Remembrance Sunday 2023

May I speak in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

Amen.

How should we remember?

Or what should be the nature of our remembrance when we live in a time of war?

That's gonna be my question for us this morning.

How should we remember when we live in a time of war?

In 1992, a political scientist, an American political scientist called Francis Fukuyama, wrote a piece of political philosophy called The End of History and the Last Man.

He's become infamous for this book, The End of History.

He wrote it in 1992.

In it, he argued that with the end of the Cold War, just a year earlier, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, humanity had reached not just the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but literally the end of history as such.

That is the end point of humankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.

He's not suggesting that we turn off our clocks and stop writing things down.

He's not history in that sense.

But Francis Fukiama in 1992 made the claim we have reached the final point.

We've got democracy, we've got capitalism, we know those two things have won.

That means there's no more learning to be done.

He's a fantastic example of what I want to call the straight line view of history.

The straight line view of history.

From Neanderthals all the way up to 1992, slowly getting better and better, higher and higher.

Always heading in the straight direction, things are steadily getting better and improving.

This view of history, if it had a theme tune, it would be the same as Labour's theme tune in 1997.

If you remember the campaign theme tune by D.

Reim, things can only get better.

Not only can things only get better, but they will and they must.

That is the direction that history is going in.

I wonder if you've ever heard that phrase before.

Francis Fukiama, 1992, is making the sense that in some making the claim that in some sense we have reached the final answer.

It's the answer to the question of how we run our markets and how we should run our societies, capitalism and democracy.

And everything up to this point has been trying to find out the answer to those.

And now that we've got them, that's the end of history.

History is a straight line.

It should be noticed that all the examples I've just given come from the 1990s, at the end of the last millennium, and with all of that entails the kind of heady sense that we were reaching a climactic point.

And clearly it's the case, and I'll come back to this theme, that the last 20 years have started to discredit some of the strident confidence that we had as a society back then.

And yet I think this view of history lingers.

You might still feel it in the way that you talk about your own lives or the lives of your children and grandchildren.

You might not talk this way, but you might feel it as a basic assumption of how our lives should play out, how our careers should develop, that we should just naturally acquire more material possessions as life goes on.

Of course, you're going to pay off your house and become richer as you get older.

And of course, our children and our grandchildren should be better off than when we were growing up.

These are the way things should be.

The lingering assumption that progress only and ever increases.

And as a result of that assumption, we only ever get further and further away from the darkness of our past.

I grew up in the 90s.

I remember this time of peace and prosperity.

And I grew up with this straight-line view of history.

And so I thought that the task of Remembrance Day was to sit and think about these world wars, first and second, as they got further and further away from us.

And for me personally, it was an opportunity to think about my English grandfather, who was a mechanic in the Second World War, and my Polish grandparents on my mother's side, who were refugees, having been moved out of their home by the Russians and ended up in London.

This was my connection to those wars, and that's how I chose to remember them.

There is clearly a problem with the straight-line view of history.

The darknesses of our past are not slowly retreating into distant memory.

We have not seen the glorious unfurling of democracy and peace around the world.

In fact, the demographic suggests that the youngest generation is going to be poorer and shorter lived than the generations that have preceded it.

And, and you I imagine could feel I was going here, with the war in Ukraine and with the conflict in Israel and between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, growing tensions between China and Taiwan, we must acknowledge, I think, the inexorable sense that we are heading back into a time of global and regional conflict.

Remember my question for our morning together.

How do we remember in a time of war?

What is the nature of our remembrance in conflict?

Let me suggest a new way of understanding history and the future.

And in fact, it's a much older way of understanding history.

Not a straight line, but a circle.

Just as there are seasons of the year, autumn leads to spring, leads to summer.

Autumn leads to winter, leads to spring, leads to summer, and then returns back again to autumn.

Just as seeds are planted, they grow, crops are harvested, and then seeds are sown again.

Just as we follow the natural rhythms of life, of birth and death.

For ancient societies, it was far more natural to think of time and history not as a straight line, but as a circle.

History moves in and out of seasons, times.

There are times of peace and times of conflict.

Or as the writer of Ecclesiastes says in chapter 3, very famously, for everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven, a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to pluck up what is planted, a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to break down and a time to build up, a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance, a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace.

Somehow those verses ring afresh on a day like today.

I think this is a much better understanding of how the world really is, and it means I'd like to suggest that on a day like today our remembrance can be filled with hope.

Remembrance and hope.

With this view of history, remembrance on a day like today takes on new meaning.

Remembrance becomes filled with hope.

We don't just remember the conflict, we also remember and hope for again the reconciliation that came after that conflict.

We remember not just the wars that took place and those people who died and gave up their lives for us, but we also remember that after each of those wars came to an end, there was a season of healing and reconciliation.

This is why, and I'd like you to turn now to the back of your orders of service.

I've included two images from Coventry Cathedral.

It's the same statue, but given from two different aspects, so that you can get a good sense of what it looks like.

Coventry Cathedral is a very special place to me.

I worked there for two years before I got ordained, and the whole building really is a monument to the power of peace, forgiveness, and reconciliation.

What is possible right in the midst of war?

This particular sculpture that I've recreated for you in the bulletins is was created in 1977 by Josefina de Vasconzolez, who said this.

People were stunned.

I read in a newspaper about a woman who crossed Europe on foot to find her husband, and I was so moved that I made it into a sculpture.

Then I thought that it wasn't only about the reunion of two people, but hopefully the reunion of nations that had been fighting.

And so in 1995, bronze casts of this sculpture were placed in the ruins of Coventry Cathedral, in Hiroshima Peace Park in Japan, and then additional casts have been made and put into the Stormont estate in Belfast, in the German Reichstag, and after the fall of the Berlin War, they were placed in the Chapel of Reconciliation in Berlin.

This image has been used around the world to remind people of reconciliation, to help people remember peace, reconciliation, and reunion.

On the pedestal of the statue, the text reads this All statues remind us that in the face of destructive forces, human dignity and love will triumph over disaster and bring nations together in respect and peace.

Let me suggest this morning that our remembrance must also be an act of hope.

Just as we remember spring in the depths of winter, so too we must remember peace in a time of war.

There is so much darkness around us at this time.

We are surrounded by visual and physical reminders.

But we are reminded by visual and physical reminders that good really can come out of evil, that peace really does come after war, that healing is possible after violence, that resurrection is possible after death, that light will push back darkness eventually, and that despair, cruelty, and hate will one day yield to faith, hope, and love.

This way of remembering, I think, should be familiar to Christians.

And this is how I'm going to lead into the Eucharist, because every Sunday we say in our liturgy the words that Jesus said, Do this in remembrance of me.

And so every Sunday we remember his dying on a cross and we live in the hope of his resurrection.

How do we remember in a time of war?

What is the nature of our remembrance when we're surrounded by conflict?

We will remember them.

And if that and if it is the case that history is repeating itself, then we will also remember in hope that after war comes peace and reconciliation.

Amen.