Sunday 11 November 2018
REMEMBRANCE SUNDAY
9.30am Requiem Mass and Act of Remembrance
I can’t believe that it was four years ago that, having finish a meeting at Church House in Westminster mercifully early, I made my way to see the 888,246 ceramic poppies that filled the moat at the Tower of London - one for each British and Commonwealth death during World War 1. It was a truly incredible memorial and art installation, and drew a variety of moving responses from many many people. An estimated four million visited the Tower in the run up to Remembrance Sunday that year. Four years on, the Tower of London is again filled with poppies, this time oil burning lanterns which have been lit each evening and have drawn around 10,000 visitors every night. And of course closer to home, at our Cathedral over 8,000 people queued to see the Poppy Field light installation over 2 evenings at the end of October.
I didn’t go to the Tower this time, or to the Cathedral – but last Monday afternoon I did go to the Odyssey Cinema to see Peter Jackson’s incredible film They Shall Not Grow Old, which will be shown on BBC2 tonight at 9.30pm. It’s a compilation of BBC News footage from the front line that’s been enhanced and colourised. It is at the same time shocking and inspiring. Extraordinary and normal. And quite remarkable how the soldiers in the trenches adapted and made do with what was available to them. At one point, one of those whose recorded interview acts as the commentary for the film says this: “There’s one thing about the Vickers gun, that being a water-cooled weapon, if you were continuously firing you’d find that the water would be boiling, so you could disconnect the tube and make a cup of tea…” Surely it takes an Englishman to work that one out whilst fighting on the front-line!
That unique footage, and the poppy installations of varied creativity and quantities up and down the country have become iconic. But there’s one image, one iconic event, which for me out-ranks them all. Captain Robert Patrick Miles, who was attached to the Royal Irish Rifles write in an edited letter that was published following his death in action on 30 December 1914 (and of course by then everyone thought the war would be over):
Friday (Christmas Day). We are having the most extraordinary Christmas Day imaginable. A sort of unarranged and quite unauthorized but perfectly understood and scrupulously observed truce exists between us and our friends in front. The funny thing is it only seems to exist in this part of the battle line – on our right and left we can all hear them firing away as cheerfully as ever. The thing started last night – a bitter cold night, with white frost – soon after dusk when the Germans started shouting 'Merry Christmas, Englishmen' to us. Of course our fellows shouted back and presently large numbers of both sides had left their trenches, unarmed, and met in the debatable, shot-riddled, no man's land between the lines. Here the agreement – all on their own – came to be made that we should not fire at each other until after midnight tonight. The men were all fraternizing in the middle and swapped cigarettes in the utmost good fellowship. Not a shot was fired all night.
Although recent historians have questioned the accuracy of the accounts, famously impromptu football matches broke out in no mans land. As we commemorate the 100th anniversary of the end of the Great War, God calls us into no mans land. God calls us to reconciliation. In 2 Corinthians 5.19 Paul tells us that ‘God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself’. It is at the heart of the Gospel. It is the very work and mission of God.
The reality is that our experience of reconciliation is likely to be like the Christmas Day truce on 1914. Piecemeal. Shortlived. Sporadic. Yet that doesn’t mean it isn’t meaningful, genuine and profound. Because wherever reconciliation breaks through, there is the glimmer and the seed of the kingdom of God. Whether it’s between friends who have argued, or rival factions in a political area. Whether it’s in a feuding family or among warring nations. And as a Christian community we are to model that reconciliation, and to be that reconciliation in our local community and in the world around. God calls us continually to return to no mand land. To that place of vulnerability and truce and reconciling love.
We’ve had the usual seasonal comments and complaints about those who choose not to wear a poppy, or who challenge the notions of what it stands for. But I think as much as anything else it can be a symbol of reconciliation. If you watch the Peter Jackson film later this evening, look out for the poppies. I didn’t notice them at first, and of course in the original black and white film they’re hard to distinguish. But in the colourised version they are a haze of red among the mud and grass and debris.
Poppies are of course perennial weeds. The seeds can lay dormant for years and years in the ground until it the earth is turned and they spring to life – only to die and seed once more. And similarly, wherever reconciliation breaks through, there is the glimmer and the seed of the kingdom of God.
Where are those seeds in your life and mine? Or where do they need to be? Where can we be that glimmer of reconciliation in our families, in our congregation, in our community and in the world?
100 years after the end of the Great War there may well be cause for commemoration and celebration, but that can only be authentic – can only be real and justified – if we can honestly lay claim to the lessons we have learned along the way. We are called anew to God’s ministry of reconciliation.
Continually, God calls us to step courageously into no mans land.