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Service on Remembrance Sunday, November 9.2008
Service on Remembrance Sunday, November 9.2008
Sermon preached at a Service on Remembrance Sunday, November 9.2008 in St
Macartan’s Cathedral, Clogher
by the Right Reverend Michael Jackson, bishop of Clogher
Readings: Wisdom of Solomon 6:12-16; St Matthew 25:1-13
St Matthew 25:13 Later the other bridesmaids came also, saying: ‘Lord,
Lord, open to us.’ But he replied, ‘Truly I tell you, I do not
know you.’ Keep awake therefore, for you know neither the day nor the
hour.
The Readings which we have heard this afternoon speak of preparation and
practicality – both of them are essential to the life and work of the
serving soldier. The Wisdom of Solomon introduces us to Wisdom itself, spoken
of here as a person. Wisdom the person overlaps significantly and intimately
with the person of God, as the author understands and pictures Wisdom. The
very positive thing which comes through is that Wisdom actively makes herself
known to those who seek Wisdom. Wisdom is to be found at the gate, in a prominent
position where she simply cannot remain un-seen – precisely because
everyone passing in and out passes through the gate of the city, the town
or the village. The picture continues: once Wisdom has been met and recognized,
Wisdom becomes a companion, seeking out new friends, meeting people as they
go on their way and meeting them also in everything that they think and do.
Wisdom is not abstract, therefore, Wisdom is a friend to those in sorrow
or in joy, caught up as they are in their everyday life and preoccupation.
It ought, then, to follow quite easily for us that in the New Testament Reading
the distinction is clearly drawn between a practical wisdom and a practical
folly. Being prepared for the Lord’s arrival is one thing. Being prepared
for the Lord’s delayed arrival is quite another. And it is, perhaps,
here that we see a shift in thinking. This, again, is not a matter of theory
but a matter of practice. Lived wisdom is the particular point at which you
recognize that you are part of what has been carefully prepared and at which
you have a special part to play. If you are ready to play it and to cope
with the emergencies and the things which are unexpected, and if you can
indeed react to them, then you are recognized as a friend and received as
a guest. The Wisdom which has been waiting at the gate, the Wisdom which
meets you and accompanies you receives you now into the banquet of the Messiah.
We gather this afternoon to remember with thanksgiving those from this parish
and locality who followed the call of Wisdom in their day and hour in serving
their country, in serving the cause of freedom in their generation and in creating
a climate of freedom for their successors. We here this afternoon are beneficiaries
of their active sense of active service. For them, they would have combined
and drawn together a number of voices: the voice of duty; the voice of honour;
the voice of a most special contribution in the hour of need and darkness;
the voice of care for others; the voice of God – all of these voices
together made and constituted for them the voice of Wisdom. And as the years
between the events themselves and our remembering them grow in number and in
distance it is all the more important that in remembering we do not forget.
Our remembering is, of course, set in the context of a wide appreciation of
war. Sadly – particularly for those who thought it – the turn of
the second into the third millennium has not brought about either a cessation
of war or the advent of predictable peace. Across the arena of world events
we still live daily with theatres of war and with all of the squalid consequences
of impoverishment, displacement, cruelty, illness and death. It does not change
sufficiently for us to be convinced that it has in any sense gone away. And
so we, too, in our day – in our remembering – need Wisdom to meet
us, to accompany us and to warn us repeatedly to be prepared.
Now I am sure that you would agree with me in saying that the phrase: Whatever
you say, say nothing …is a piece of homespun wisdom which has seen many
a person out of a tight corner and I can only presume will do so again. Many
of us will have heard it and perhaps used it. I wonder indeed if, in so doing,
we ever give it a second thought. What does it say? Does it speak from a standpoint
of confidence and resilience - based on the matter in hand being so self-evident
that you do not in fact need to say anything more? Or does it speak, instead,
from a standpoint of fear and resignation heading, rather, towards the sort
of silence which says nothing in its quest for yet another piece of homespun
wisdom: anything for a quiet life? Maybe somehow the phrase has stood the test
of time precisely because it can and does say any or all of these things at
the same time and still is capable of keeping people guessing.
