Today’s remembering

We meet today on Remembrance Sunday, a day when we hold before God all those who have died in war, and in which we commit ourselves to the furthering of the Kingdom of peace. We meet in a time of renewed war – whether Russia in Ukraine – a war driven by a search for power in which human beings are incidental, are expendable – or the dozens of other conflicts around the world that never hit the headlines, and yet which continue to scar the continents from which many of us come. The hubristic notion that the First World War would be the war to end all wars has been shown up for exactly the hubris it was, and despite every step forward we might like to point to in human civilization, here we are again, with force being used to pursue ideological and mythical aims, with women and children being murdered, and war crimes taking place in Europe itself. For the twenty-first century European, just as for so many before us, in the midst of life, we are in death. For everything we tell about ourselves, the reality of war refuses to die away.

 

And whilst we meet here to remember, it is not at all clear that we are truly remembering, as a nation, with the clarity that we need. Of course, it is entirely right for us to remember those who have died, to mourn them and to commemorate their sacrifice. And yet there is the ever-present temptation to sanitise that sacrifice – to refuse to do the hard work and ask questions about the how and the why, focusing instead on the narratives we tell ourselves about duty, and service, and patriotism. None of those things are bad things, of course, but neither should they provide a smokescreen for self-congratulation as a country. And in refusing to ask the deeper questions, we cheapen everything we say and do at this time of national remembrance. A true commitment to country requires us to ask those questions.

 

For we know that wars do not come out of nowhere. What we say matters – what we say, what indeed our leaders say and what we choose to follow, is not incidental. The stories we tell about ourselves and about the world, the way we see ourselves in relation to other people and to the world around us, all these things matter. And to take a step back and look at the way we talk about ourselves today as a nation does not always feel terribly comfortable.

 

Much has been made in recent years of the importance of free speech – of the need for people to be able to say what they think without fear of being censured, without fear of being ‘cancelled’. And yet, free speech – what we say about ourselves and about others – does not spring forth into a vacuum. What we say is not incidental to how we live – it frequently defines exactly who we are and who we want to be. Our national narrative, our political and cultural dialogue, is not somehow irrelevant to how we develop as a country – it is fundamental. The language we use matters – the things we say about each other matters, whether that is around the dinner table, in the public square, in the parliament or at the UN. Each and every time, then, we demean or debase others, we demean and debase our public life – we demean and debase ourselves. In marring the image of God in others, what we end up doing is marring it in ourselves.

 

‘While we try to accommodate them as best we can, the word ‘guest’ is a bit of a misnomer. Arrivals are all known by a number rather than by a name. They wear this number on a band around their wrist. Some try to make weapons out of everything – even dismantling the tents that offer a roof over their heads. Some of them use these weapons for self-harm. We intervene if anyone makes themselves bleed.’

 

These words sound like something historical, and yet these are not the words of long ago. They are the words of today – of Manston camp today, less than a hundred miles away from us, in twenty-first century Britain. And yet, in a sense, they become the words of history – the words of our history as a nation. No nation can live on its past reputation, or on its life ‘as was’. Our own nation’s history is far too often sanitised, as we have seen in recent years. And yet putting the arguments about what happened generations ago aside for one moment, this is what is happening today, here and now. And these are the very people who the Home Secretary referred to as ‘invaders on the southern coast’.

 

Words matter. Words matter because by referring to asylum seekers as ‘illegal invaders’, we not only misrepresent the truth but we cheapen the sacrifice of those who we commemorate today. In following the crowd, in our desire for simple answers and easy solutions, we participate in the dehumanisation that sits at the heart of the ‘freedom’ that we so often hear about from our political leaders. Our war dead did not die for vapid notions of freedom that leave us free to persecute and scapegoat others. That kind of freedom is not worth anything at all.

 

Our freedom comes with a responsibility, and as Christians our freedom in Christ makes this responsibility even clearer and even weightier. We are called to speak in the language of encounter and not in the language of othering – to meet human beings as human beings, created in the image of God, loved as we are loved, honoured as we are honoured, as three-dimensional and holy and adored by God as anyone else. Whatever our frustrations, or our disappointments, the moment we start to use others as tools and refuse to meet them as beloved children of God, we deny Christ. We are called to be people of the truth, people called to speak carefully, yet unambiguously and clearly, about the innate holiness of each person that God has created. We are called to solidarity – to life with Christ. 

 

Our first allegiance is, ultimately, to Christ – and yet that does not make Christians unpatriotic, whatever others might claim. It may suit some politicians and commentators to call something Christian nationalism, but my friends no such thing exists. The politicization of Christianity – the politicization, indeed, of Christ Himself – is a grave scandal, and something we must resist at all costs. Yet we should not be surprised – a political narrative that uses people as means not ends will eventually use the Lord Himself as a means to an end too. Yet how much easier it is to make Christ serve our purposes than to commit ourselves to serving his.

 

‘Beware that you are not led astray’, says Jesus. Brothers and sisters, says St Paul, do not be weary in doing what is right.

 

For as we see the slow chipping away of truth, as we see the encroachment into the mainstream of language that dehumanizes, we cannot say that we had no way of knowing what might happen. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. We meet today to remember the past – to remember those who have died, and to commit ourselves to a better future, a future lived as citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven. That remembering is an active commitment to life in Christ. We are called to stand firm, to testify, to follow the true God and not the gods of the world. Our faith has consequences. And so will our failure to hold firm to it. May God grant us the words and the wisdom, and the courage, to play our part, however small, in His transformation of the world.