As many of you know, I’ve been spending as good deal of time at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary in recent days. Its corridors are enlivened by a lot of interesting artwork, and I was particularly struck by a wooden panel into which are carved these words:
“History comes out of the walls”.
It’s the work of an artist called Shauna McMullan, and she took her inspiration from the dining tables in the old Royal Infirmary buildings in Lauriston Place. Over the years some of the clinicians and scientists who worked there carved their names onto the tops of those tables. The most famous of them was the microbiologist Louis Pasteur who visited Edinburgh in 1884 to take part in the celebrations for the 300th anniversary of Edinburgh University. The table-tops are now mounted on the wall opposite Shauna McMullan’s art work.
Shauna McMullan’s intention was to bring some memories of the old Royal Infirmary into the new building, gathering fragments of the past and preserving them for the future. She wanted there to be a sense of continuity between past and future and that, of course, is precisely what remembrance is about. That great theologian St Augustine of Hippo argued that we are, in a very important sense, what we remember. In his autobiography, The Confessions, he posed the question:
“What then am I, O my God? What is my nature?”
and answered that question with these words:
“…behold the numberless fields and caves and caverns of memory, each immeasurably full of an innumerable variety of things.”
What is true of us as individuals can, and I believe should also be true of communities and nations.
History comes out of the walls of the great majority of our churches from war memorials. The great majority of them, as here at the Good Shepherd, list those who died in two World Wars. There’s an important difference between the names carved on the tables of the old Royal Infirmary and the names on our war memorial. Those medics and scientists chose to record their names. The men recorded on our war memorial are not there by their choice. Some were volunteers, some conscripts but all went to war in the hope of returning to their loved ones. They died resisting aggression and in remembering them we not only honour them but sustain the shared memories of our nation and of the wider world and we resist the forgetfulness that is one of our greatest human weaknesses.
St Augustine, in the quotation I used a moment ago, wrote of the fields, caves and caverns of memory. Fields are open to the view, we see what is on their surfaces. Caves and caverns can be places of concealment and, if we are not diligent in our remembrance, they become places that are forgotten.
We are in danger of forgetting that those who fought and died in the Second World War were resisting regimes which taught that some races were superior to others, regimes which persecuted gay people, which denied millions their human rights, including the right to life itself. Those regimes believed that might is right and, in the case of National Socialist Germany, were supported by many Christians.
A few weeks ago, Susan and I entertained a friend whose father, a German Lutheran pastor who later became a Methodist minister, was, in the early 1930s, curate to the Rev’d Martin Niemöller in a parish in the southern suburbs of Berlin. Before he was ordained, Niemöller served in the German navy in World War One as a U-boat officer and was highly-decorated. His politics were of the kind that we now call National Conservatism. He disliked the liberal, democratic republic that was established in Germany after the First World War. He voted for the Nazis in 1924, 1928 and 1933 and welcomed Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, seeing Hitler as the strong man who would make Germany great again.
He soon began to criticise Hitler’s interference in church affairs, especially his policy of forbidding Christian clergy who, like our friend’s father, were ethnically Jewish from serving in parishes. In 1938 he was arrested and sent to Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp. Imprisonment proved to be a school of repentance, and he emerged in 1945 to become an advocate for human rights and a pacifist.
Niemöller’s story is one that we forget at our peril, for we live in an era when one form of national conservatism has taken power in the United States, with the enthusiastic support of many Christians, and another has taken root in Russia, with the backing of the Russian Orthodox Church. These are forms of politics which, because they are aggressive and divisive, misunderstand and misrepresent the very essence of Christianity, an essence foretold in our reading from the Prophet Micah, who offers a vision of peace:
“…and they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore…”
and developed in our Gospel reading, the Benedictus, with its vision of a people liberated from fear and persecution and its promise that God will
“…guide our feet into the way of peace.”
Not only peace as the absence of conflict, though that is a desirable goal, but peace in the sense of harmonious relations between all sorts and conditions of human beings. That peace is only possible if we open ourselves to the Grace of God and this morning’s reading from Revelation is a vision of what God intends and promises, a reminder that God
“…will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”
When he was released from captivity, Pastor Martin Niemöller wrote a short statement of repentance which, in various forms, has become very well-known. This is a translation of the version displayed at the Martin Niemöller Haus in Dahlem.
When the Nazis came for the communists,
I kept quiet; I wasn't a communist.
When they came for the trade unionists, I kept quiet;
I wasn't a trade unionist.
When they locked up the social democrats, I kept quiet;
I wasn't a social democrat.
When they locked up the Jews, I kept quiet;
I wasn't a Jew.
When they came for me, there was no one left to protest.
Remembrance is important. As St Augustine suggests, we are, both as individuals and as communities, what we remember. In recalling the sacrifice of those who died in battle we rightly honour them. In remembering the causes of the conflicts in which they fell we open ourselves to the possibility of eschewing the evils which led to their deaths.