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Remembrance Sunday 2007:
St Mary's, Barnes
Sermon by the Rt Revd Lord Harries of Pentregarth, former Bishop
of Oxford
With our forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, we are very conscious of the
reality of war. We are also aware of the cost, a significant number
of our soldiers having been killed or seriously wounded. Yet the casualties
in the World Wars of the 20th century were at a horrendous level. Some
350 names of people from Barnes killed in World War I are entered in
the Book of Remembrance and some 180 from World War II. We are conscious
of the terrible losses – what the poet Wilfred Owen called "the
pity of war". It is servicemen and women who are most aware of this,
and who will be the last people to give war a false glamour. As the
Duke of Wellington remarked, "There is only one thing sadder than winning
a battle, and that is losing it."
Yet, in a world characterized by sin and folly, hard choices have
to be made. There are times when force has to be used, in full awareness
of what this will entail in terms of travail and suffering. So, we remember
and honour those who chose to join in the struggle to resist evil, and
whose lives were maimed or cut short as a result. There is a real sense
in which those of us who have lived since World War II owe them a debt.
We have had basic freedoms and rights which we would not have had unless
the nation had responded to the call to engage in that life and death
struggle. We have enjoyed a world which is not dominated by Nazi tyranny.
And we do not forget those within Germany itself who, in even more difficult
circumstances, recognized evil for what it was and resisted it at the
cost of their lives.
The prophet Ezekiel warns us against those who say "Peace, Peace"
when there is no peace. For there are many forms of false peace: that
which is built on injustice; the apparent peace of prosperity that hides
exploitation. When Martin Luther King was jailed in his struggle for
civil rights, twenty white pastors wrote to him to suggest that he stopped
stirring things up. He wrote back to say, "Peace is not the absence
of tension but the presence of Justice." That is a wonderful summary
of the Old Testament understanding of Shalom, the peace which is built
on justice.
There is a prayer that is used by the Corrymeela Community in Northern
Ireland, which is dedicated to working for reconciliation between the
communities, which goes
Show us, good Lord
The peace we should seek,
The peace we must give,
The peace we can keep,
The peace we must forgo,
And the peace you have given,
In Jesus Christ our Lord.
Not all peace is the peace of God: true peace is a peace we have to
seek and often have to struggle for.
There is also a peace we must give. This is a peace we give when we
work for a better, fairer world, when we work for reconciliation, when
we are one of those of whom Jesus said "Blessed are the Peacemakers".
There is unfortunately a part of human nature that gets a frisson at
the thought of division and strife, which takes a secret delight in
someone else's quarrel. But we are called to try to bring people together
and that means first of all having peace within ourselves. Jesus said
to his disciples just before he departed from this world "Peace I leave
you, my peace I give unto you. Not as the world giveth, give I unto
you." This, we pray, is the peace which now enfolds those whom we remember
today. This is the peace we pray for ourselves. There is a peace within
us, what Wordsworth referred to as "A central peace subsisting at the
heart of endless agitation." But it is not the peace of withdrawal and
escapism. It leads us to heal antagonisms and divisions and to work
for that justice on which alone the peace of the world can rest. This
is the way we best honour our debt to those we remember today, those
whose courage and lives have enabled us to live in comparative peace
and security.
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