Remembrance Sunday, 14 November 2021
Austwick, Clapham, Keasden
“When you hear of wars and rumours of wars,
do not be alarmed;
this is but the beginning of the birth pangs.”
Now, for obvious reasons I don’t have personal first-hand experience of birth pangs. I have on many occasions come home from church on a Sunday evening to find myself watching Call The Midwife with the cries and screams of those East End mothers, and on a couple of occasions I have been that hapless man in the maternity ward, sitting alongside a woman in agony, helpless to know what to do or say.
But only those of you who have been through childbirth really know what the birth pangs are like. Having experienced them once some say, “never again”, and stick to that. Others, overtaken by the joy of having this new life appear, will somehow put the painful struggle behind them and determine to go through it all again.
Jesus said, “When you hear of wars and rumours of wars, do not be alarmed; this is but the beginning of the birth pangs.” Whenever you hear apocalyptic language like that in the New Testament the context is the First Jewish-Roman War. The gospels, John’s Revelation and the other books were all written in the immediate aftermath of the Jewish rebellion which ended with the Romans destroying Jewish towns, displacing their people and appropriating their land, all around the symbolically momentous destruction of the Jewish Temple and Jerusalem itself in AD70.
For many Jewish people at that time, their lives turned upside-down, their society in ruins, it must have felt like the beginning of the end for them. Defeated, displaced and in disarray, how could they ever re-form and re-build?
The gospels portray a Jesus foreseeing these events a generation earlier. And his message is that this is not the beginning of the end; rather it’s the end of the beginning, for, as every midwife knows ‘the beginning of the birth pangs’ is part of an unstoppable process which will lead to the start of a new life. Jesus’ message does not deny the pain that we feel in times of war and conflict; but it carries the hopeful meaning that in those times when our land is troubled, our world is aching, then we are pregnant, with the possibility of the birth of a new ‘kingdom’ in which human conflict and its consequences - of poverty, famine, disease - will be no more.
Today we gather to honour the memory of those who gave their all in the conviction that their struggle, their suffering, in war, was worth it: for they saw it as the end of the beginning, the means to open up the possibility of a new life for the people and the world they were fighting to protect. And so it proved in many ways following World War Two, with the genesis of organisations which have brought nations together for mutual flourishing - like the UN; and financial protection - The World Bank; and in this country the post-war settlement saw the much-celebrated birth of the NHS and a welfare state system which for a few decades provided a genuine safety net for the poorest and most vulnerable of our citizens. Beyond the terrible pangs of war, the relief of reconstruction and renewal.
And so this short sermon ends with a question about today. For we may not in this country be at war right now but - in common with every other society on Earth - we are living through agonies wrought by a global pandemic, distressed by the shocks of severe economic changes, anguished by the awareness that our very existence is now challenged by the severity of climate change with its reportedly fast approaching tipping-points.
Do these agonies mark the beginning of the end for us; or can we rather see them as the end of the beginning? Are the troubles of today the birth pangs of a better world which we can shape if we engage with the struggle through them, if we act hopefully, create imaginatively, and commit to the earth and each other - all peoples together?
Those who have faith in Jesus Christ can affirm that in the way of life he demonstrated and taught, he opened up the possibility of a better world for us. People of goodwill, of all faiths and traditions, are already engaged in many different ways in shaping this better world: by changing their lives to live more gently on the earth, to live generously towards others, to restore the common good in place of antagonism and conflict.
It is good that we are here, to take the time to consider the lives and the character of the people we remember today: to contemplate their self-giving commitment to fighting for a better world; to be encouraged thereby to open up space in our world to make new beginnings possible. When we step in to play our part in this work of re-creation and re-birth - then we honour them.
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