St Wilfrid & Presentation, Haywards Heath Remembrance Sunday 12.11.23

Muster Green changed character 99 years ago on November 30th 1924 when Lord Leconsfield unveiled the Haywards Heath war memorial to replace a temporary provision at the town’s ancient road junction. With the appalling slaughter of World War One fresh in their minds, hundreds gathered for the blessing of the seven and a half ton granite slab from Cornwall. 

This morning our parish priest leads a commemoration there of those who died in war for our country in which the war dead of the world today will be much in mind. Palestine and Israel with Ukraine, so much in the news, then, currently less newsworthy but with thousands of dead in the last year: Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Myanmar, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen. 

In his Rector’s letter this week Fr Edward quoted from our first reading 'Wisdom is radiant and unfading, and she is easily discerned by those who love her, and is found by those who seek her.' (Wisdom 6.12) going on to pray that the nations might pursue Holy Wisdom in their endeavours, working to bring peace, justice and reconciliation to the world. All week I’ve been wrestling with the other two readings from 1 Thessalonians on death and Matthew 25 on the wise and foolish bridesmaids linked to the Wisdom passage. I thought of telling my story of waiting 45 minutes for a bride up at Highbrook on a chilly December afternoon, or that of our family’s getting ready for son James’ marriage in April at Horsted Keynes - but, after reflection, I decided I’d just comment on the Gospel and head for depth study of the 1 Thessalonians which fits Remembrance Sunday. 

Where are the dead? What has become of them? Will we see them again?

The questions folk at Thessalonica put to Paul are just as important today - as is his answer. This passage has two parts, the second optional in the universal lectionary but compulsory in the Church of England. Let’s listen again to the first section, 1 Thessalonians 4:13-14: ‘We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about those who have died, so that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have died’.

Grief for Christians is not without hope. Our faith is built on a revelation well founded in history - the life, teaching, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  Alexander Schmemann writes of this: ‘The only meaningful thing in life is what conquers death, and not “what” but “who” - Christ. There is undoubtedly only one joy: to know him and share him with each other’ (unquote). We gather every Sunday, the Lord’s day, as the Lord’s people, around the Lord’s table to celebrate that Jesus died and rose again. That celebration is linked to knowing and sharing Jesus and professing faith in the everlasting love of God. This takes the sting out of grief at the passing of those we love. 

Let’s read on in the second reading from verses 15 to 18: ‘For this we declare to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will by no means precede those who have died. For the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel's call and with the sound of God's trumpet, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air; and so we will be with the Lord forever. Therefore encourage one another with these words’ (1 Thessalonians 4:15-18). That second to last sentence says all - ‘we will be with the Lord forever’. 

Its difficult imagery, though, that of the Lord descending from above and the dead coming up from the earth within a three decker universe. In the 21st century we see beyond a three-decker universe to what has been called a multiverse with many dimensions but this does not contradict the Christian Creed.  We just have new symbols of our passing into eternity. One such symbol is the saving of the file of our life into the computer memory of God. That salvation after death, the ultimate hope of Christians, is, according to scripture, Christ-focussed and corporate. 

On Remembrance Sunday as poppies are laid on the ground we affirm that faith founded upon our risen Lord who helps us see through death to ‘the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting’. 

Where are the dead? What has become of them? Will we see them again?

It is Christian faith that at the moment of death the soul is judged by God to pass toward one of two ultimate destinations, bliss or loss, heaven or hell. In that passage the prayer of the Church surrounds and helps all those souls the Christian community commends to God who will welcome help, the origin of the maligned term purgatory. 

God wishes nothing or no one to be lost from the sight of his holiness.

We imagine the moment of death, however painful or merciful physically, will be painful spiritually for most of us as we come to see God, turning our eyes away at his loving, holy glance. His invitation to look him in the eyes, like that of any good parent chastising his child, will be painful on account of our unrepented sins. Purgatory can be thought of, some theologians hold, as just momentary. A moment of pain as holiness meets the unrepentant sin within us, then the soul passing on to await the next stage of cosmic history.

Those who die without sin face God, as if in heaven, and begin to see him face to face, but heaven is not yet heaven until that vision is shared bodily in the company of all the saints.

