Remembrance Sunday Sermon 2016

If you found yourself standing in my study this Sunday morning, probably the first thing you’d notice is the mess. The untidy piles of books awaiting sorting, a desk that seems to fill itself with paperwork every time I turn my back, two sets of roofbars that I’m trying to sell on Gumtree. That kind of thing.

But get past the mess, and the next thing you’d notice are the various bits and pieces hanging on the walls or blu-tacked to the doors or the filing cabinet. Some big, some small, but all of them carrying memories.

The big canvas print of my favourite photo from our trip to America two summers ago – a sunset over Puget Sound.

A postcard of a stained glass window from Pluscarden Abbey. A fridge magnet with a grinning cartoon pig and a caption saying ‘The Pig of Happiness. May his Joyful Smile remind us how much there is to be happy about!”. I needed that one after Tuesday’s election result.

There’s a painting that our summer student Katie bought me last year, a picture of two friends at the Stennes Stones in Orkney. Several works of art created by the kids when they were much much younger than they are today.

And you have your equivalents of those – the bits and pieces around your lounge or dining room or kitchen or bedroom that tell the story of a life. The places you’ve been, the people you love; the things you’ve achieved. All the good memories that you want to hold on to.

And the memories are there in your mind and your heart – nobody can take them from you – but these visual things help our remembering. They bring those particular memories into sharper focus every time we pause and really look at them.

Images, symbols, help us remember.

“I will place my rainbow in the sky” says God to Noah after the great deluge. “And every time I see it, I will remember” – I’ll remember the covenant I’ve made between me and you and every living creature.”

And so the rainbow became a symbol of remembrance.

When a Jewish family eat the Passover meal together, there’s a whole ritual about the proceedings. By tradition the youngest child asks “Why does this night differ from all other nights?” and that unlocks the re-telling of the story of the Exodus. And during the evening they eat the same food their ancestors would have eaten all those years ago - unleavened bread, lamb, bitter herbs, and a sweet dish call charoset.

The food becomes a symbol of remembrance.

Here in the church, we have our own symbols too. The cross, of course, and the bread and wine we share in memory of the sacrifice that Jesus made. Do this, he said to his disciples, in remembrance of me.

And we’ve heard this morning about the origins of the poppies that many of us are wearing. How those lovely red flowers sprang up so quickly on the graves of fallen servicemen and inspired John McCrea to put pen to paper and write “In Flanders Fields”.

And so the poppy became a symbol of remembrance.

So symbols, images, help us when it comes to this business of conscious, intentional remembering.

But it seems to me, as I’ve reflected on this for today, that we’re mistaken if we think that remembrance is all about looking backwards. That’s only half the story, I think.

When God gave the rainbow, he was looking back to the destruction of the flood, but vowing that it would never happen again. He was promising that the present and the future were safe from that kind of disaster.

When a Jewish family takes Passover together, they do so not just to remember their ancestors and the way God delivered them, but to remember that they are a part of that same community even now. That the same God is living and active among them in the present moment.

We wear the poppy on Remembrance Sunday to remember the courage and sacrifice of those who fell in battle. Those men from our parish whose names are carved in granite in our war memorial, and the millions like them who left these shores and fought the enemy not because they wanted to but because they felt they had to.

We remember their heroism in the past; but we also remember the values and principles they fought to defend – freedom from tyranny and oppression, justice for the weak and powerless, the equality of all people regardless of race, creed or colour and our human obligation to one another. And we remember that if their sacrifice is to have any meaning in the present moment, these are the values we need to be living by in our times.

And this morning, gathered together here in the church, we remember the cross. Bearing a figure of Christ in Catholic tradition, to remind us of his suffering. And empty in Protestant tradition, to remind us that the cross did not have the last word on his life.

And we realise again that the cross isn’t just a sign of what Jesus went through in the past; it’s a sign of what he calls us to now in the present. To Love God, and to love your neighbour.

To be a Christian, is to live each present moment at the intersection of those two commands.

We’re surrounded by potent symbols as we gather here this morning; flags, uniforms, poppies, medals. And outside, the names of our fallen beneath a granite celtic cross.

May our time among them help us realise

that Remembrance isn’t just about honouring the past,

important though that is.

It’s also about shaping the present and the future;

holding high the torch

our glorious dead have passed into our hands.

Amen and thanks be to God for his word.