Remembrance Day sermon
Nov. 8th, 2009 09:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chrishansenhomeWhen you're preaching, or giving any sort of speech, it's sometimes a bit unclear to you whether you're actually getting through or not. You can tell a less-then-optimal sermon by the rustling, the murmuring, sometimes even nodding heads. But the way you can tell if your message is being well-communicated is this: when you look around the church, there is no rustling, no murmuring, just people being silent and listening intently. That is the Bingo Moment. During the last few paragraphs of this sermon, I had a Bingo Moment, and afterwards I was complimented by some of the congregation. There is no more precious time for a preacher than to experience a Bingo Moment.
I was very lucky in another way today: the person reading the Jewish Scriptures picked up the wrong reading and read it through. Had I depended upon this reading for my sermon, I would have been a bit put out. I have seen other preachers in the same situation: they simply read the correct reading from the pulpit and ploughed on into the sermon. I'm glad I didn't have to do that this morning.
November 8, 2009 Remembrance Sunday
Sermon delivered at St. John the Evangelist, 10 am.
Readings: II Samuel 1:17-27; Ps. 23; Revelation 21:1-7; Matthew 5:1-11
In the name of God, the one, the Undivided Trinity. AMEN.
Let me tell you a slightly imaginary tale.
The person in the chair stood to greet me. He had a pleasant smile on his face, and said, “I’m sorry, I don’t know you. I’m John.” and held out his hand for a handshake. I shook hands and said, “I’m Chris, how are you today?”
This is something that might happen to any of us entering a room containing a stranger. However, the person in the chair was not a stranger—he had been a close friend for many years.
Whenever I visited him, he introduced himself yet again as John, and professed not to know me. The psychiatrist said that John would never remember me from visit to visit. His memory only lasted for 10 minutes before fading away.
I wonder if you can imagine living with a memory that stretched back only 10 minutes. When a person has a stroke that affects a certain place in their brains, their memories become as fleeting as the blink of an eye. Their family, friends, homes become places and people who are continually unknown to them. Their reactions range from a childlike wonder at the series of new faces and places entering their lives to a terrified fear of the unknowns around every corner.
Forgetting in this way is, thankfully, very rare. Were I to suffer from this condition, the only balm would be that I would be unaware that I suffered from it. Every ten minutes or so, I would forget everything, even the fact of my illness, and the even more terrible fact that there is no cure for it.
There are of course other manners of forgetfulness. I forget to buy a can of kidney beans for the chili I cooked Friday night. A friend of mine has tactlessly forgotten that I lent him fifty pounds, and requires reminding occasionally. I forget a social engagement to which I’ve been looking forward for weeks, and remember only an hour after it’s begun. At a party, I forget someone’s name, and (as per usual) the someone comes over, greets me by name, and engages me in conversation while I desperately rack my brain for his name. People who specialise in methods for remembering lists of things like names of people make a lot of money teaching them to other people. And, as I get older, I find myself going to the refrigerator to put away the cling film, or filling the electric kettle and catching myself fleetingly wanting to place it on the hob and light the gas.
The ability to remember our past and relate it to our present and future is a great ability, and one which helps make a human being. If we all had 10-minute memories, civilisation would be impossible. Communication would be difficult. Nothing that had to be arranged more than 10 minutes in the future would ever get done.
The Israelites had a very specific use for memory—one that we might want to think about today. As they did not generally believe in an afterlife (that addition to Jewish theology came much later) what they substituted for an afterlife was memory. After death, a person lived on not in Heaven, or some other place—a person lived on in the memories of those who had known him or her.
This was not a unique belief of the Israelites. When an Egyptian pharaoh died, and an enemy succeeded to the throne, the first thing the new pharaoh did was to deface the monumental statues raised to his predecessor, and chisel out from the walls any written references to him. This was a symbol that the dead pharaoh was a non-person, unsuitable for the collective memory of the Egyptian people. His memory was erased.
