Remembrance Sunday (The Third Sunday before Advent), 8 November 2015
West Camel, Weston Bampfylde
What did they bring back from the war? (Those who did return, who are among those we remember today).
Some came back with heroic stories, of bold actions which won battles and rewarded medals.
Some returned with stories of the camaraderie and comradeship they had found in battle - a new community which for many stretched across enemy lines, with a sense of solidarity with the troops from the other side too.
Some brought back from the war a heightened sense of right and wrong, a politicised view of life, as never before critical of God and of State.
Some brought back forms of madness, shell-shock, despair, anger which would never heal.
And yet others brought back silence; as if all they had experienced had numbed them. And the families of these combatants developed the skill of listening to the gaps, learning from what went unspoken.
My great-grandfather was one of these. The man for whom I was named, John Cyril Davies, was a First World War Survivor. A ship’s carpenter on the Cunard passenger liner Lusitania which was torpedoed by a German U-boat off the coast of Ireland in May 1915.
1,198 passengers and crew lost their lives that day, but my great-grandfather was one of the 764 survivors.
The historian Patrick O’Sullivan later wrote that ’The world was shocked in 1912 by the loss of the Titanic to an iceberg, but the shock bore no parallel to that felt by the loss of the Lusitania, which was needlessly sacrificed to the insatiable gods of war.' [1]
I’m told that my great-grandfather hardly ever spoke of the events; but he did have a totem, an item which he brought home with him - a lock of a young woman’s hair, which he kept in a box in the attic but, again, never told the story of whose it was or how he came to have it.
If I had not been a preacher but a novelist I might have seized on this detail and constructed a story on it - maybe of heroism, his rescue of a young girl floundering in the drowning seas, or maybe of unrequited love, she lost to the sinking ship never to be seen again, leaving him with just the lock of hair to contemplate what might have been.
But I am a preacher and so my task is to give voice to one of the unspoken questions raised in my great-grandfather’s silences: where was God in all this?
Well, let’s just turn that question around a moment. Where is the Devil in all this? Some say that the devil is in the detail.
I suggest that in the majority of the great wars of modern times the devil has been in our unquestioning devotion to the Nation State, an invention of modernity which has replaced God with nationalism as the focus for people’s faithfulness, and the driving force behind most of the major conflicts of the past two hundred years. The historian Karen Armstrong suggests that ‘The secular war for the nation had given some of the participants experiences associated with the religious traditions: an ekstasis, a sense of liberation, freedom, equanimity, community and a profound relationship with other human beings, even the enemy’. [2]
I suggest that the devil has been in the timeless pursuits of religious and political utopias, led by those convinced that the use of force is necessary to ensure the power of the good; pursuits which could never be achieved but which have led to the slaughter of millions - whether by twentieth-century communism or national socialism, or by Isis today, and if we are circumspect about such things, as we should be, whether also by the nations driving towards the world domination of western style free-market democracy - with the effect of wholesale destruction in Iraq, the dislocation of millions of people worldwide, the destruction of the planet itself. [3]
And so, if the world’s peoples are to work out how to live in peace in the future we need to address these sobering propositions, that the nation is now our idol, that utopias are our idol, that the belief in the power of redemptive violence is our idol.
The most devilish detail of all is the mistaken view of God as one who supports such idolatries. The notion of an angry, vengeful God who demands blood sacrifices of his subjects and judges in blood and fire - the God of the old scriptures, the God before the Gospels, the God of violence.
One of our greatest contemporary prophets, the philosopher René Girard, who died this week, [4] once wrote,
"Violence is a slavery; it imposes upon people a false conception of God as well as everything else. This is why is is a closed kingdom. To escape from violence would mean to escape from this kingdom to enter another kingdom that most of us cannot even imagine: the kingdom of love which is also the kingdom of the true God, this father of Jesus of whom the prisoners of violence don't have the slightest idea". [5]
So where is God in all this? I propose that it is not the devil, but God who is in the detail.
For I put it to you that our God is a God of small things, who stood alongside people in their suffering in the trenches and other arenas of war, who then accompanied them home. Who stood with those at home, waiting anxiously for their loved ones’ return.
I put it to you that our God is a God of modest things, whose great skill is to help humans to learn to be humane in the everyday exchanges of ordinary life.
I suggest that our God is a God whose kingdom is very much of this earth, as taught by Jesus to ordinary people in everyday places - the dining table, the mountainside, the sea shore. See how he called the fishermen Simon and Andrew, James and John to join him in proclaiming the good news of this kingdom, a new way of life which he inaugurated at that time, to grow like a mustard seed from that very moment on, and last for all time.
It is God who is in the detail. A God whose kingdom is a peaceable kingdom, built on self-giving grace.
In the rip-roaring tale of Jonah - common to the Jewish, Christian and Islamic scriptures - the only violence in the story surrounds the self-serving reluctance of the prophet Jonah, who didn’t want to help save Nineveh’s people, and reacted badly when they changed their ways. Did Jonah prefer to do nothing to save them so as to let an angry God wreak his violent judgement on Nineveh? Was Jonah angry with God because he chose to save rather than destroy them?
At the very end of the book of Jonah God says, ‘Should not I pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than 120,000 persons who do not know their right hand from their left…?’ [6]
The king of Nineveh said, ‘All [of us] shall turn from [our] evil ways and from the violence that is in [our] hands.’ [7] This is good news for every society - ever - caught up in the devilish deceits of violence; the king and the people of Nineveh had caught a glimpse of a different kingdom, a new way for them, and they grasped it gratefully.
What did they bring back from the war, those we remember today, those whose blood our poppies represent?
Many of them brought a desire to move on, to learn how to turn from violence and to live now in peace. To find love, to make a home, to build families, to apply themselves to neighbourliness and community.
I believe that God was with them in those details, as they went about the humble, but noble, task of making the peace. Because these are the details, these are the values, of the kingdom of God.
I believe that God was with my great-grandfather as he overcame the trauma of the Lusitania and set about building a life for himself - building a home and family which eventually included me.
And so I invite you now, to take a few moments to consider the lives we are commemorating today, and other lives whose memories have been rekindled for you in this hour.
Consider how we might, to honour their memory and embrace their spirit, turn away from violence and commit our lives in peacetime to the humble, but noble, task of making and keeping the peace.
Consider how we might embrace the new kingdom into our hearts - the peaceable kingdom of God - in which loving God, loving our neighbour, loving our enemies are our way, and the teachings of Jesus on the mountainside are our guide:
[Close by saying The Beatitudes together - Matthew 5.1-12]
Notes
Based on the sermon What did they bring back from the war? Reflection for ‘Till the Boys Come Home’ preached at Corton Denham, 30 November 2014.
[1] Patrick O'Sullivan, The Sinking of the Lusitania, p.29. See my other writings on this topic: The silence of John Davies, my great-grandfather, Lusitania survivor.
[2] Karen Armstrong, Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence p.274
[3] ‘Blair believes in the power of force to ensure the triumph of the good.’ John Gray, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, p.137.
[5] Cynthia Haven, Stanford professor and eminent French theorist René Girard, member of the Académie Française, dies at 91, Stanford Report, November 4, 2015
[6] René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, p.197, paraphrase.
[3] Jonah 4.11
[4] Jonah 3.8
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