Those without love continue their self-chosen loneliness into hell, which God permits as he permits free will, though the choice to turn our backs on him forever is not God’s will but something made out of human perversity.

The Christian hope is consummated by the return of Jesus Christ ‘who will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead’. That final judgement will complete our individual judgement at the moment of death. Today’s second reading indicates the general judgement as bringing humanity of past ages to bodily resurrection to greet Christ’s return and be clothed afresh with the body, to make their heaven fully heaven, or their hell fully hell, in the life of the world to come.

In that world the faithful departed will continue in a salvation that is personal, practical, purposeful and permanent. We will continue to know personally, only unveiled, the one who so knows and loves us. We will experience the practical benefit of our sins being cast away from us. We will be fully taken into the purpose of God and with permanence. The pains we've suffered will be lost in celestial praise. Such is salvation - and here is its anticipation as the Lord’s people gather around the Lord’s table. Happy are those who are called to his supper, to receive in Bread and Wine the pledge of future glory! God open our eyes more fully, and the spiritual eyes of those who have died, to see death vanquished through a Crucified Saviour who opens his arms to us and to them and to all eager to embrace and be embraced by everlasting love in the company of the saints!

Giggleswick School Remembrance Sunday 14.11.21

Eternity intersects time.

When Walter Morrison built Chapel he planned a reminder of such an intersection, placing the dome, symbol of eternity, on the Craven landscape, with seasons governed by the changes and chances of time. Over my lifetime the dome itself has seen such changes and chances, losing its green coat of verdigris, growing less striking but no less majestic. Within the dome, the interlaced angels are better lit up than when they first appeared, and shine, as they’ve shone upon five generations of Giggleswickians, a reminder of the eternal God above who is our refuge.

Eternity intersects time.

We’ve had a reminder of that truth as time stopped for two minutes and eyes and hearts lifted to the Dome and beyond it. The ritual of Remembrance Sunday is slightly younger than Chapel. Year by year it brings people across our nation to look up from time to eternity and engage thankfully with the selflessness of service. Reflection upon those who gave their lives in warfare is focussed for Christians upon the verse in John’s Gospel, subject of our anthem, capturing the moral significance of eternity’s intersection with time: ‘No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends’ (John 15:13). 

Recognising that love found in Jesus Christ, true God and true man, I knelt years back under the Dome to be confirmed. I set my passion for Chemistry in an eternal context thanks to the inspiration of masters like Bill Brocklebank, John Dean and The Reverend Philip Curtis. Off I went to Oxford and the nuclear reactor at Harwell down the road to continue experiments I’d begun at Giggleswick, and in our garden shed, to search out the forces that bind polymers. 

As scientist I see faith as a form of wisdom that goes beyond but not against knowledge accessible to our minds. How can I believe in a God I cannot see? I’ve made a well weighed decision. That is what faith is – a careful decision to act as if God were there and be energised by a power beyond oneself. Some things in life can’t be tied down rationally. God is one such thing, and so is much of chemistry. Contrary to popular perception the revelation of truth in chemistry relies on the subjective imagination of the scientist as well as the objective truth awaiting discovery. Similarly, theological pursuit of truth, especially in Christianity, relies on stubborn historical research as well as philosophical speculation. Science by definition excludes the supernatural but does not deny it or the associated realm of metaphysics we are invited into by Christ’s resurrection. Both faith and reason lead us up to God, so Christian revelation is partner with and not rival to scientific knowledge, as the witness of so many believing scientists makes clear. To have faith is to go beyond not against reason. As John Donne wrote ‘Reason is our soul’s left hand, faith his right, by these we reach divinity’. Faith and reason lift us to God and in Jesus God himself reaches down to us revealing himself to both our reason and our faith.

Eternity intersects time.