The Soviet Union would do the same things to those who fell from the grace of those modern pharaohs, Stalin, Lenin, and Khrushchev. History books were recalled and the names of those fallen out of favour would be missing from the replacement books. They were non-persons.
To the Israelites, to forget someone was to annihilate him, to make him a non-person, to act as though he had never existed. They continuously cried out to God not to forget Israel—as the consequence of God forgetting Israel would be to make Israel into nothing at all.
Thus, to remember someone was in a way to continue their existence beyond sight, even beyond the grave.
Today we are meant to remember all those who have gone before us as a result of war. The Beatitudes which we have just heard tell us all we need to know about war—Jesus didn’t bless war, or warriors. He blessed those who made peace, and he didn’t mean those who made peace at the point of a gun or the blade of a sword.
General George S. Patton, the US Army general who said that war is the noblest activity of mankind, was wrong. War is hell, as his predecessor General Sherman said, and nothing since the American Civil War has been able to negate that. Those who died in the Crimea, the Spanish-American War, the First World War, the Second World War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the first and second Gulf Wars, and now the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan claim our memory, claim admiration for their bravery in the face of death, but the wars in which they died—even the Second World War against fascism—offer nothing but ashes to our memories.
In order that these brave men and women will live on in the earthly memories of the nations and peoples of the world, we remember them not only today, but every day. We remember not only those who died in battle but those who participated bravely in these wars and lived their lives out afterward. Perhaps they did not live to tell the tale, as many found the tales too frightening to confide to anyone.
My own father, a veteran of the Second World War in the South Pacific who served on an aircraft carrier during the Battle of Guadalcanal, never mentioned the war again once he had returned home. He wanted to forget, to annihiliate the cruelties, the casualties, and the horrors of that battle and that war. He entered Paradise six years ago tomorrow, and he still lives on in the memories of his children and friends here below.
While our memories of those whom we honour today help them to live on in our national memory, as Christians we believe fervently that death is not the end, that people’s eternal lives begin at the moment of their death, and that God’s saving power extends beyond the grave. We who live remember those who died; the One who has given us our lives also remembers them, and God’s memory does not exist in 10-minute intervals, but lasts forever. We remember them, and He remembers them, and our faith tells us that His memory is sufficient.
AMEN.
I was very lucky in another way today: the person reading the Jewish Scriptures picked up the wrong reading and read it through. Had I depended upon this reading for my sermon, I would have been a bit put out. I have seen other preachers in the same situation: they simply read the correct reading from the pulpit and ploughed on into the sermon. I'm glad I didn't have to do that this morning.
November 8, 2009 Remembrance Sunday
Sermon delivered at St. John the Evangelist, 10 am.
Readings: II Samuel 1:17-27; Ps. 23; Revelation 21:1-7; Matthew 5:1-11
In the name of God, the one, the Undivided Trinity. AMEN.
Let me tell you a slightly imaginary tale.
The person in the chair stood to greet me. He had a pleasant smile on his face, and said, “I’m sorry, I don’t know you. I’m John.” and held out his hand for a handshake. I shook hands and said, “I’m Chris, how are you today?”
This is something that might happen to any of us entering a room containing a stranger. However, the person in the chair was not a stranger—he had been a close friend for many years.
Whenever I visited him, he introduced himself yet again as John, and professed not to know me. The psychiatrist said that John would never remember me from visit to visit. His memory only lasted for 10 minutes before fading away.
I wonder if you can imagine living with a memory that stretched back only 10 minutes. When a person has a stroke that affects a certain place in their brains, their memories become as fleeting as the blink of an eye. Their family, friends, homes become places and people who are continually unknown to them. Their reactions range from a childlike wonder at the series of new faces and places entering their lives to a terrified fear of the unknowns around every corner.
Forgetting in this way is, thankfully, very rare. Were I to suffer from this condition, the only balm would be that I would be unaware that I suffered from it. Every ten minutes or so, I would forget everything, even the fact of my illness, and the even more terrible fact that there is no cure for it.
