I make no apologies for copying this for others to read. The writer is and was one of the most inspirational lecturers I had during my ministry/theological training. The time I spent in Jerusalem was so special, I cannot ever stop pulling on so many experiences whilst I was there and trying to apply what we had spoken about. Below is an homily, I wish I had written something of this calibre….. thanks Dwight
A Remembrance Day Homily
On 11 November, 1918, the guns fell silent on what had been the bloodiest war in human history. From November 1919 until today the moment that the guns stopped, on the 11th hour, has been the moment for everyone to stop and remember the cost in human lives, and to vow, ‘Never again!’ The horrors experienced led those who had experienced it to hope that by remembering the cost, it would have been ‘a war to end all wars’.
Some 16 million people died, and another 21 million were wounded, in that war—37 million people. In the destruction, nearly 7 million civilians were killed. (Information on casualties for WWI and WWII is taken from http://en.wikipedia.org)
The remembering did not have its desired effect then, as perhaps even now. Only thirty years later the Second World War began. No one knows just how many died—estimates vary between 50 and 78 million, perhaps up to 52 million of them civilians.
[How can we fathom such numbers of dead? We have become numbed to the deaths of others. An American study recently reported that ‘the average child will watch 8,000 murders on TV before finishing elementary school. By age eighteen, the average American has seen 200,000 acts of violence on TV, including 40,000 murders.’ British viewing figures may be lower, but Britain is the gaming capital of the world, and games such as Grand Theft Auto and Modern Warfare probably make the American number of simulated deaths witnessed pale into insignificance beside the more exciting prospect of killing virtual people in true Rambo fashion.]
How can we gain perspective on how many real people died? Imagine the entire population of the UK being wiped out over the period of six years.
The Cost
It is worth considering why those who lived through The Great War hoped it would be the last of all wars. From the British perspective, the Battle of the Somme provides the key. The battle lasted from 1 July to 18 November, 1916. 58,000 British troops were killed or injured on the first day alone—the equivalent to a full complement of Manchester United supporters at Old Trafford. When the offensive was called off after 4½ months and a net gain of 8 miles of ground, there had been 420,000 British, 200,000 French, and an estimated 500,000 German casualties—1,120,000 dead and wounded.
The longest battle of that war was the Battle of Verdun, which started on 21 February, 1916, and ended 18 December. The battle began with a German bombardment along 8 miles of the French lines from 1,400 guns pouring out 100,000 shells each hour. French casualties during the battle were estimated at 550,000 with German losses set at 434,000. Half were fatalities. The front line did not move, but it was called a French victory.
The dead in just these two battles is equivalent to the population of Greater Manchester.
The Verdun Ossuary
In the summer of 1978, laid up for over a month with a kidney infection, I set about reading a five-volume history of the Great War that I had bought in 1967 for the great sum of $3.50. The first four volumes were published by 1917, the last within weeks of the end of the war. The tale of these two battles filled half of Volume Two, and the Battle of Verdun has long stood out in my memory, both for its length, and for the interminable agonising tedium of the report of death and mayhem. So it was that when my wife and I decided to visit the battleground in 2001 it was the fulfilment of a long-standing desire to see the setting, and to try to grasp something of what happened. Most of the battle-site is wooded now; the trenches are visible in only a few places. Small cemeteries sprinkle the area. But the Ossuary is the heart of the memorial. A long, low building (about 500 meters long) with a tower in the middle, stretching some 40 metres skyward like a missile, contains the remains of 130,000 unknown French and German soldiers.
Inside the building there are 18 alcoves, each containing a pair of tombs. On the wall above each tomb there is an inscription showing the area of the battlefield from which the bodies or bones were recovered. Each tomb covers an 18 cubic metre vault. There are two additional vaults at each end of the building, each 150 cubic meters, containing the remains from areas of such carnage that the numbers of bodies could not be housed in the tombs. 948 cubic metres of space—1,139 square yards—contain the unidentified fallen. The names of the missing are inscribed on the walls. The Ossuary is surrounded by a cemetery which contains the graves of 15,000 named French dead.
