Remembrance Sunday

https://youtu.be/mZBVgh3hbto

Remembrance Sunday 2025

2009 marked the deaths of two of the last surviving veterans of the First World War. Their names are Henry Allingham and Harry Patch. On the day of Henry Allingham’s funeral the BBC broadcast a new poem by the Carol Ann Duffy, the then Poet Laureate. It’s called “Last Post” and it imagines what would happen if time ran backwards and those killed in the war came back to life.

This is the poem she wrote.

“If poetry could tell it backwards, true, begin
that moment shrapnel scythed you to the stinking mud…
but you get up, amazed, watch bled bad blood
run upwards from the slime into its wounds;
see lines and lines of British boys rewind
back to their trenches, kiss the photographs from home –
mothers, sweethearts, sisters, younger brothers
not entering the story now
to die and die and die.
Dulce – No – Decorum – No – Pro patria mori.
You walk away.

You walk away; drop your gun (fixed bayonet)
like all your mates do too –
Harry, Tommy, Wilfred, Edward, Bert –
and light a cigarette.
There’s coffee in the square,
warm French bread
and all those thousands dead
are shaking dried mud from their hair
and queuing up for home. Freshly alive,
a lad plays Tipperary to the crowd, released
from History; the glistening, healthy horses fit for heroes, kings.

You lean against a wall,
your several million lives still possible
and crammed with love, work, children, talent, English beer, good food.
You see the poet tuck away his pocket-book and smile.
If poetry could truly tell it backwards,
then it would.”

In this poem, time runs backwards: ‘lines of British boys rewind back to their trenches’, lift themselves out of the violence, drop their guns and return home. The cinematic image of a film rewinding is poignant because the final lines tell us that we can’t rewind the film. Poetry can’t truly tell it backwards. It can’t undo so much death, and so much violence and futility.

But if poetry can’t undo these deaths, then perhaps God can. On Remembrance Sunday and on every Sunday Christians remember the Resurrection.

St Paul wrote to the Thessalonians, Now may our Lord Jesus Christ himself and God our Father, who loved us and through grace gave us eternal comfort and good hope comfort your hearts and strengthen them…

 (2 Thess. 2.16) Our hope today is in Resurrection of the dead. Our hope today is in Jesus’ words that God is God of the living, not the dead. He is not the God of the dead because there is life after death.  Jesus said that He is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and so He is the God of Harry, Tommy, Wilfred, Edward, Bert too. Jesus himself suffered a brutal and seemingly hopeless death. But every death was contained in that death: every death, including yours and mine yet to come. And by the alchemy of who he was as Son of God, by the power of His divine-human love, by His obedience to the Father, He changed the base metal of death into the gold of eternal life. He overcame death: For He is stronger than death. He did not allow death to have the last word. He changed it into the first word of a new sentence, and the beginning of a new world. And because He rose, all of us can now hope to rise with Him. If enter into relationship with Him as He has entered into relationship with us, then He will make us ‘children of the resurrection’. As Psalm 17 says, when I awake I shall be satisfied, with the sight of your glory, O Lord.This is our good hope for all those whom we remember today. Resurrection will undo their deaths. This hope is what sustains our fortitude as we remember war and the pity of war. This hope is what sustains our prayer for those who died in war and for all the departed. For this is the hope that can enter every sorrow in our lives.

Amen.

The Rev’d Dr James Lawson,
St Mary Magdalene Enfield, 09/11/2025