There are of course other manners of forgetfulness. I forget to buy a can of kidney beans for the chili I cooked Friday night. A friend of mine has tactlessly forgotten that I lent him fifty pounds, and requires reminding occasionally. I forget a social engagement to which I’ve been looking forward for weeks, and remember only an hour after it’s begun. At a party, I forget someone’s name, and (as per usual) the someone comes over, greets me by name, and engages me in conversation while I desperately rack my brain for his name. People who specialise in methods for remembering lists of things like names of people make a lot of money teaching them to other people. And, as I get older, I find myself going to the refrigerator to put away the cling film, or filling the electric kettle and catching myself fleetingly wanting to place it on the hob and light the gas.
The ability to remember our past and relate it to our present and future is a great ability, and one which helps make a human being. If we all had 10-minute memories, civilisation would be impossible. Communication would be difficult. Nothing that had to be arranged more than 10 minutes in the future would ever get done.
The Israelites had a very specific use for memory—one that we might want to think about today. As they did not generally believe in an afterlife (that addition to Jewish theology came much later) what they substituted for an afterlife was memory. After death, a person lived on not in Heaven, or some other place—a person lived on in the memories of those who had known him or her.
This was not a unique belief of the Israelites. When an Egyptian pharaoh died, and an enemy succeeded to the throne, the first thing the new pharaoh did was to deface the monumental statues raised to his predecessor, and chisel out from the walls any written references to him. This was a symbol that the dead pharaoh was a non-person, unsuitable for the collective memory of the Egyptian people. His memory was erased.
The Soviet Union would do the same things to those who fell from the grace of those modern pharaohs, Stalin, Lenin, and Khrushchev. History books were recalled and the names of those fallen out of favour would be missing from the replacement books. They were non-persons.
To the Israelites, to forget someone was to annihilate him, to make him a non-person, to act as though he had never existed. They continuously cried out to God not to forget Israel—as the consequence of God forgetting Israel would be to make Israel into nothing at all.
Thus, to remember someone was in a way to continue their existence beyond sight, even beyond the grave.
Today we are meant to remember all those who have gone before us as a result of war. The Beatitudes which we have just heard tell us all we need to know about war—Jesus didn’t bless war, or warriors. He blessed those who made peace, and he didn’t mean those who made peace at the point of a gun or the blade of a sword.
General George S. Patton, the US Army general who said that war is the noblest activity of mankind, was wrong. War is hell, as his predecessor General Sherman said, and nothing since the American Civil War has been able to negate that. Those who died in the Crimea, the Spanish-American War, the First World War, the Second World War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the first and second Gulf Wars, and now the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan claim our memory, claim admiration for their bravery in the face of death, but the wars in which they died—even the Second World War against fascism—offer nothing but ashes to our memories.
In order that these brave men and women will live on in the earthly memories of the nations and peoples of the world, we remember them not only today, but every day. We remember not only those who died in battle but those who participated bravely in these wars and lived their lives out afterward. Perhaps they did not live to tell the tale, as many found the tales too frightening to confide to anyone.
My own father, a veteran of the Second World War in the South Pacific who served on an aircraft carrier during the Battle of Guadalcanal, never mentioned the war again once he had returned home. He wanted to forget, to annihiliate the cruelties, the casualties, and the horrors of that battle and that war. He entered Paradise six years ago tomorrow, and he still lives on in the memories of his children and friends here below.
While our memories of those whom we honour today help them to live on in our national memory, as Christians we believe fervently that death is not the end, that people’s eternal lives begin at the moment of their death, and that God’s saving power extends beyond the grave. We who live remember those who died; the One who has given us our lives also remembers them, and God’s memory does not exist in 10-minute intervals, but lasts forever. We remember them, and He remembers them, and our faith tells us that His memory is sufficient.
AMEN.