A few years after I left Giggleswick the angels in the Dome came real for me. I was heading on my Lambretta from Harwell up the A34 to my Oxford College when the front tyre burst and I went across the road to slide under a lorry. I was heading to keep the feast of St Michael & All Angels at my church of St Mary Magdalene in Oxford. The good news is I passed under the lorry though I missed that service and ended up in the Radcliffe Infirmary. I remain convinced St Michael and his angels were sent by God to protect my life for a purpose. A few years later that purpose was revealed. I left my work at Oxford University and the nuclear power station at Harwell to train as a priest. The angels who shifted the lorry, or my scooter, helped shift my career their way. I say ‘their way’ because angels and priests have the same mission: to bring God’s love to people and people to God’s love. I am here to preach this morning because of a direct experience of eternity intersecting time on the A34.

‘No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends’. 

This Remembrance Sunday we have recalled the self sacrifice of many in an eternal context, that of the death of Jesus on the Cross. As evangelist Oswald Chambers (1874-1917), who died during World War One, wrote:  ‘The Cross is the point where God and sinful man merge with a crash and the way to life is opened - but the crash is on the heart of God’. The overwhelming, never-ending, reckless love of God chases us down through our years with the provision attained by his sacrifice, his crash with wickedness on the Cross and the gift of the Spirit that burst out of Christ’s tomb on Easter Day.

Eternity intersects time.

Your troubles, my troubles, seem slight compared to those on a battlefield. As we take time to put troubles before God in prayer, as did many of those we remember  today, eternity intersects time, our time, to strengthen the important things in our life and shake off what is peripheral.  

For many of us the silence we kept was a reaching out towards the eternal God to care for those gone before us and help us gain peace of heart to bless our circle. Keeping silence regularly before the Lord, the silence we call prayer, is a means of becoming a channel for eternal love and peace passing understanding to intersect with time and flow into our troubled world including the environment. It affirms another world we are now to sing of, the eternal country whose ways are ways of gentleness and paths are peace. God’s kingdom come - his will be done, on earth as it is in heaven!

Remembrance Sunday 8am 8th November 2015

Today is Remembrance Sunday when we remember all those people who died in the World Wars for which the poppy is our visual reminder.

In the early part of the 20th century, the fields of France and Belgium were filled with red poppies. The flowers grew in the same fields where many soldiers lost their lives fighting in World War I.

John McCrae was a Canadian surgeon in the First World War. He wrote poetry and produced a famous poem called "In Flanders Fields". The day before he wrote this one of John's closest friends was killed and buried in a grave decorated with only a simple wooden cross. Wild poppies were already blooming between the crosses that marked the graves of those who were killed in battle.

"In Flanders Fields" was first published in December, 1915 in England's "Punch" magazine. Within months it became the most popular poem about the First World War. Many people felt the poem symbolised the sacrifices made by all those who participated in World War I. Here it is

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Today we remember that out of that sadness and terrible events there must be a longing for peace and that we should all work to make everyone's lives peaceful.

There is another sign mentioned in the poem besides that of the poppy. It’s that of the cross which is placed over graves to remind people of the sacrifice of Jesus and his victory over death.

During the First World War a British Soldier fought in one of the trenches in the Somme surviving 4 years of World War between 1914 and 1918 to return to his native Yorkshire.

He took with him a spent brass shell case from the trench of the Somme. In his spare time he took that case and moulded it into a crucifix, an image of the Cross of Jesus.

Years later I was to meet his daughter who gave me the same crucifix when I visited her in her old age in Doncaster.

Here it is - a very special cross given me thirty years ago by a miner's widow.

A cross made from a shell to show God's love.

A cross made from a weapon of destruction to hold Jesus our crucified Saviour.

I keep it on my desk to remind me of Jesus as the One who can turn the raw material of our lives, with all its pain and sorrow, into a thing of beauty, just as the brass shell became this crucifix.

Through the cross of Jesus we know God has overcome the worst things in the world that can ever come against us – sin, fear, doubt, disease, even death – all these powers are overcome.

Jesus, the Son of God, has been through the darkest valley so I know that there is nothing God and I together cannot overcome in this world or the next.

So on Remembrance Sunday we’re asking God to give help to the living and rest to the departed, peace to the earth and heavenly life to men and women.

There are few more concise and beautiful prayers than the one carved on the outside wall of Westminster Abbey which is particularly appropriate on Remembrance Sunday.

I end by reading this prayer:

May God grant to the living grace, to the departed rest, to the church and the world peace and concord and to us sinners eternal life.