Remembrance Sunday 2022

This sermon was preached on Remembrance Sunday 2022. The Gospel was Luke 21:5-19. I hope you enjoy reading it.

Our gospel this morning is a jarring one for Remembrance Sunday.

Here we are this morning – joining thousands of people across our country – coming together to contemplate the horrors of war and recommitting ourselves to work for peace in our world, and – instead of a gospel message about the coming Kingdom of God, where there will be no more war, and no more pain, and no more tears, we get this:

Wars and insurrections? These things must happen, says Christ.
Nations will fight nations, and kingdoms will fight kingdoms.
Earthquakes, and famines and plagues.
All will be thrown down.

I don’t know about you, but I was expecting something else; something about Heaven, and peace, and love. I wanted to hear the passage from Isaiah about beating ploughshares into swords, and spears into pruning hooks and nations not learning war anymore.

But instead, Christ tells his disciples that they will be betrayed. That they’ll be arrested. That they’ll be put into prison. That some of them will be killed.
He wasn’t wrong. His disciples, who professed him as the Prince of Peace, suffered terrible things at the hands of others whilst trying to work to bring forth the kingdom of God – that kingdom of peace, and love.

And Christ wasn’t wrong about the inevitability of wars and insurrections. Maybe you’ve heard the quotation (that dates back to the late 1980s) that since the end of WWI – the Great War, the War to End All Wars – the world has only experienced 26 days of peace. But, in fact, it’s actually worse than that: taking into account civil wars, insurrections and rebellions, there have been none. No days of peace. Not one. We’ve been marking Remembrance Day for over one hundred years, and all the while, war has been raging.

The world has been raging for more than a hundred years. For as long as we have been recording world history – and most likely ever since humans first learned to pick up a rock and throw it. Humans kill and destroy.

Christ knew this. His eyes may have been on Heaven, but his feet were always placed on earth. He knew our nature was to fight rather than to forgive – he spent so much of his teaching on this point to show us another way: turn the other cheek; forgive until you have lost count of the times you have forgiven – the hyperbolic seventy times seven, to love your enemies and pray for your persecutors. 

“Blessed are the peacemakers”, he said. And, for a man who lived in a land occupied by a foreign power, and surrounded by ‘peacekeeping’ soldiers, this all clearly meant something: Christ lived through times of war. With foreign soldiers on his own streets. When a man such as this talks about peace, you know this is not just a theoretical concept.

This year’s act of remembrance feels different than previous years to me, with war on the outskirts of Europe on our doorstep.

But it isn’t different. Nations fight nations and kingdoms fight kingdoms. They have always done so.

It seems to just be what we humans do.

But Christ, with his feet on the ground, and his mind in Heaven, says it doesn’t have to be this way.

There’s another way, if we want to take it.

With his feet on the ground, Christ knows most of us won’t. War may be hell, but violence is easy. 

It’s much easier to raise a fist, or throw a spear, or pick up a gun than it is to choose the way of peace. Christ knew that. It’s easier for a tyrant to distract his people by sending an army to invade a foreign country than it is to deal with problems in his own country economically, politically, or socially.

The way of peace is harder. Turning the other cheek hurts - literally. Making peace is much harder than holding the biggest weapon, and claiming to be keeping it.

But it’s also the only way that lasts.

Because, despite the fact we have raged and fought for thousands of years, nothing that we fight for is permanent. Tyrants will be forgotten, and the ground they have won will – at some point – be claimed by another. Nations will fade into obscurity – even great nations will end: The USSR? Gone. Prussia? No more. Babylon? Long-since crumbled to dust.

Even our great symbols of state will pass; the Church and the Crown will one day be no more.

All will be thrown down, says Christ.

There’s only one thing that lasts. 

Not one thing that exists, is worth killing for. But there is one thing worth dying for: it is patient. It is kind. It is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way and it is not irritable or resentful. It does not rejoice in wrong-doing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things and endures all things. And it never ends.

It is Love.

In the end – when all else has been thrown down and turned to dust, when nations are no more, and the earth is no more, and the sun is no more, Love will endure.

In the end, love wins.

And so that is our challenge – following the examples of all who have shown the greatest love that exists, of laying down their lives for the sake of someone else – to simply love. Love wholeheartedly. Love outrageously. Love offensively.

Love – and make a difference. Make the only difference that lasts.

And make it your act of ongoing remembrance, this day, and always.

Amen.