Sermon for Remembrance Sunday, Choral Evensong
“Greater love hath no man than this, that a man
lay down his life for his friends”
Remembrance Sunday ushers us into a week of remembrance culminating in Remembrance Day. Its significance should not be lost on any of us. And yet, how hard it is to remember! In that difficulty, though, we contemplate an important feature of our humanity, namely, the limits of our knowing and our being.
The leaves lie scattered on the wind and the rain. Who can count the leaves? Who can count the dead? Who can name them? November is the grey month of remembering. What does it mean to remember?
To remember is to realize who we really are. That means, paradoxically, to pay attention to others.
Remembrance Day itself is a kind of secular All Souls’ Day. The intention of All Souls is to remember our common mortality, to commemorate all who have died and to do so within the greater context of All Saints’, the celebration of the redeemed community of our humanity. The golden thread of the life of Christ in the Saints runs through the common grave of our mortality. The intention of Remembrance Day in the secular aspect of our culture is to remember those who died for the sake of our social and political freedoms and life.
To say that Remembrance Day is a kind of secular All Souls’ Day is not to say that our remembrance is not religious. It is, and profoundly so. It reminds us of the spiritual and, specifically, Christian, principles which underlie the modern national states even in their contemporary confusion and disarray; some would say collapse because those principles no longer seem to animate our souls and our institutions. Such is a kind of forgetting. Our November remembrances signal, perhaps, a kind of return. To remember the fallen is to honour what they fought and died for in far away places and in scenes of absolute horror, far beyond our imaging, despite the efforts of the film industry and even the purple prose of preachers.