But more recently, as I am sure that you know, the phrase: Whatever you
say, say nothing … has had a new lease of life as the title of a piece of
research undertaken by The Hard Gospel Project of the Church of Ireland; it
is a report on the views and experiences of Border Protestants for the Church
of Ireland Diocese of Clogher. The Report is a report for our times. It is
ten years now since ‘the outbreak of peace’ in Northern Ireland.
The overwhelming absence of real violence as a daily occurrence in our streets
and in our fields and hedges is a cause of gratitude and relief. Often we hear
that nobody now wants things to go back to how they were in the bad old days
of The Troubles and that nobody has an appetite for violence of that sort and
on that scale. I simply hope that this is true and I try very hard to share
their confidence.
But where - as People of the Open Book, as people who claim to be Bible-based
in all our thinking, as people who rejoice in a heritage of ready access to
the Bible in our own language, a development in which history combined to give
us both the Reformation and the Printing Press – where do we stand within
the Biblical expectation as peacemakers, not simply as peacetakers? What contribution
have we made; what contribution do we wish and want actively to make to a community
of respect, a country of confidence and a climate of co-operation? The report
in its concluding section expresses it starkly: ‘Clogher Diocese should
seek to determine the key areas where ‘the carpet’ (as in the phrase:
lifting the carpet) needs to be lifted and whether or not it is indeed the
role of the Church to encourage and enable people (Church leaders, clergy,
parishioners and others) to gain the skills and confidence, and secure the
support, to face and address the issues and challenges that prevail. The alternative
is arguably a future built on continued avoidance and dishonesty.’ This
really does nail it – are we willing together to move out and to move
forward or do we somehow expect others to do this work for us? And if they
get it wrong do we want them around to offload shame and blame?
The Report, to my mind, highlights a dilemma at a deep human level which simply
will not go away. It is a conviction which lies at the heart of human integrity
and human solidarity that it is quite wrong to diminish an experience which
you yourself have not had. At the same time it is also impossible to avoid
the fact that any human society is made up of people who have had similar and
overlapping experiences and others who have had quite different and contradictory
experiences. The key - later or sooner – is for such groups to listen,
to understand and then to act together. Until that happens, life is in a very
real sense suspended and, in an equally real sense, not happening. Where part
of the total community is hurting, the rest of the community is hurting – and
may even have no effective way of expressing it – AND the whole community
is incomplete. St Paul tells us as much whether it be about the crucifixion
of Jesus or the church as the body of Christ.
I trust that you will find time to read the Report. There are copies in abundance
at the West End of the cathedral and I hope that you will take one home. I
am glad that it was commissioned and I am glad that we have it. It is a competent
and a sensitive piece of work on a post-Conflict situation and such a situation
of Conflict and post-Conflict is where our memories also carry us today: we
stand together post-World War 1, post-World War 2, post-The Troubles of Northern
Ireland and are catapulted on into Iraq, Afghanistan, the Congo and elsewhere
with all the sadness, anger, confusion and forgiveness which such conflicts
have brought to the fore in human individuals. Their own experience is the
realization that war itself brings few winners through its barbed-wire, its
landmines and mortars, its knee-cappings, its cluster bombs and its concentration
camps, whether they be Dachau, Auschwitz or Guantanamo Bay. It is true but
frightening to say that the trauma and the wounded-ness of war and situations
of conflict can and do eat up the future as well as the present for people
who become en-meshed in things and situations they never expected to have to
encounter. For such people are at the mercy of forces they cannot regulate.
Some things in the Report strike me as particularly note-worthy and rather
alarming but they do locate us in the wider context of what is happening throughout
the world. Many people from the diocese were interviewed for this Report and
there is, in fact, no sustained mention of God in it on the lips of anyone.
