Sermon preached for Remembrance Sunday – 13th November 2022

Fr Leonard Doolan – St Paul’s Athens

 

After preaching for Remembrance Sunday every year for 39 years is there anything new that I can say? Probably not. The Christian preacher, I, can only engage in variations on the same theme.

The theme is this. War is a sin – whatever provokes it is also sinful. War is a sin because it causes a chasm; a chasm between man and God, between one person and another, one nation against another; and a chasm to the integrity within ourselves, for it pulls us apart in our ‘oneness’ with God and fellow human. In this chasm we find that we are able, through intellectual game-playing, to justify that one side has justice and right; and that the other side is unjust and wrong. In a sophisticated world like ours, how naïve is that polarisation?

So war is a sin – and its consequences have a huge outreach in human experience. Every war is a vortex of destruction that drags human beings into it, willing or unwilling, combative or non-combative. Nobility sits side by side with collateral damage; destruction sits side by side with the high moral ground.

So in this context, year by year, we have Remembrance Sunday. It is something of an outrage that this should need a place in the Christian Annual Calendar; an outrage that it should be hallowed by many more people, in the UK at least, than Birth of the Saviour at Christmas, or his Resurrection from the tomb to redeem this humanity which so readily spits in his face for being the Prince of Peace.

By the way, we all know our history, and even the Christian Church cannot claim innocence historically. The experience of Greece in 1204 illustrates all too well what a misguided religious zeal can cause, let alone a battle against those we were happy to call ‘infidel’. ‘Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.’

Those who know their history even better will recall the words of Tacitus, in his work, Agricola, placed on the lips of the leader of the Albions, Calgacus,  against the advancing Roman army, ‘Ubi solitudinem faciant, pacem appellant.’ Where they create a desert they call it peace.’ (Speech of Calgacus, ‘Agricola’, Tacitus).

This year we celebrate this Remembrance Sunday against the skene – against the backcloth – of a conflict between Russia and Ukraine. One side, which includes us, I assume, refer to it as a war, a declared war, against an opponent that does not call it a war, but a special military exercise – undeclared war. The collateral damage in war, declared or undeclared, has uncanny similarities – Calgacus says it all, ‘They make a desert and call it peace’.

 

We see this principle all over the world. Kill it dead; flatten it; destroy its civilization; create a religious and cultural dark age; crush its habits and customs; erase its memory in the hope of a corporate amnesia, then declare it ‘peace’.

It is a very Brito-focussed celebration today, though we are in Greece. All over Europe different dates are kept in national calendars – dates when a country was liberated from the horrors of Nazi imperialism.  The poppy, though hugely important to people of a British or British Empire background, is a redundant symbol to most other people. Each has its own tradition.

In the battlefields of Flanders, where young German boys were gunned down in the First World War the memorial stones have engraved on them the Oak leaf – much more an English symbol one might have thought.

A bit later this morning some of us will be in Alimos. We will be standing in a place where men and women from all over the world were dragged into a European War. We will have present Ambassadors and representatives, and leaders of all different Christian churches from different countries, a Jewish rabbi, a Muslim Imam, and a German Pastor. We can rise above the sin of war when we try – and when we want to.

Later this afternoon our Ambassador, the Defence Attache, and I will be up in the mountains to the north of Athens. Why on earth would we go there? We go there because there is a German war grave in the mountains where around 9,000 young German lives were lost fighting in Greece.

 

I have strong links with Cameroon in West Africa. I have visited around six or seven times. Cameroon used to be a German colony before 1918 before it was split between France and Britain as war reparations.

The centre of the German administration was in a seaside town of Limbe. It is cooler there, so it suited the Western taste a little better. So that German officers and bureaucrats, and their wives, could have some of the little luxuries they remembered in northern Europe, they built a zoo, and a botanical garden.

On my first visit to Limbe, a young Anglican priest, who had been born in that seaside town,  took me to the botanical gardens. ‘There is something you should see’, Fr. Dibo said. (He is now the Anglican Bishop of Cameroon). As we wandered round the botanical gardens it was just like visiting a European garden – except it wasn’t cold or raining. As we turned a corner, there, in a secluded part of the garden was something I never expected to see there – a small cluster of Commonwealth War Graves. They were just like the ones we will see at Alimos. ‘How could this be?’ I rather naively asked him. ‘Because of the West African Defence Force’ he said. ‘They were formed to go and fight in Europe, to step foot on soil that they had never trodden before, and they never came back alive. They died fighting someone else’s war.’

There is a ‘just war’ theory. It was skillfully developed by St. Augustine of Hippo. It is Jesuitical in its argumentation, long before the Jesuits ever existed, and I am sure it is still studied in military academies all over the world. But war is always a sin. That there is war is a shadow side of the human condition – and in that shadow aggression against a nation, and defence against agressors have to find a pragmatic existence. I know that, and we all know that.

History is written and marked by wars, not by peace. I have sounded harsh this morning about war-making (whose flip side is peace-keeping) as if my hands as a Christian priest are clean. This is not so.

Christ’s Church has colluded with war, for Christ’s Church is populated by people like you and me, and we know what we are each like. We each know what we are capable of – our potential to cause good, and our capacity to harm. The Church, whose Prince is a Prince of Peace, engages in warfare when it suits her.

The great South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu who died in 2021 threw himself fully into issues of division and social warfare, and issues of reconciliation and peace. He was a giant of reconciliation in his own nation, and he had deep insights into those who shared the same faith as him as he criticized his own Church. He said, ‘Whenever there is war, the Church shouts out to warring men the message, love, love. When two men love each other, the Church goes to war.’

The church, I, cannot stand and condemn what happens in wars, and with the need for the military, when human beings who know and confess the God of love, can so easily and wantonly revert to the language of the battle field within their Christian fellowship. Humility in deep measure is needed.

On this Remembrance Sunday – this distinctly British day – I think what we are trying to show is not just deep respect for those who died fighting against what had been identified as evil, but also because we extend ourselves – we reach out – we are intentional – that humanity can be and can do better.

It is possible for us, in our most noble and dignified aspirations to become who and what God intends us to become, namely his form and image.

What is this form and image? It is none other than Jesus Christ himself, born in time and place, in history and culture, in a society under oppression from a foreign power – this Jesus Christ, who says to us ‘to have seen me is to have seen the Father’ and at whose birth the skies sparkled with diamonds of beauty as the angels proclaimed to humanity, ‘Glory to God in  the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those he favours.’ (Luke 2, 14)

Amen.