Remembrance Sunday 2025

 This sermon was written for Remembrance Sunday 2025; eighty years since the end of World War  II.



Today we mark eighty years since the end of the Second World War.


I remember clearly standing here only six years ago, marking one hundred years since the very first Remembrance  Day.


I also gave my first remembrance day sermon 11 years ago, marking one hundred years since the start of the First World War.


This is my fifth Remembrance Sunday sermon.


Each year that I write these sermons, I realise that fewer and fewer of us remember. 


Back in 2014, I remarked that to have met anyone who had died in World War I – that great war to end all wars, you would have needed to be at least 96 years old then. You’d need to be 107 now. There are about 130 people living in the UK who are 107 or older.


You would need to be over eighty years old now to have ever met anyone who died in the Second World Wa. That’s about 4% of the UK population. Even with that, you’d probably need to be in your late eighties to really remember them.


As each year turns, these people whose names we will read out later this morning are fading from our national consciousness. They are no longer memories for many of us; instead they live on as stories; tales told by someone else, second – or even third – hand.



For many of us, all we hear is a name and a war in which they died. As we hear those names, we will pause to reflect on family names that we hear repeated in and across the wars, and think of the families to come who never were, descendants never born and not sitting here with us today. But most of us never knew these people.



We will remember them.

How do we do that when we never knew them?



In the six years that have passed since my first remembrance sermon, levels of conflict in the world have doubled. Within that time almost one million people around the world have died as a result of war. To put it into context, that is higher than all those who died as a result of war in the entire decade from 2010 to 2019. 


2022 was the single worst year for deaths caused by war in the world since the Rwandan conflict in 1994. The statistics for 2025 are not yet available.


We will remember them.




It seems that we are incredibly bad at remembering.


We turn war into a thing of glory and justice and bravery. We think of our brave boys marching out with heads held high, heading off to face the enemy with good old British pluck and courage, and we aspire to their levels of bravery in the face of evil.


But war is not glorious. And the people it kills may perform heroic acts, but they are ordinary people, like you and me, like our families and our friends. They just ended up in the wrong place, at the wrong time. 


Those who knew these people in person, who fought alongside them would tell us that, but they themselves are leaving us year on year. And in losing them as well, our remembrance becomes poorer; It becomes distorted.


This – I think – is what is important to remember. These men and women who have died in those two hellish wars, and all wars in the last one hundred and twenty five years, would plead for us to do so. One hundred and eighty-eight million voices – for that is how many people across the world have died as a result of war since the start of the twentieth century – one hundred and eighty-eight million voices calling for peace. Calling for wars to cease and for no-one else to have a death like theirs. Calling for us to strive to live in a world governed by love for one another – as Christ commanded those who love him to do. Calling for us to strive to live in a world prophesied by Isaiah, where nations shall no longer lift up arms against each other, and that neither shall they learn war any more.


Let us not remember glory. Let us not remember heroism. Let us not remember victory. 

Remembering these things is not working. Whilst remembering these things, humankind has only waged further, and more intense war.


Let us instead remember those one hundred and eighty-eight million ordinary people – a tiny handful of whose names we will read out this morning – and let us honour their memory in our work to make our world, our country, our own lives, places of peace.


Let us finally try to love one another, and learn war no more.


We will remember them.


Amen


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