REMEMBRANCE SUNDAY
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“How long, O Lord?” Robert Palmer wrote this poem (see Pewsheet) shortly before his death in action in 1916. He was from the aristocracy – The Honourable Robert Palmer – a barrister. He joined a Hampshire Regiment as a second lieutenant in 1913, and found himself in the Mesopotamian campaign, where he was killed in the Battle of Hanna. War takes its victims from all classes. Palmer was a fervent Christian believer, and had considered ordination.
The First World War saw slaughter such as had never been seen before, and Palmer viewed it as an offence against God. “The blood of kindly men streams up in mists of hate / polluting Thy clean air.” Great and sophisticated nations sunk to the state of brute barbarians, not knowing love or mercy. Again he asks “Lord, how long?”
The First World War was supposed to have been the war to end all wars, but as we know, it was followed by another world conflict barely twenty years later, and by many lesser conflicts since; ‘lesser’ not perhaps the most accurate word, as all conflicts are deadly.
Today we honour all those lost in these major wars of the last hundred and ten years, and the conflicts that still claim lives today. I recall – at a service some years ago – trying to name all the other conflicts British service personnel have fought in since 1945. But a veteran came up afterwards and said, “You forgot Northern Ireland – everyone forgets Northern Ireland.” I shouldn’t have done as a boy from my school was killed on active service there, aged 19. We remember not just those whose lives were taken in these conflicts, but all who served and whose lives were changed for ever by the experiences they went through. And on this day when we are making a collection for SSAFA, we indeed remember all the personnel of our Armed Forces; those who served but didn’t have to make the ultimate sacrifice.
With the instant communications of our day, we are constantly reminded of the conflicts that rage across the world, in vivid detail. We may have become so used to watching this almost daily outpouring of violence that we don’t stop so often to ask, “How long, O Lord?”
Of course, some people see the very fact of war as evidence that there is no God. How could a loving God allow such suffering; how could he allow people to act in such a way?” The slick answer, I suppose, it that God allows us free-will, but sometimes that seems a high price to pay for the excesses of human behaviour.
Other people – Christians included – would point to an unmistakeable truth of there being real evil in the world, which at times must be challenged and confronted. Robert Palmer talks of Satan in high places leading the blind to battle for the passions of the strong. In the First World War, many churchmen spoke of the war as a battle against evil. Many ‘kindly soldiers’ in both world wars felt that they were taking part in a bloody, but necessary, conflict.
So, as people ask, “Where is God in all this?” It was a question also asked in Auschwitz. As a group of prisoners were forced to watch a child being hanged, one cried out ‘Where is God now?’ Another found himself replying “Where is He? Here he is – He is hanging here on the gallows.” Maybe he meant that God was dead. But despite all the horrors of war, numerous soldiers have found God to be involved; there with them, even suffering. One of the more famous war poets, Wilfred Owen, wrote a very memorable poem which begins “One ever hangs where shelled roads part; In this war He too lost a limb.” He saw a damaged wayside Calvary near Ancre. It was as if the crucified Jesus was sharing the suffering and mutilation of the soldiers. Owen mixed images of the war with the events of Calvary, “Near Golgotha” he wrote “strolls many a priest, And in their faces there is pride / That they were flesh-marked by the Beast”- that is, Satan. “But they who love the greater love / Lay down their life; they do not hate.”
The Cross is a potent symbol of great meaning to countless numbers of people beyond the ranks of Christian worshippers. The cross gives a message that there can be positive meaning in what might appear the most pointless of deaths. Thus we honour the sacrifice of millions today. To take a verse from the psalms, “precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints.”
In his book Dethroning Mammon, which came out in 2017, Archbishop Welby heads one chapter ‘What we have we hold.’ He gives two inspiring instances of sacrifice. He mentions the brutal murder of a number of Coptic Christians on a beach in Libya by a terrorist group in 2015. He says they could have escaped death by turning away from their Christian faith; yet they would not. They died crying out prayers to Jesus and worshipping his name. He continues “One can imagine how many people would say, ‘What a waste – It is absurd and wasteful to throw away life in such a way when you could have held on to it.” What a waste? Not at all. By rejecting the idea that they must hold on to what they had, they offered in worship all that there was for them to give, and in doing so transformed that act of murder from deep darkness to an example of the brightest light in humanity.
Then he recounts conducting the funeral of a British soldier killed in Afghanistan. Listening to the man’s colleagues was profoundly moving, he recalls. “One heard underlined that what they held to be most precious – their own lives – was not to be held onto in the extreme circumstances of battle, if to hold on to it meant abandoning one’s colleagues.”
Primarily this is a day of Remembrance. We cannot say that all those who served and lost their lives did so from worthy motives; we cannot say that there didn’t seem to be some pointless deaths in the conflicts we recall. But I believe we can acknowledge today that sometimes a precious sacrifice has to be made for a greater good, to uphold what is right, and that that sacrifice has enduring value.
108 years after Robert Palmer’s poem, we still cry out “How long, O Lord?” He would not have known about nuclear weapons, precision drone attacks, exocet missiles, cyber warfare and other aspects of 20th– and 21st-century conflict. But he would have us, who, like him, live in this world with ‘hopes of heaven’ – he would have us pray for peace, and for the turning of the hearts of those who make for war. “Oh, touch Thy children’s hearts, that they may know ‘Hate their most hateful, and pride their deadliest foe.’
Though first-hand memories of the First World War are all gone now, and those of the Second war diminishing quickly, we still salute those whose deaths symbolise the values we cherish and that we find deeply enshrined in our Christian faith – goodness, truth, peace, freedom and self-sacrifice. So as we honour all those lost in war today, we pledge ourselves personally to live in way that promotes those values, as we strive to ensure that goodness will always overcome evil, and that God’s kingdom will come.