November 10 NOTES FOR REFLECTION Remembrance Sunday
Texts: Micah 4:1-7; Ephesians 2:13-18; John 15:9-17*
[*There are a lot of choices to be made this week. First, do you choose to observe Remembrance Sunday, or stick with the readings set for the 32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time? If you do decide to go with Remembrance Sunday, you will face a choice of 5 lessons from the Old Testament/Apocrypha, 4 lessons from the New Testament, and 4 choices from the gospels. Unable to please everyone I have chosen to follow the choices made for us at my local church of St Barnabas, Warrington. Hopefully something in these notes will be of some use whichever choices you make.]
Theme: The simplest approach may be to go with "Remembrance Sunday". I am going a little wider with "The Power of Memory", although I have wondered about "The Power to Create Memory", or even "Myths and Memories".
Introduction. Some might argue that with the rise to prominence of Anzac Day commemorations, complete with truncated and sanitised "services", there is no longer a need for this special Sunday, particularly as it might seem to be too closely associated with the First World War. However, in my view the converse is the stronger case: that precisely because we can acknowledge the personal tragedies and losses war always involves on Anzac Day, Remembrance Sunday can be a day of lamentation and confession within the Christian community of faith at our collective failure to stand firm in our faith whenever we feel threatened by those we are told to consider to be our enemies.
It has always been that way, but we start with a wonderful reminder from the prophet Micah that it does not always have to be that way. In a passage to which the editors of the New Revised Standard Version have given the heading "Peace and Security through Obedience", Micah foresees a time when "nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more". Building on that foundation, our readings continue with yet another wonderful extract from the Letter to the Ephesians where the end of hostility, the birth of peace, is incarnated in the very Body of Christ. Only when we get to the gospel passage is the very clear anti-war message obfuscated almost beyond recognition. We will know that the Church has finally freed itself from the Roman gods of nationalism when our Lectionary insists that the proper gospel passage for this Sunday is Luke 6:27-36. (Yes, I know we got the first bit of this last week, but it belongs on this Sunday IN FULL!)
Background. This week I watched the first of a new series called "Family Secrets". Basically, the story was about a man who was working in India at the time of the British Raj and suddenly vanished, leaving a wife and three young children at home. The bit that caught my attention involved family members sharing what they had been told about the reasons for this disappearance. These ranged from being lost in the desert to being eaten by a lion! It is unlikely that those who told them these tales actually believed them, so here we have examples of false "memories" deliberately created. In many other cases families have memories which are fervently believed, but which occasionally turn out to be myths. In my own family I was told stories about my maternal grandfather who had been a Church of England priest, before dying "tragically young" through what today would be called "clergy burnout"; and I was assured that I had been baptised as an infant by this man. Only when I was being ordained (at the age of 48) and my Mother decided it was fitting that I should have a few of Grandfather's "papers" that I discovered that he had died of typhoid fever at the age of 63, nearly two years before I was born! [A whole new meaning for the modern term "recovered memory"!]
Usually such family myths and memories are innocent and harmless, although not always, of course. Where they become particularly dangerous is on a national level, where history becomes the servant, not of truth, but of political and national power. Many years ago I subscribed to a weekly magazine series on the History of the Second World War. The great strength of this series, in my view, was that on each event covered in it four historians from four different countries wrote their own account and commentary. Usually the four came from the U.K., Germany, the USA, and France. Sometimes a Russian historian also contributed. I can still remember the shock and unbelief I felt when reading the "other" (that is, the non-British) accounts – how blind and biased those people were! Why couldn't they just stick to the truth like the British historians always did!
Today we shake our judgmental heads at those Japanese politicians – and those Japanese school textbooks – that fail to record accurately the Japanese "war crimes" of that era: we demand that Serbia hands over its "war criminals" to face international justice, and we rejoice to see various "war criminals" from Cambodia, and from a number of African Countries, being brought before various international courts and tribunals. How easily we forget the old adage, "history is written by the victors". Memories are created by them, too.
And so is theology. In the wake of the terrible slaughter of the First World War the teaching and preaching of the mainline churches, at least within New Zealand, underwent a sudden conversion. No longer was faith in Christ considered the only route to eternal bliss – a parallel path was created for those who died "in the service of their country" – a special order of military martyrdom was created within the pantheon of saints. To be fair, one of the driving forces of this new heresy was a desire to offer pastoral comfort and support to the grieving families at home, but whether or not they did find comfort in the assurance that their loved one (often aged little more than 20) was now "safe in the loving armies of Jesus" must remain a moot point. What is more certain is that many bishops and clergy became little more than recruiting agents for the armed forces, responding out of fear of appearing unpatriotic rather than standing firm in their calling to preach the gospel of love in season and out. Not for them the promised blessing that comes when "people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man".
So perhaps the first thing we need to remember on this Remembrance Sunday is the gospel of Jesus Christ. War is always sinful: it is always born of failure – and that is even more so when the principal proponents are self-described "Christian countries". Let us never forget that before the plane carrying the first atomic bomb to Hiroshima took off a Christian chaplain prayed God's blessing over the bomb and prayed for its "success". And let us never forget that part of that "success" was the annihilation of a Carmelite convent when the nuns were in chapel at prayer. Memories should be made of this – particularly on Remembrance Sunday.
