14th. November. 2021. Service at North Queensferry.

North Queensferry Parish Church

Remembrance Service

9.45 a.m. 14th November, 2021.

Welcome and Intimations

Call to Worship: God is our refuge and our strength, a very present help in trouble; therefore, will we not fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea. [Psalm 46:1-2 (AV)]< Hymn 153: Great is thy faithfulness, O God my father
Prayers of approach and confession; assurance of pardon
Children’s Talk: Say it with flowers
Hymn 710: I have a dream
Readings:
Isaiah 25:1-9
Revelation 22:1-5
Matthew 5:38-48
Hymn 266: God the Omnipotent
Sermon: Turning the other cheek
Hymn 704: I vow to thee my country
Collect; Prayers of Intercession and Petition; Commemoration of the Saints; Lord’s Prayer.
Dedication of Offering
Hymn 715: Behold the mountain of the Lord
Dismissal and Grace.
Threefold Amen.
The National Anthem

Prayers of Approach and Confession; Assurance of pardon.

Some boast of Chariots and some of horses, but our boast is in the name of the Lord our God [Psalm 20:7]

Lord God Almighty, you are the Lord of Hosts, you are the King, mighty in battle: before you the nations tremble; yet, Father God, you are the God of perfect love: you love us with a tenderness that only a parent can know. And in your love, you offer to us and to all of humanity your forgiveness and restoration to fellowship with You.

Lord, we confess that we stand in need now of that forgiveness, for we have sinned against You and our fellows, in thought and word and deed, through negligence, through weakness and through our own deliberate fault. We have done things which we ought not to have done, and have left undone those things which we should have done and which we name now in the silence of our hearts….. We are heartily sorry and do repent of these our sins. For the sake of your son, Jesus Christ, who died for us, forgive us all that is past; and grant that we may serve you in newness of life, to the glory of Your Name.

Amen.

Jesus died and rose again for us. In humble penitence, we accept his pardon and receive his peace.

Amen.

IN FLANDERS FIELDS

Major John McCrae was a Canadian surgeon who was serving on the Ypres salient in the Spring of 1915. After 17 days of heavy fighting, many of his fellow soldiers suffered terrible injuries or had been killed. One in particular, a young friend and former student, Lieutenant Alexis Helmer of Ottawa, had been killed by a shell burst on 2 May 1915. There was no chaplain available, and it was Major McCrae who had conducted the funeral in the little cemetery outside his dressing station.

As he sat by the grave later that day, McCrae’s eyes were drawn to the poppies growing in the mud of the battlefield.

He wrote this description of the scene before him:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

SERMON

Turning the Other Cheek

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, so let it be.

In an offensive launched on Easter Monday, 2017, the Canadian Corps took a heavily fortified German position on Vimy Ridge, near Arras. This victory, some say, marked a turning point in the Great War, for it signalled that no matter how seemingly impregnable the enemy, victory may yet be won by careful planning and great courage – no fewer than four Victoria Crosses were awarded for valour shown in the course of that engagement. Yet it was a victory that came at the cost of 3,598 Canadian lives.

The image before you is of the central part of the War Memorial which stands today on Vimy Ridge. It shows Mother Canada in mourning before the spirit of sacrifice. Look, for moment at the pristine white stone, imparting a sense of purity to the sacrifice of so many young lives. See the central figures whose gazes are turned upwards to the sky, whilst the veiled mother figure averts her eyes downwards in grief. It is a powerful image, speaking of a time which saw nobility in sacrifice, and grief tempered by the overwhelming importance of the cause – a war fought to end all wars.

But death is not noble: in all that pristine whiteness, see the blood-red of the poppies at the feet of the central figure, reminding us that death on the battlefield is not beautiful, and if the eyes of the dying are turned towards heaven, so often that will be not in decorous aspiration, but in terror.

And, mark that this stone allegory of a noble sacrifice made to banish war from the face of the Earth was unveiled on 26^th July, 1936. The following day, 27^th July, the German Chancellor, Adolf Hitler, sent 26 German fighter aircraft to aid the Nationalists in the Spanish Civil war, facilitating the horrors, the following year, of the bombing of Guernica. Four months previously, in March, 1936, Germany had invaded and annexed the Rhineland, and a week after the Vimy Ridge memorial was unveiled, on 1^st August, 1936, another structure built in pristine white stone, a stadium in Munich, saw the opening amidst vainglorious Nazi pomp, of the 1936 Olympics.

That is the problem with human resistance to evil: victories over evil which are hard fought and won at great cost can only ever be provisional. As we remember the sacrifice of one generation, another generation is already being called upon to lay down their lives in pursuit of another victory which can only ever be provisional.

We think of this when we read the words of the prophet Isaiah who attributes to God the act of having made the city a heap, the fortified city a ruin, the palace of aliens a city no more.

God, in Isaiah’s eyes, has brought deliverance, but it is deliverance brought through human agency, destruction visited upon the enemy by men. We may not find this altogether comfortable to contemplate: destruction may not come from God – we think of Coventry and of the east end of London and of Clydebank; and even where we might be thankful for destruction wrought upon the enemy in a righteous cause, we should remember Dresden and we should think twice before we presume to thank God for bringing it about.

