Homily for Remembrance Sunday 8 Nov 2009

Homily for Remembrance Sunday 8 November 2009

Since we commemorated Armistice Day last year, the last three survivors of the First World War have gone to their rest in their extreme old age, and so that war, which older generations called the Great War, has now finally passed out of living memory. It was a war that cost ten thousand men’s lives a day and when it was over all over the United Kingdom every town or village, every college, every school, every church- even railway stations like Waterloo - put up its war memorial with those long sad lists of names, the names of all those young men whose lives had been sacrificed. How poignant it is to read the inscriptions on those memorials, how optimistic, how naïve they sound to us now- this was “the War to end War”, the final conflict for the triumph of Liberty, of Justice and Peace- the survivors and the bereaved families just couldn’t believe that sacrifice and slaughter on that vast scale could have been in vain. They so wanted to believe that the words of the Apocalypse we have just heard were to come true in their time: “There will be no more death, and no more mourning or sadness. The world of the past has gone”. Alas, they were wrong- within the lifetimes of many of those who inscribed such sentiments on the memorials, Europe – and with it, the whole world - was once again convulsed with the horrors of war. And so it is, isn’t it- when one war ends, another starts up so that war just goes on, doesn’t it, somewhere in the world, all the time – the bazaars of Rawalpindi last week have shown us that, and we can’t ever lose sight of the whole ferment of violence that continues along what we used to call The North West Frontier, or the endemic hatred that simmers away in the Middle East. Genocide, which we associate for ever with what the Nazi regime did sixty years ago, has happened in our lifetime in places such as the former Yugoslavia and in Africa –one thinks of Ruanda, of Sierra Leone. We are forced to admit that the words of the Apocalypse have not yet come to pass.
Why is that? Well, one place to look for an answer is the Book of Genesis, whose first eleven chapters preserve for us the many ancient traditions of the Jewish people that explain in the style of myths and legends the nature of God and the nature of human beings. Human beings, destined by their loving Creator for a constant, easy friendship with God, are shown in the Adam and Eve story to be determined to be gods themselves, not content to live by the moral absolutes that are divinely appointed, but determined to make up their own minds about what is right and what is wrong – “if I want to do it, it’s OK!” The story of Cain and Abel that follows immediately after the story of the Fall shows us at once what human nature is capable of: we see the rivalry between two brothers, a resentment of what one brother seems to enjoy and the other thinks should be his, and this envy and bitterness spilling over into violence, and murder. That terrible reply that Cain gives to God when he asks where Abel is- “Am I my brother’s keeper?” The answer of course should be yes, we should have always before our eyes the common humanity we share with all our fellow human beings of whatever race or background, and consequently all members of the one human family should be our cause for concern. But Cain has impersonalised the whole issue, he has repudiated the common bond between him and his brother- how often that happens in our world- the prelude to atrocities perpetrated against people we resent and dislike is always the distancing of ourselves from them, by the demonising of propaganda and the irresponsibility of generalisations. We are somehow “Us” and they are “Them”. And we see how from this legend of the two brothers that violence and war have entered our world and will never leave it. Genesis shows the descendents of Cain contrasted against the descendents of the third brother Seth. Seth’s offspring stand for that part of the human race that is trying always for a closer union with God, that is open to the Divine- Seth’s son Enosh we are told “was the first to invoke the name of the Lord” in prayer and of one of his descendants Enoch it is said “he walked with God” and did not see death but was assumed into Heaven. But Cain has a descendant Lamech, who sings proudly of his violent behaviour: “I killed a man for wounding me, a boy for striking me” and claims that “sevenfold vengeance is taken for Cain, but seventy-sevenfold for Lamech”. We see that although one side of the human race is forever aspiring to heavenly things, to peace and concord at one with God, the other side is caught up in a momentum of evil- a violence that is for ever increasing as it goes from one generation to the next, because of the deadly power of bitterness within us and its demand for retaliation and revenge.
And of course the really terrifying thing is, that this relentless violence is in fact a warfare that takes place not only on our TV screens in faraway places but inside each and every one of us- the struggle between Good and Evil, which must go on its weary way till the end of time, is a daily combat in our own souls, where we must take up our arms every day. But is this therefore a cause for despair, that human nature is so fatally corrupt that war and violence must always have their sway? Will the promises of the Apocalypse never come true? The answer lies in our reading from St Paul’s Letter to the Romans: “this hope is not deceptive, because the love of God has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit which has been given to us”. This endless tension within us between impulses to do the right thing by God and by others and urges to have our selfish way no matter what can be reconciled, has been reconciled if we will only allow ourselves to co-operate with God’s endless grace- we must trust in “Our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have already gained our reconciliation”. The first step towards peace, the peace of the world we all long for – and every Mass after all is explicitly offered “to advance the peace and salvation of all the world” as Canon III has it – is peace within ourselves, peace between me and God. Only then is there a chance that there may come peace on a larger scale, and we will experience rather than just glimpse the true and lasting peace, “the peace that the world cannot give” only Jesus, whose words we hear at every Mass “I leave you peace, my peace I give you.” On this day when we recall with sorrow the appalling loss of life in the two world wars of the last century let us pray that such sacrifices were not in vain, and that the human race will learn its sobering lesson from them, and as our small part let us renew our own commitment to peace- peace in our hearts, peace with our neighbours, peace in the world, but first of all, peace with God. Amen.