November 2009

 

A sermon to be preached at this morning’s Remembrance Day Service at the Anglican Church in Palma by the Anglican Chaplain

Fr Robert Ellis.

 

Towards the end of the Second World War - on the eve of the D-Day Landings in Normandy - Brigadier James Hills stood in front of his men to give his final briefing. After the heartache and blood shed of the evacuation at Dunkirk morale was not high and there was a sense of nervousness everywhere – as some of you here today will know only too well.  Would this be an unmitigated disaster or would it be the point at which the tide turned?

 

Brigadier James Hills stood in front of his men to give his last orders and offer encouragement, “Gentlemen, in spite of your excellent training and orders, he said, do not be daunted if chaos reigns. It undoubtedly will!”

 

We know what the end of the story was. We have seen the films. How after terrible losses France was liberated and the war was brought to a victorious conclusion. Perhaps Brigadier Hill’s words might be addressed to us today. “Do not be daunted if chaos reigns.”

 

The world we inhabit today is in some ways no less frightening. Terrorism on the streets of London and Madrid, terrorism in the air in New York, bloodshed in Afghanistan, bombs in Iraq, starvation and disease in the Third World, poverty on every street corner in some cities, and for some, the daily threat of annihilation in one form or another.

 

Do not be daunted if chaos reigns. Yet contrast, if you will, the contradictions of the society in which we live. Poland had been invaded and France was occupied.

 

 

Sir Winston Churchill visits the burnt out shell of Coventry Cathedral after the Coventry blitz.

The other evening I watched a BBC documentary on the Coventry Blitz. For ten hours on November 14^th 1940 five hundred and fifteen German bombers did their worst to the city of Coventry. It was one of the most devastating aerial attacks ever on the United Kingdom. Over five hundred people died, homes were destroyed, factories flattened and the Cathedral was more or less burnt to the ground.

 

Just a few years later Hamburg and Dresden were blanket bombed by the RAF and the USA forces. In Dresden it is estimated that between 24 – 40,000 people were killed.

 

 

This last week there could not have been a bigger contrast as those same European countries who have fought each other for years and generations, and others prepare for the Lisbon Treaty to come into force on December 1st.   The Old Testament prophet Isaiah had seen it all before, “Swords shall be beaten into ploughshares and the lion will lie down with the lamb”. That is what keeps our “hope” alive on a day like today. Chaos may appear to reign but we are not daunted.

 

Remembrance Sunday is about remembering. Memories are precious and have meaning. As the incidence of Alzheimer’s rises we are sorry for individuals who have lost their memories. If you cannot tell what you have been and done, how you have loved and suffered then your identity seems to be diminished. The same is true for whole communities. Occasions of remembrance like this can help people to understand where you have come from, what we have stood for, the mistakes we have made and what it is worth living and dying for.

 

  

Tom Butler, the Bishop of Southwark, in one of his Thoughts for the Days on BBC Radio 4 told recently of a strange case of remembering. His mother was dying and her mind was wandering. He visited her in hospital and she mistook him for one of her brothers who had been killed in action in the First World War. She was so happy to see him and spoke to him for almost an hour about the sort of things they had done as children – fishing in the river and playing in the fields of the Lake District. It was all new to him and he’d never heard her speak about her childhood before and rarely had he seen her so happy. But then she turned serious and stroked his hand and said, “But why won’t you talk to me about the war?” She obviously thought that her brother was on leave and was reluctant to talk about the war at all.

 

The whole encounter was based on a misunderstanding, but it didn’t matter because it was all family. There was a real mismatch between life in the trenches for the soldiers and life in the Lake District for those left behind. Like so many others, including I suspect some of you here in Church and certainly my own father - it’s not that he couldn’t talk about it, he just didn’t have the words.

 

The strange thing is that we know more about life in the trenches during the First World War than the civilians did at the time. Old film footage, writings, the war poets such as our own Robert Graves and contemporary images bring it all back. We know more about war and terrorism, both in the last century and this - than any other generation. We watch in horror as the World Trade Centre crashes, we know of the deaths of soldiers in Afghanistan, sometimes even before their own families are told and warfare comes into the corner of our living rooms on an hourly basis through the TV screen. Through the lens of the cameraman we know what it is to patrol the streets of Baghdad or to drive the roads of Afghanistan alert for a road side bomb.

 

 

There was a time, not so long ago, when people, including myself, were in the habit of saying it was time to move on and give up on occasions like this. I don’t hear people saying that now, there is too much to learn when we live in a dangerous world. That is why memories are so important.

 

Let me if I may sound a warning. One of the catch phrases during World War Two was that “careless words cost lives.” At a time of atrocities we are seeing across the world the old time adage has a new relevance. “Careless words can indeed cost lives.”

 

Any language which demonises another race or the whole Islamic world – and drives a wedge between Muslims and their neighbours – makes a tragic and dangerous situation even worse. Remember it used to be the Jews, or the non Aryans, or the niggers, or the gypos, or the Pakis or the fat capitalist pigs or perhaps even the turistas!

  

As Jonathan Swift lamented, “How is it that we have just enough religion to hate one another but not enough to love one another?”

 

Fred Kaan: writer of the twentieth century modern hymn "For the healing of the nations"

Last month, on October 4^th, the Revd. Fred Kaan died, he was 80. He was a United Reformed Church minister and probably the greatest hymn writer of the twentieth century. He had many interests and enthusiasms and until Alzheimer’s, and later cancer clouded his life he enjoyed jazz, travelling and - like many of us - a very cold gin and tonic. He was a Protestant minister born in the Netherlands and he had an incredible knack of being able to write marvellous hymns. Every Sunday morning after preaching his congregation would stand to sing a new hymn that he had written the previous week to illustrate his sermon, usually to a well known tune.

 

A large part of his childhood was spent under Nazi occupation and he learned from his parents, who were active resistance fighters, that peace is a gift worth taking risks for.

 

Their terrace house home offered a hiding place to people being hunted by the Nazis in the Netherlands. For two years a Jewish woman hid in a tiny space under their stairs. If she had been discovered the family would have been killed.

 

  

His hymns suggest that the search for what is divine is ultimately the search for that which binds us together as human beings. Most of the hymns he wrote were about peace and justice. Little did he know that his hymns would be included in hymn books all over the world and it’s one of his hymns that we now stand to sing, a hymn which reminds us that peace also brings freedom,

 

-         that human beings are inextricably linked and interdependent,

-          that regardless of national barriers we are all brothers and sisters together and that it was the same Jesus Christ who gave up his life for others that was also the Prince of Peace whose birth we shall be celebrating in six weeks time.

-          “For the Healing of the Nations, Lord we pray with one accord, for a just and equal sharing of the things that earth affords.”