What, then, do we do in the face of aggression, where evil walks abroad and people are enslaved and murdered in pursuit of greed or insane beliefs of racial purity or of moral superiority?

When we look to the passage in Matthew’s Gospel, what answer does it give us?

The focus of the passage is about how we, as individuals, should lead our lives. The old testament admonition “an eye for an eye” was not a barbaric call to vengeance, but a call to act justly and proportionately: it is an eye for an eye and not a life for an eye. This serves to prevent blood feud and vendetta. But what Jesus calls upon his followers to do is to go above and beyond, to show a self-sacrificing love in the face of evil. At a personal level it is radical: the forceful taking of a coat was a lesser crime than the forceful taking of a cloak, for in the cold desert nights of Palestine, the cloak was essential to maintaining body warmth – yet Jesus says that if someone takes your coat, you should also offer your cloak. Further, Roman centurions had the legal right to command civilians to carry military supplies for up to one mile. This was a power which was hugely resented by a people under occupation, yet Jesus requires not only compliance, but a willingness to carry the burden yet one mile more than the Roman law compelled.

As a doctrine for living one’s personal life, it is radical. It shows forth the self-sacrificing love of God for humanity, and by ourselves showing that love, we are truly children of God.

But does this really answer the question of what we are to do in the face of military aggression, threatening the freedom, the well-being, indeed the very lives of our fellow-countrymen? Are we all together to turn the other cheek?

The church has grappled with this problem since its very foundation; and some Christians, in all good conscience, believe that taking up arms in the face of aggression can never be justified, whilst others see the taking up of arms to resist evil as a moral necessity. It was St Augustine of Hippo who developed the theory of the Just War, positing that failure to resist in the face of a grave wrong that could only be stopped by violence would itself be a sin. Defence of one’s self or others could be a necessity, especially when authorised by a legitimate authority.

This concept was developed by Thomas Aquinas and others and, indeed, even today is enshrined in the United Nations Charter in the form of the right of defence of self or of others, but, at the root, it is not an affirmation of war as a first resort, so much as of war as a necessary evil in a fallen world.

Yet, there is about war, even a just war, a moral ambiguity which is as old as the question of whether the ends justify the means.

That moral ambiguity, as we have seen, is raised by Isaiah’s thanksgiving for destruction, yet, Isaiah looks beyond this morally ambiguous war towards a time of true restoration and healing upon the mountain of the Lord; a vision we see perfected in the vision in Revelation of the healing of the nations that shall come at the end of time.

Is, then, our destiny, as Christians, merely to wait for that time of final healing? I suggest not. If we were called upon to do so, we might, or we might not, as individuals, take up arms in what we judge to be a just war. However, the Church is, in the words of Karl Barth, “the provisional representation of the whole world of humanity that receives justification in Christ” and in the words of Teresa of Avilla, our hands are Christ’s hands. Look again at the Gospel reading: it calls upon us not merely to turn the other cheek, but to go the extra mile, and to do so in order to show God’s love for humanity.

I was at COP26 this week, and I met an artist who works in a metal called “humanium”. The metal is produced by a Swedish Company which works with the United Nations to melt down illegally held firearms captured from war zones, and to recast the metal in objects of beauty and of utility, such as the pen which you can see in the photograph; and thus it is that the pen becomes, quite literally, mightier than the sword.

This project is a living outworking of going the extra mile, taking something which is evil, and transforming it into something which is good. It is a positive expression of the commitment of the United Nations to work for peace, as that is expressed in the opening words of the United Nations Charter:

“We, the peoples of the United Nations, determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind….have resolved to combine our efforts to accomplish [the aims set out in the Charter]”

Note this well: that determination does not come out of thin air; it is rooted in an act remembrance – the remembrance of the two world wars fought in the lifetimes of the signatories to the Charter and of the untold sorrows brought by those wars.

And so, as we commit ourselves this day to working for peace, expressing as Christ’s Church the love of God for all of humanity, we, too, should find our love as being informed by an act of remembrance – remembrance of the evils that have passed, remembrance of the evils that persist, and remembrance of the sacrifice of all of those whose names appear on the War Memorial at Vimy Ridge, all of the war memorials throughout Flanders, and all of the war memorials throughout this land; In a short while, we shall recall the names which appear on the war memorial here in our village, and we shall remember their sacrifice.

We know that in this world there cannot be a war to end all wars, that a fallen humanity will always know the curse of war, but, informed by our act of remembrance, we can work in the here and now to show through our love an imperfect reflection of the vision of Revelation: that there will come to pass the final healing of the nations, the ending of darkness and the dawning of the light of final redemption.

To him who has the power to make you stand firm, to the only wise God through Jesus Christ, be Glory for everAmen.

Prayers of Thanksgiving, Intercession and Petition; Commemoration of the Saints; Lord’s Prayer.

Father God, we thank you for those before us who sacrificed their strength, their courage, their lives, that we might live at peace; and we thank you for those who, even now, continue to make those sacrifices; yet at the same time as we give thanks, we bring also to mind the pain of a world that has need of such sacrifices, a world that is broken through the pomp and pride of human vanity, the strife born of human aggression. Lord, we ask that you should heal all that is broken and all that brings the affliction of war to this world.