Of course this puts us in the diocese of Clogher in exactly the place in which
we find the rest of the Western world – increasingly slow even to talk
about God, unconcerned about our inability to do so, content with the ‘value
added’ of secular consumerism – but it will come as a shock to
you as indeed it did to me. From what I can see, not one of the participants
mentions God once. I fully accept that for many people there are tremendous
difficulties in finding God again after a sustained period of conflict and
even in believing in God but I do not somehow think that this is what has happened
here. In fact I do not know what has happened. But I do know that there is
no real evidence of God being where we seem to be going. You would expect people
who have quite a lot to say – and often being very critical of others
into the bargain - about what they want and do not want the church to be to
speak about God in what they are saying. But: No!
The second thing which particularly struck me is a suggestion made in the
body of the Report as an editorial comment by the author. It connects the thinking
of people in the diocese with the thinking of the whole of Europe in the post-Conflict
situation of two World Wars, not least in the context of what is now called
the European Union. It comes across as a practical, courageous expression of
that genuine cry for help voiced so often in the form: ‘It must never
happen again …’ It runs as follows and I quote from the Report: ‘The
task facing the Church, and indeed wider society, is arguably less about solving
or fixing whatever the immediate issues may be and more about building a new
preparedness and capacity to embrace such contentious issues in an on-going
way. Perhaps the real challenge is to learn to walk towards rather than away
from conflict and genuinely see it as an opportunity rather than a threat.’ This,
I respectfully suggest to us all, is a place where Protestant people have not
often been before and a place where we need to enter. I ask you please to think
about it and to consider where it might take us.
The third thing I want to say relates to something which the author of the
Report, Mr David Gardiner, said and it is this: in Chinese characters the symbol
for conflict is the same as the symbol for opportunity. Again, I ask you please
to think about it. It connects with the previous point I have made and it opens
a way of breaking the cycle of re-invented suspicion, hostility, diminishment
which has taken place on all sides and may well still be there under the surface
of The Peace. This is the point at which we have the potential to make a difference
and to match our experience in all its reality, painfulness, forgiveness and
hopefulness with what it is to be adventurous. And this is why, at the recent
Diocesan Synod, I spoke with the highest of expectation of this Report as ushering
in an era of hope.
The motto, derived from Holy Scripture, which expresses the life-blood of
the Anglican Communion is the following: The truth shall set you free.
It is a rule of thumb which I have found every bit as useful as that other
rule of thumb which we have been discussing: Whatever you say, say nothing … We
all aspire to truth but so often do not want truth on God’s terms. The
terms on which God offers truth to us is such that God does not, in giving
it to us, deny it to others whom we do not, cannot and will not control. I
say this not to be disloyal to truth and truth-telling but because truth and
love in the person of God are the same. As I said earlier, the absence of any
mention of God in the Report does not of itself inspire confidence - in fact
it can do only the opposite - inspire concern and alarm. But, where will the
truth lead us? If we do not honestly and openly ask this question in 2008,
we simply are left with the unanswered question of generations of people at
home and abroad who have already fought and given their lives for freedom and
truth and love and respect. We simply cannot, when we gather in the name and
in the house of the God who is truth, be left with the unanswered question
of the hand-wringing Pontius Pilate: What is truth? Not least on a Day of Remembrance,
my friends, we need to go further as our human need and our spiritual instinct
combine to seek resolution of questions which torture.
Any post-Conflict situation leads us into fresh expressions of truth because
neither human nature nor God lives in a vacuum - or can do. Today we commemorate – with
sober diligence and thankful dutifulness – the offering of life on the
part of those who gave not only everything they had but also everything they
were to humanity and to God, as each one of them understood God to be, for
a future which they themselves would not see. Every generation has the open
opportunity to be mindful of what previous generations have given, of what
others who came before us offered in terms of courage, conviction and commitment.
In the words of a hymn too infrequently sung:
Sing praise, then, for all who here sought and here found him,
Whose journey is ended, whose perils are past;
They believed in the light; and its glory is round them,
Where the clouds of earth’s sorrows are lifted at last.
Let us not, in our day, in any way dis-honour them by our fearfulness of a
future which God carries in his heart and is yet to disclose. In the morning
and in the evening let us remember them.
Wisdom of Solomon 6:12: Wisdom is radiant and unfading, and she is easily
discerned by those who love her, and is found by those who seek her.
May God bless both our remembering those of the past and our hoping for those
of the future.
Date: 11 Nov 08