Will you stand still at 11am on Sunday and at 11am on the 11th? I wonder how many people in Great Britain will stand still on these days?
For some, if not many, in our population, today’s ceremonies in churches, town halls, at the Cenotaph and at countless War Memorials may hold no significance. Many may be somewhat bemused by seeing groups of people keeping two minutes silence, out of respect for people killed in war; for people that those in silence never knew. Why do it? They might think.
War and other armed hostilities do not just affect those immediately concerned; the comrades, parents, siblings and partners, it also affects the children, grand-children and the collective memory of families and wider society. I still, to this day, place a poppy in the photograph frame of my great-great Uncle Ernest, whose image sits on my desk. (He died days before the end of WWI in a German concentration camp and was mourned by my Grannie until the day she died. I of course never knew him but I knew him through my Grannie’s stories and memories. I am also aware that I am perhaps his only descendent that keeps his memory alive. I also hope that I won’t be the last member of the family to remember him but I might be.) That is why corporate remembrance is so important.
As a society and as a church, we have, I think, a duty to remember those who have given their lives in the service of this country and in the defence of our national liberties.
God does not want us to continue to fight with each other. We were not created out of anger but out of love. Yet we are the most aggressive animal on the planet and at the same time the most loving and compassionate too. We are a paradox. We need to remember our dual nature and as we stand this morning we need to remember to pray. To pray for an end to war and violence and for the conversion of our natural desire to fight out of aggression. Lest we forget.