Press Releases14 Nov 04

Remembrance, Thanksgiving and Anticipation - Bishop Jackon's Remembrance Day sermon at St. Macartan's Cathedral, Clogher

REMEMBRANCE, THANKSGIVING AND ANTICIPATION
sermon by
The Rt. Revd Michael Jackson, Bishop of Clogher
Remembrance Sunday
14th November 2004
in St Macartan?s Cathedral, Clogher.

Isaiah 65.17-25; St Luke 21.5-19; psalm 98.

It simply would not be possible to argue that we live in a world of sustained and settled peace. News bulletins are steeped in conflicts whether they be topical or of long standing. Did we think that we would be talking on a daily basis about Falujah and Kirkuk in November 2004? Did we think we would once more be praying for the well-being of hostages from our own country in mortal danger abroad? To many people the immediate, instantaneous and instinctive attempt on the part of the Westminster Government to refute and disown statistics of war dead in the Iraq War only last month said more about the jitteriness of a leader with one eye on his own re-election for a third term and the other eye on his friend?s bid for re-election for a second term of office than it did about anything else. Those figures ? as you will be well aware ? were 100,000 women and children dead in the Iraq War, many of them classed as killed violently. The numbers appeared in the medical journal The Lancet, aptly named because the figures cut deep, they really hurt, they add up what we hear and half hear, watch and half take in during the day on most days.

This afternoon we gather in St Macartan?s Cathedral and in Clogher with the purpose of remembering those who in two World Wars have given their lives in the service of others for the cause of freedom and for that elusive word peace. In our own part of the world, so deceptively and charmingly peaceful-looking at times, this inevitably and rightly has extended to the troubled warfare which has eaten into the life, the morale and the community of our own country for well over thirty years. People here too have given their lives in the service of others and others too have been deprived of life simply by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Such examples live with us still in the names of people we know and love and whom we have now lost.

Yet all of this we do in a spirit of remembrance and thanksgiving combined. This combination of thanksgiving and remembrance is not easy. The remembrance tends to make us particularly conscious of our loss. The thanksgiving tends to make us guilty in the face of those who remain bereaved. Yet as so often it is just those very people, the bereaved themselves, who hold the key to enabling any embattled and embittered society to move forward, however slow that movement may be and may have to be. And we should be able to listen to and learn from them. We are upheld in hope by the promise of God the Father that hurt and destruction do not last for ever. We are supported here in life by the compassion of God the Son who wept both for his friend Lazarus and for the city of Jerusalem ? the individual is personally in the care of Christ Jesus as is also the gathering of individuals into a people, a city, a nation. We are strengthened in our own service of the community by God the Spirit who gives us a vision of God dwelling with us as his people in a new creation, as a fresh energy is released by those who live through the loss, the grief, the sadness and hold to the vision of a peaceful future.

This sort of vision is not the glib mission statement of success, of enhanced productivity, of plastic joy and ?photo calls which have become the public face of a society driven by advertising, consumerism and superficiality. It does something more timeless, more noble and more respectful. It draws into the embrace of God the hurt and the destruction, the compassion and the forgiveness, the old and the new in a free flow of love between God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit and his people, his children, the people of the new earth who are God?s own children. There may seem to be no time, but it takes time. There may seem to be no hope, but it plants hope. There may seem to be no future, but in the strength of God it moves us into the future which will happen whether we are part of it or not. And, I say, we do all of this in a spirit of remembrance and thanksgiving.

Remembrance , thanksgiving - and at this time of year I need to add a third word: anticipation because the Scriptural Readings demand it of us. And we can anticipate in either of two ways. In a well worn image people often speak of the choice between a glass half-empty and a glass half-full. But, then, images become well-worn often because they have been put to considerable and repeated use. Our anticipation is based on the anticipation of the Season of Advent in which with Christ Jesus, whose coming at Christmas we await, we enter the darkness with light and also carry the darkness with us out into the light again.

The prophet Isaiah knew well how to listen to God and to speak with God?s people in a whole range of areas of life which remain fresh to us today: the creation of what is new; the hope of a longer time-frame in which we can live, love, laugh, plan for a future which we will experience as the present and all the time not notice the years go by, not let the ticking of the clock dictate to us an unwillingness to move in any direction. Isaiah points God?s people to extraordinary things which can happen, in language which speaks of a new era ? wolf and lamb together feeding, lion and ox together eating, the serpent with its instinct for hurt and destruction banished to eat dust. It is a powerful picture of protection, of holiness coming out from the body of God?s people and spreading like sunlight over all before it. The darkness is certainly not denied - because we are well aware that it is not usual for these animals to sit down to dinner together - but the darkness is dealt with and the light of holiness opens up a glorious way to life.

The temptation for us as people struggling day by day to make sense of our lives, to give something as well as taking something is that we can easily be blown off course. We can concentrate too much on the signs near to hand without looking further ahead, towards the end. In fact we have become terrified of the end because we see it as the low point and not the high point. To people like us the Jesus of St Luke gives a timely reminder to go easier on ourselves at a point when we could all too easily opt for judgement instead of hope. And this instinct for judgement is one about which we need to be extremely careful. The negative piling up of experiences can eat away at our storehouse of hope; then when we really need hope, it is painfully not there. So I suggest that instead of concentrating on the disasters we concentrate on the anticipation embedded in them:

And Jesus said: Beware that you are not led astray; for many will come in my name and say: I am he! and: The time is near! Don?t go after them.

