Sermon for Remembrance Day
“Greater love hath no man than this,
that a man lay down his life for his friends”
The significance of this time of remembrance should not be lost on any of us. That it gets harder and harder to remember each year because there are fewer and fewer veterans only heightens the necessity of our remembering.
We may name those who gave their lives, to be sure, but we can’t really say that we know them in any kind of personal way. Few can really remember anyone who died in the First World War. Our remembering has less to do with our personal knowledge and more to do with what they died for. Only so can we enter into the meaning of their sacrifice.
Remembrance Day is really a kind of secular All Souls’ Day. The intention of All Souls’ Day is to remember our common mortality, to commemorate all those who have died and to do so within the greater context of All Saints’, the celebration of our common vocation in the Communion of Saints. The intention of Remembrance Day is to remember all who died for the sake of our political freedoms and life. We remember them to God for without that there is no real remembrance.
To say that Remembrance Day is a kind of secular All Souls’ Day is not to say that our civil remembrances are not religious. They are and profoundly so. Rather it is to remind us of the spiritual and, specifically, Christian principles which underlie the modern national states even in their contemporary confusion and disarray. To remember is to honour what they fought and died for in faraway places and in scenes of absolute horror. We meet at empty tombs – cenotaphs – because their bodies are not here. That alone should remind us of the hell of war and of the destruction and evil which we inflict upon one another. The dust of our common humanity is soaked in blood. Nowhere are we reminded more strongly of the great cost of “render[ing] unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s” than on Remembrance Day. But, mercifully, Paul reminds us that “our citizenship is in heaven;” that is, if we render “unto God the things that are God’s.”
O Lord our God, whose name only is excellent and thy praise above heaven and earth: We give thee high praise and hearty thanks for all those who counted not their lives dear unto themselves but laid them down for their friends; beseeching thee to give them a part and a lot in those good things which thou has prepared for all those whose names are written in the Book of Life; and grant to us, that having them always in remembrance, we may imitate their faithfulness and with them inherit the new name which thou has promised to them that overcome; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.