Micah. What a wonderful vision this is! Notice that this is not about all ethnic or national identity being given up in favour of a sort of composite uniformity. We still have "peoples" and "nations": what we don't have is weapons and war. We have a universal recognition that we are all in this together: that we are all children of the one God: that God is the author of peace and concord and that to follow his ways is to live in peace and harmony with all others, and not just those who look like us or speak our language. And when we are tempted to dismiss this as unrealistic idealism gone mad, let us remember the progress that Europe has made and is making in this direction. Britain, Germany, France and Italy are today less likely to go to war with one another than ever before – and this within 68 years of the end of the Second World War. Yes, there is a long way to go before weapons are recycled into implements for food production, but Micah's prophecy is not looking quite so ridiculous as it was 70 years ago, is it?
Taking It Personally.
· Reflect on the gift of memory – how important is it to you? When was the last time you gave thanks to God for that gift? Are you overdue?
· Does your family have any treasured memories that may in fact be at slight variance with the facts? Does that affect their value as family stories?
· What is your earliest memory? In general, do you tend to remember happy or difficult times most easily?
· Do you have, or have you heard, memories of war within your family? What is the "emotional colour" of those stories? What have they taught you about war?
· How much do you think New Zealand has "air-brushed" it's memories of war?
· How would you feel if someone described you as a "Christian pacifist?" Why?
· What is your opinion of "conscientious objectors"?
· Richard Rohr has written that it is easier to belong to a group than to remember that we belong to God. Meditate on that.
· Next year is the centennial of the outbreak of the First World War. As Christians how should we mark that anniversary?
Ephesians. As Christians living in the twenty-first century it is hard for us to grasp how shocking it would have been for Jews of Paul's time to hear that the barrier between Jews and Gentiles was no more, and that they were now all one people in Jesus Christ. And what on earth could it mean that this extraordinary reconciliation had occurred in the flesh, or in the body, of Christ? Perhaps we can get something of the enormity of what Paul is saying by thinking about this: if it is true that peace has been established within the Body of Christ, than it must also be true, at least for Christians, that when war breaks out it does so within the Body of Christ. Someone has said that all wars are "civil wars", fought within the one human race. If we all belong to the one family of God, then all wars are gross manifestations of sibling rivalry. And Paul would lead us to go further: all wars are an acute manifestation of disease within the Body of Christ.
Taking It Personally.
· Personalise all this. Reflect on your relations with other Christians. Have you quarrelled with any of them? If so, how do you feel about the idea that your quarrel took place within the Body of Christ?
· If the hostility between you was put to death on the cross, is it not time to let it go?
· This is a good passage for slow, reflective reading (lectio divina).
· End with prayers of confession and thanksgiving, as you are led.
John. This is a dangerous passage at the best of times, and even more dangerous on occasions such as Remembrance Sunday. First, "abide" sounds as though it might mean something like "remain"; in which case verse 10 seems to suggest that we will only remain in God's love if we continue to obey him. But how then can we proclaim that God's love is "unconditional"? For me, a better understanding of "abiding" would be more like "living or residing". As we obey Christ's commandments, as we live our lives as he has shown and taught us to, so we will experience the reality of God's love more and more. His love remains even when we disobey, but we lose the experience of it.
The greater danger, the pre-eminent one on Remembrance Sunday, lies in the twisted theology the Church has created on the basis of verse 13. Christ was preparing his disciples for his own death: he was talking about that death. It is perfectly true that he voluntarily lay down his life for his friends – but, of course, not only for them – he laid down his life for the whole of creation. To apply such language to every death on the battlefield is outrageous. No doubt there were individual cases of extreme heroism, where one individual sacrificed his own life to save another. But the vast majority of deaths were not like that, were they? The victims did not lay down their lives voluntarily in those cases: their lives were cruelly taken from them by the normal occurrences of war. Often, they were the unlucky ones, felled by a bullet that could just as easily have missed them and hit someone else; or they were in a plane that was shot down or a ship that was torpedoed. Or they died of dysentery or other disease, or a lack of good medical care after receiving what would otherwise have been a non-lethal wound. And thousands of them were at the front because they had been conscripted, and certainly had no wish to lay down their lives for their friends or for anyone else. To take this important passage out of its sacred context and use it to alleviate our feelings of guilt over the senseless slaughter of so many young men is surely offensive and borders on the blasphemous.
Taking It Personally.
· Do you keep the Lord's commandments? All of them? All the time?
· When are you most aware that you are abiding in his love?
· Do you feel more comfortable thinking of yourself as a "servant" of the Lord, or as a "friend" of the Lord? Why?
· Ponder verse 16. You are chosen by Jesus (whether you believe it or not). Do you believe it? Does it make you glad?
· Think about the qualification "fruit that will last". Fruit is notoriously difficult to keep fresh. It can perish in all sorts of circumstances. In what sort of circumstances might your faith fail?
· Have you been offended by anything in these notes? Why? What would you like to say in response? Take your feelings into prayer.
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