I shall not forget entering the Ossuary building. I did not expect the visit to be more than another stop on my educational pilgrimage. But, I was immediately struck by a deep sense of hallowedness. It was as quiet as a church, which was to be expected; but I was overwhelmed by a sense of awe and of sorrow. There is a Christian altar there, and I prayed.
My 1978 reading had driven into me the senselessness of that war, of the horrible sacrifice of lives to so little purpose, which counted for nothing within a generation of the killing. In the presence of the dead, I could only weep; but it was beyond my tears.
I have stood in churches in remote villages of Germany, and cenotaphs in remote villages of Scotland, and read the long lists of the dead in each. The prime of a generation, reaching into every village and hamlet, was lost.
Who can not have been moved, recently, by seeing and hearing Harry Patch, the last British veteran of that war who died just this past Winter, speaking out of his experience at last, tell us that war is a waste of young lives. And must be the last resort of politicians.
We remember
Now, we pause to remember these fallen while young men—and now, women—are dying in two wars. And to remember the suffering peoples of these countries.
Since 2003, 4677 Coalition soldiers have died in Iraq; 179 of them British. Documented Iraq civilian deaths in the same period are between 93,793 and 102,330.
Since 2001, 1506 Coalition soldiers have died in Afghanistan; 229 of them British. 11,152 Afghan troops have died; 7,589 Afghanistan deaths are documented. Another 53,435 have been injured.
This, of course, is in response to the attack on the US on 11 September 2001, where 2,993 people died, including the hijackers of the airplanes.
Apology necessary
I do not apologise for this litany of numbers. If we are going to remember the purpose of this day, we need to grasp the enormity of the human cost of war. And, we need to grasp the futility of waging war to bring about peace. Every war sows the seeds of the next.
I must, nevertheless, apologise for the Euro/North Americo-centric nature of this litany. There is no catalogue of the wars that simmer out of our sight because our news moguls do not deem them important enough to be reported (because we want to know who is the winner on the latest ‘Idol’ programme); where the criterion of ‘news’ is ‘was there a British national involved; was there an American involved?’ So it is that the sad death of one Brit in a bar in Texas is granted equal time to the slaughter of 13 American soldiers by one of their own. What of the fallen of the Congo? Of Sudan? Of Columbia?
What are we sowing? Why do we not remember?
The Vision of Peace: Isaiah and Revelation
We are gathered in Christian worship. This is not a political gathering; we pay tribute to those who have given their lives in service to their countries, for their self-sacrifice. But, we do so under the hearing of the gospel of Jesus Christ; and this demands that we try to hear the Word of the Lord in the midst of our days.
The readings from Isaiah (2:2-4) and Revelation (21:1-5) present together a vitally important picture of God’s purposes for humanity, locked into its culture of violence and strife.
The Peaceable Kingdom
Isaiah presents a beautiful picture of what has been called ‘the peaceable kingdom’, looking forward to the day when wars cease forever. It is a remarkable vision for any time; it stands as a stark rebuke to humanity that such a picture of beauty might still be termed a fantasy after the passing of 2,500 years.
These words were not spoken by someone with reason for optimism. To the contrary, the prophet-poet can, perhaps, best be compared to a current resident of East Jerusalem, watching his land be taken first by the ruling class of his own people, then by the marauding soldiers of a great superpower. Who can be an optimist when surrounded by walls and guns? When I read this, I think of my Christian brothers and sisters in Jerusalem.
Yet, those brothers and sisters today look to the same vision. Beyond the present oppression and bloodshed, and out of that very bleakness, the Lord God promises to establish his kingdom of peace. In the centre of strife will be placed a school for teaching God’s ways: he will not send experts to train armies and police, but will teach the settling of disputes, the cultivating of gardens.
Everything made new
The vision of John the Seer is no less sweeping in its grandeur. He sees the time when this present order, based on violence and hatred, will be wholly replaced by an order, a new creation, with God in the midst. On this earth, there is no death, no mourning. Only peace.