When you hear of wars and insurrections, do not be terrified ? the end will not follow immediately.

You will be hated by all ? But not a hair of your head will perish. By your endurance you will gain your souls.

As I say, let us anticipate the positive. In such a spirit as this let us look forward in remembrance and in thanksgiving today. There are people to lead us astray still in this society with loose talk of sectarianism, reprisal, the cast of mind which mutters ?sure, the only good one is a dead one? ? Don?t go after them, says Jesus. There are prophets of doom who sap your energy, bleed your trust and are nowhere to be found to be confronted with the truth when things are not as bad as they made them out to be ? the end will not follow immediately, says Jesus. There are the manipulators of decent, quiet people who have been bruised, battered and bereaved. Nobody is denying the sadness of loss, the evil of war but ? By your endurance you will gain your souls, says Jesus. Say: No! to evil manipulators. Say: Yes! to a future of which you are part. Say: Well done! to yourselves for the integrity of your endurance. And see the prophets of doom off the premises!

It is my firm and sustained conviction that we can from within the pages of Holy Scripture find the way to love God, to love ourselves and to love one another. To me this really is what the Christian experiment is all about. As Christian people we have the invitation and the imperative to combat the evil in our society with goodness. We have direct access to the goodness and the Godliness which form our living heritage to help us to combat what is now the warfare of a sub-culture. As I have said before on various occasions: racism in Northern Ireland is taking over where sectarianism seems to have left off. I was the first to say it in The General Synod of 2003 and I was immediately shot down ? but you get used to that sort of thing! The war waged by the sort of subculture to which I refer is sapping the vitality and the genuine desire of people like you and me to move forward into the zone of peace with other people. We and they are different but we and they need not be sworn enemies The political vacuum which is Northern Ireland today does not help. And all too easily the price of peace can become, and remain, a silence of fear. This war concerns things like drugs, fuel and cigarettes ? and worse. It fuels a lifestyle which runs in the face of the straightforward values of a decent society. Like Isaiah?s serpent it has no place at the table with wolf and lamb, lion and ox but its food should be dust!

Our memory and our thanksgiving challenge us to settle only for something better and more wholesome as we recall the service and the suffering of those who died for freedom in two World Wars and as we draw into that circle of memory all who have suffered and died in The Troubles, our own tragic and soul-diminishing internal War in Northern Ireland. The haunting pledge which has annually gone out on Remembrance Sunday to every generation is this: ?we will remember them. The silent majority always needs to take care that it is not the invisible and the forgotten statistic. That would indeed be a tragic waste of experience, of restraint and of quiet hope. It is on these simple virtues rather than on the merry-go-round of political spin that a new society will emerge and challenge what is partisan, what is sectarian, what is racist, what is the black market of an unseen war and a corrosive sub-culture.

I began with frightening, shattering statistics of the violent deaths of anything up to 100,000 people in contemporary Iraq, many of them women and children. As we honour our own dead in two World Wars, we must never forget that every war has at least two sides, so many innocent victims. And so I leave you with a genuine story told to me with passion by the person at the heart of it herself, more than sixty years later. It concerns a girl aged four. She was re-located within her own country as an internal refugee during World War II. She lived with good people some 800 kilometres to the East of her home in the West of her country. One day she simply left the village where she lived and found her way purposefully ? as so often can be the way with little girls of 4 ? to the War Cemetery. She gathered small flowers and began by placing 5 flowers on each of the graves of the dead soldiers. But she soon ran out, so she re-arranged them in such a way that there were 2 on each grave. Even these ran out, so she eventually settled for 1 per grave.

She is now the wife of the Lutheran bishop in Sleswig in Germany. I met her recently and she told me why she did it. Her father from whom the outbreak of War separated her, never to see him again, was a soldier. She did all of what I have outlined above quite deliberately in the hope that another little girl somewhere else might do the same thing for her father when he dies, when he was killed, when he was buried in a cemetery. Her father was our enemy, indeed she was our enemy. But the sense of freedom which radiated from her face as, approaching 70 years old, she told me the rest of the story ? namely that visiting in the West of her country she had on the previous day located her father?s grave ? brought me into a whole new realm of remembrance and thanksgiving. Her personal and individual anticipation had taken a lifetime but she was fulfilled, she was delighted, she was at last able to bring together remembrance and thanksgiving. In the words of St Luke: by her endurance she gained her soul.

Remembering and giving thanks take different forms for different people. Each one has a private part of the self, the soul where we go to handle this. And anyone who does it knows deep down that it takes time and that it is often very lonely. Gradually a new community can form itself. Equipped with the assurance of Jesus that war is tragic and yet is not the end we can go back into Isaiah?s prophecy and see with our own eyes the new heavens and the new earth of God?s promise.

I offer you this short prayer of remembrance of our calling as Gods? children and people of the world, an expression of our incompleteness until all are complete:

Show us, good Lord,
How to be frugal, till all are fed;
How to weep, till all can laugh;
How to be meek, till all can stand in pride;
How to mourn, till all are comforted;
How to be restless, till all live in peace;
How to claim less, till all find justice.

It does take time. It will take time. But have we ever really thought otherwise?