig a trench, he remembered trying to drive away the despair engulfing him by thinking of his faraway wife. He wrote that suddenly “[I] sensed my spirit piercing through the enveloping gloom. I felt it transcend that hopeless, meaningless world, and from somewhere I heard a victorious ‘Yes’ in answer to my question of the existence of an ultimate purpose. At that moment a light was lit in a distant farmhouse… in the midst of the miserable grey of… [the] morning… [he wrote that he overwhelmingly felt that] the light [does] shine in the darkness.” That light, the Bible insists, is the light of God in Christ, present in this world amid the darkness. It is why God came to earth in the person of Jesus. To bring light to us through the darkness we experience.

As a nation in the two minutes’ silence we will remember those who have died in service to their country in the two world wars, and subsequent wars. And I think the words of St Augustine are as pertinent now as they were in the 5^th century when he was writing to an imperial official handling a rebellion. He wrote: “Those soldiers are indeed… worthy of honour… by whose labours and dangers… peace is obtained…  It is a higher glory still… to procure or maintain peace by peace, not by war. For those who fight, if they are good persons, doubtless seek for peace; nevertheless it is through blood. Your mission, however, is to prevent the shedding of blood.”

In our final hymn today we will sing a similar sentiment: “I vow to thee my country… the service of my love… the love that pays the price [of]… the final sacrifice…  And there’s another country… [the Kingdom of God whose] ways are ways of gentleness and all her paths our peace.” May we remember the dead and be committed to make it so.

Amen.

The Rev’d Michael Aylmer, St Mary Magdalene Enfield, 10/11/2024