It is difficult to get such a picture in our minds; we can only catch a glimpse by analogy to things we know—thus the strangeness of some of the pictures of Revelation. What we need to grasp, if only we can just a little, is that which is common to both these texts: God’s purposes in creation have always been the peaceable kingdom. From the garden in Eden to the city of trees in Revelation, his purpose has been the life of peace for all of creation. His action in Christ Jesus is consistent with this grand purpose. Jesus did not die merely that some of us might find forgiveness of our sins and so look forward to a life of bliss one day. The life and death of Christ marks the beginning of the new creation. He lives for the ‘healing of the nations’ (Rev 22:2); ‘no longer will there be any curse’.
Life out of death; peace out of violence
It is no accident that both these visions of peace flow from tales of violence. Modern sceptics read the bloodshed of Revelation and interpret it as a call to violence and bloodshed. Sadly, for too long too many Christians have done the same. The visions of Revelation are not a timetable to Armageddon to be counted down with relish; those who look forward to such a battle worship a parody of the truth. The realistic vision of both Isaiah and Revelation is that human violence is so deep-seated, and human power so antagonistic to the vision of peace, and knows only violence as a solution (from the yobo on the street corner with his knife, to the war master in the incident room with his unmanned drones, violence is the primary tool), that the course of human history can only end in Armageddon.
The Present Reality
We find ourselves, in our present reality, living the Gospel reading from Matthew 24. Wars multiply; nations rise against nations, tribes against tribes. But this is not Armageddon. It is human reality. It is the birth-pains of the new creation. The human order grinds inexorably to a violent end.
But the Christian vision in the midst of this is, ‘the good news of the kingdom of God will be proclaimed throughout the world, as a testimony to all the nations, and then the end will come’ (Matt 24:14). Not long ago I was told of some people who read this verse as condition for Jesus’ return, and so hope to hasten this day by flying to every country of the world to stop off in the airport and preach a sermon, so ‘the end’ will kick in—as though this word were a determinism, a box to be ticked along the way.
What is offered here, however, is an alternate ending to the story—an ‘end’, a purpose, which comes through witness to the peace of God in the here and now; in which the people of Jesus Christ go out to teach gardening and conflict-resolution, not waiting for all the nations to come to the new Jerusalem.
It is a hopeless vision!
But, it once came near to reality. In the last years of the 3rd C AD the Roman Empire had become so permeated by Christians that emperors began to fear they could not wage war any longer—Christians from one part of the empire would not fight against Christians in another part of the empire.
In the year AD 286, this reached a vivid climax; a legion of soldiers in Egypt, consisting of over six thousand six hundred men, consisted wholly of Christians. The Theban Legion was made up of what are now called Christian Copts. This legion was commanded to go to Gaul (modern France, as known by all Asterix readers). There they were commanded to wipe out the Christian barbarians. The Thebans refused. The emperor commanded their execution for this insubordination. In groups of 600 they were sliced down, to give opportunity to the rest to recant. Not a single soldier recanted. All died rather than kill fellow Christians.
The beloved patron saint of England, St George, was also martyred in this period for refusing to assist in persecution of fellow Christians.
No empire can long survive such behaviour. Constantine realised this some 30 years later, when he took the symbol of Christianity as his banner in the battle that secured his rule. He could only maintain authority by subverting the symbol of the peaceful kingdom.
[The unwillingness of Christians who were loyal Roman citizens to fight against or kill fellow Christians of other nationalities is not unlike that of Muslims today—this week’s killings at Fort Hood in Texas. There is a notable difference, however, that the early Christians preferred to die to taking the lives of others…]
What do we remember
In our worship, we remember the cost of war, whether or not that war is fought for a just cause.
We regard the shedding of the blood of the young, and of the innocent, as the ever present sign of this present order, and we pray for the peaceable kingdom.
We honour those who have made the supreme sacrifice; we grieve for those who appear under the heading ‘collateral damage’.
But we live to bear witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ—the healing of the nations.
