2 Thessalonians 3.6-13, Luke 21.5-19
Remembrance Sunday, 13 November 2022
Austwick, Clapham, Keasden
Lest we forget, Christianity was born out of conflict, having its origins in the first century Jewish-Roman wars which ended in the siege of Jerusalem and the destruction of its Temple, which Jesus forewarns in our gospel reading today.
Reading the signs of his times and seeing this conflict coming, Jesus told his followers to expect wars: ‘Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom’, he said. Expect conflict to come, and be prepared to face it.
And Jesus warned them how this coming conflict would impact those who took a stand for righteousness: ‘You will be betrayed,’ he said. ‘You will be hated by all because of my name.’
Be prepared to be involved in conflict, and be ready to face the consequences of doing the right thing.
But Jesus also reassured them that they shouldn't be scared of these things. ‘Not a hair of your head will perish,’ he said. ‘By your endurance you will gain your souls.’
Be assured that if you are trying to live faithfully in a time of conflict, you’ll be protected, you’ll be sustained.
What does it mean to live faithfully in a time of conflict? Today we remember those who endured at a time of war. By 'endured' I don't necessarily mean ‘survived’. For today we solemnly remember those who died in World Wars One and Two. What I do mean by 'endured' is that these people kept their integrity by embracing the call to struggle, to suffer, even to die, for what they felt was right.
I think it’s fair to say that they were driven by their enduring faith - whether in God, or their country, or their companions in arms;
And that they were driven by their enduring hope - that their actions would lead to a better world, a more peaceful and just world;
And that they were driven by their enduring love - for God, maybe, or for their country, their companions, perhaps especially for their loved ones back home whose safety they fought to secure.
Our gathering here shows that whether these people lost their lives on the battlefield, or have since passed on, or still survive today, their faith, hope and love endure, and continue to command our attention and respect. Perhaps our being here also means that we’re prepared to learn from them something about what it means to to live faithfully through our times of conflict today.
In these days of political upheaval, economic distress, and wars in Europe, Asia, Africa, South America, at this moment of climate despair, it is far easier to see struggle, tragedy and suffering than it is to find signs of faith, hope and love. So many people are worried about their futures, so many are shutting down or lashing out as a consequence.
Where Paul writes, ‘Anyone unwilling to work should not eat’, here, we see hardworking people still struggling to put food on their table in this broken, brutally unequal economy we have made.
Where the Psalmist sees ‘the rivers clap their hands and the hills ring out together before the Lord’, we find nature now struggling to survive in this polluted overheating world we have shaped.
And where Jesus says, ‘Beware that you are not led astray,’ we struggle to hear the voices of truth, wisdom, and goodness to guide us through the dissonance of our fractured public conversations.
Living faithfully means expecting conflict to come, and being prepared to face it.
It means being involved in conflict, ready to take the consequences of doing the right thing.
It means enduring all of this, in faith of being protected and sustained.
This week, you may have seen the previously unpublished photographs taken on Kristallnacht, the ‘Night of Broken Glass’ in November 1938 when mobs of Germans and Austrians attacked, looted and burned Jewish shops and homes, destroyed synagogues, killed Jews and sent thousands more to concentration camps. ‘One picture shows a crowd of smiling, well-dressed middle-aged German men and women standing casually as a Nazi officer smashes a storefront window. In another, brownshirts carry heaps of Jewish books, presumably for burning. Another image shows a Nazi officer splashing petrol on the pews of a synagogue before it is set alight.’ [2]
Contemplating these awful pictures revived in me an understanding of what motivated ordinary people to enlist to fight in World War Two. As they saw the evil in the mistreatment of the Jews, they became prepared to do the right thing and join the struggle to overcome that evil, prepared to face whatever consequences came their way.
Whether motivated by a pure desire to protect an oppressed minority, or by a fear that, ‘if they’ve come for the Jews already, they may come for us next’, the effect was the same: ‘concentrated on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself’, they mobilised in hope. [3]
The truth about those we remember today, is that they worked for the hope of a better world. When they set out on their struggle they could not know how things would turn out. In the case of the Allies in WW2 we know that their hope was justified, and so their memory offers hope to those who share their vision today. Those who are determined to be not idle in the face of the conflicts of life, but who will take up the struggle for protecting the innocents, the oppressed minorities; the agitators for justice who, regardless of what might happen to them, ‘will not weary in doing what is right.’
The earliest Christians were punished for refusing to take up arms for the empire; and the Christian peace tradition is sustained today by nonviolent activists like Daniel Berrigan with his firm belief in 'the total inability of violence to change anything for the better.' [4]
Other Christians through the centuries have embraced the idea of ‘just war’ and taken up arms believing that whilst war may not be good, it may be the only way to restore justice.
However we view these things, whatever our instincts on war and nonviolent action, the warriors and the peacemakers of old together call us to live faithfully, and in our own time of conflict to involve ourselves in doing what is right, being prepared to embrace both the trouble and the hope that this will bring.
Notes
[1] A rewrite of Being a Christian in a time of war, preached in Croxteth, 2004, which in turn draws on my talk on Remembrance at the Blue Coat School, Wavertree, 2003.
[2] Associated Press, Unseen Kristallnacht photos published 84 years after Nazi pogrom. Guardian, 9 November 2022.
[3] ‘Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, essentially an apostolic work, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself.’ —Thomas Merton, The Hidden Ground of Love: The Letters of Thomas Merton on Religious Experience and Social Concerns.
[4] Daniel Berrigan, Faith, Resistance, and the Future: Daniel Berrigan’s Challenge to Catholic Social Thought.
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