Black and white. Easy. Lives were given. Lives were lost. We mourn. We honour the thousands upon thousands of those who, through conflict, never returned to their families, who never came back to the lives they could have lived.
Black and white. Good and evil. Not so easy. When it comes to moral judgements life becomes incredibly hard. You’ll know that Farrow and Ball make paint. There are many kinds of white, many kinds of black. But as for grey? So many shades to choose from. Perhaps you have elephant or mole’s breath grey on your walls? The shade ‘blackened’ seems very pale to me, ‘lamp-room’ or Purbeck grey more obvious. We want this day to be easy. It’s not. Behind the pride and the privilege of remembering men and women of the armed forces, the merchant navy, emergency services and the civilians who were caught up in conflict, Remembrance Day has the power to disturb us. Over a hundred years on from the 1st World War, 80 years on from the 2nd, we look back to see that those who fought for our enemies look and feel just like us: they had wives, husbands, children, farms and businesses. They bought newspapers, listened to the radio, loved their country. One of the largest parts of any bookshop is the military section: page after page written to answer the question ‘why?’ What is it about us as human beings that draws us into horrific violence? How is it that in defence of justice and truth and humanity – which must surely be good – we are prepared to lose sight of all of these things?
War is a truly horrible business. We are seeing this again. To fight on the frontline in any conflict must be terrifying. But now we see the drone footage from the Donbas in Ukraine: men looking up to see their death above them in the sky. We are no longer shocked by stories of missiles striking cities deep into the country: 7 people’s lives taken here…another 8 there. We have grown weary of the conflict in the Middle East: unable to take in the truly apocalyptic scenes in Gaza, the immensity of huge numbers of people on the move within the Gaza strip and now in Lebanon. Once again, we hear claim and counterclaim of war crimes being committed: we hear but we don’t know how to respond.
‘Nothing to do with me’. I, possibly like you, find it hard to listen to the news nowadays. ‘Nothing to do with me.’ Except we have forces in Lebanon trying to train up an army in a country divided between rival Muslim and Christian groups: an army for a country, not just a part of it. And we have instructors supporting the Ukrainian Army. We are contributing billions of pounds to provide munitions for the fight against Putin’s invasion and the RAF helped to defend Israel against Iran’s missiles. We are involved, albeit at one remove.
The other day I was in York Minster. Around the walls of the Minster there are more memorials than can be counted, many of them for officers who died in the wars of Empire back in the 1800s. Next to the North Transept however, there is a chapel dedicated to the memory of those from the Kings Own Yorkshire Light Infantry Regiment. There you will find many, many more names from the two great wars: carved in stone to be remembered. You will also find a cabinet containing typed sheets of parchment listing the names of those who died in the Troubles in Northern Ireland, in the Falklands, in Iraq and Afghanistan – there are far too many names. How many is enough?
It is of course right that we, as a nation, pause on this day to allow the immensity of the impact of war to shape and form our common life. It is right that we acknowledge the debt we owe to those whose lives have been given and lost over the years. But alongside these things let us also acknowledge that the world is broken and we are broken within it. More often than not, we live in a grey, not a black and white world. There is a fracture within us that centuries of progress has been unable to mend. That fracture causes pride and nationalism, it fuels xenophobia, it fans ethnic tensions, it causes good people to turn away from neighbour and to ignore injustice. It releases within us forces that frighten and distress us: greed, hatred and anger that can lead to unspeakable acts of violence which we then seek to justify. We are held by this, drawn into the depths of this great chasm that cuts through the world and through our souls, unable to escape the forces of separation that it releases.
This fracture is known in the Christian tradition as Sin: so much more than the ‘white lie’ told to protect someone’s feelings or an act of indulgence for ourselves or others. Sin is what divides us from God and from one another. Its effects are there in the bible reading we heard this morning: hardship, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril, the sword (all of them given full reign in times of war, all of them diminishing our God-given humanity and His image within us.)
But the apostle Paul does not leave us in this dark, grey world. The Christian gospel speaks hope into broken lives and into a broken world. ‘There is nothing that can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord’. For all that we cannot save ourselves God still holds and loves us. In the person of Jesus, God becomes part of this hopelessly compromised world and He is caught up by its rivalries, divisions and hatreds. Seemingly powerless before them, Jesus is crucified, suffering a most God-awful death whilst his friends stand by unable or unwilling to help him. But God – possibly the two most powerful words in the scriptures- raises Him to new life on Easter Day. Jesus’ faithfulness takes Him to the cross. God’s faithfulness cannot let Death have the last word. This story has brought hope to generation upon generation of people. It is not an easy story: there are many ways of understanding it, but at its core is a conviction that God is good and God is faithful. Nothing can separate us from His love.
We live in uncertain times. Who knows how the elections in the USA will shape global politics? Who knows whether Europe, (weakened by the collapse of the government in Germany, uncertain of its direction as populism and nationalism continue their appeal) will be able to hold firm against Russian aggression? Who knows what will happen in the middle east, or in Africa or Taiwan. Who knows when the women of Afghanistan and Iran will be allowed their voice or when the people of Southern Sudan might live in peace? As we stand in silence this day we remember that people’s lives continue to be given and taken from them: a huge cost is paid for the division of the world.
We honour those who have died. We mourn their death and commit to supporting those who continue to live with the wounds of conflict but from within a grey and difficult world we pray. We pray for God’s mercy, for His compassion and strength to renew and empower us, trusting that there is nothing that can separate us from His love in Christ Jesus: we are all held by the God who gave up His only Son to save us.
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