Remembrance Sunday

First draft of a remembrance Sunday sermon.  Feel free to use if you have reached that point where you have run out of week.  Errors, omissions and typos are all mine and are included complimentary.

In monastic life, alongside the central church, you would always find a bakery and a brewhouse.  Because the water was not guaranteed to be pure, the monks would have a brewhouse which would brew ale with an alcohol content just strong enough to keep the water bacteria free.  In Dunfermline, at the Abbot House, they are recreating a medieval brewery, just like the one that would have been nearby when the abbey was a working community.  

When Mrs Gerbil and I visited, the brewer told us that the process  is temperature critical and you need to get the liquid up to exactly 70 degrees centigrade.  In the absence of thermometers, the way you would tell the liquid had got to that temperature is by looking at the surface.  When the cauldron  hit seventy degrees, the surface would go mirror smooth and you could see your face in it.  Everything looks calm on top, yet things are still quite hot underneath, an awful lot closer to boiling than ordinary room temperature.

How often does conflict look like that?  You may think that things are peaceful on the surface, but underneath, the unresolved hatred on both sides means that it won’t take much for things to reach boiling point.  

The global landscape has been shaped by conflict, past and present.  Tensions leading to the first world war had been brewing for at least a century before, with a network of treaties and alliances all serving to try to prevent war while at the same time allowing them to increase their military capabilities.  It only took a small act, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, for the whole house of cards to come tumbling down, and the deadly conflict to erupt.

And even with the ending of hostilities, the treaty of Versailles didn’t really sort anything out in Europe, and World War 2 was inevitable.  The effects of the wars can still be seen today on the maps of Europe, in the shape of Germany, and the divisions in the former Yugoslavia.

In the British isles, we have had our own share of conflict.  Between 1969 and 2010, the troubles in Northern Ireland lead to at least 3,500 deaths, and each death had a mother, or a father or a child that was bereaved, asking why.

One such parent, Colin Parry set up the Tim Parry – Johnathan Ball Foundation for Peace in Warrington, where Tim and Johnathan were killed in an IRA bomb attack.  Colin did something perhaps unthinkable to victims of terror, he invited Martin McGuinness, the Northern Irish Deputy First Minister, and former IRA member to speak to the foundation.  Colin Parry has said that he does not forgive McGuinness, and is aware that his decision has drawn severe criticism, But he has said that “this is absolutely what you need to do if you are leading a peace foundation which proclaims the importance of talking rather than fighting.” 

In his speech to the foundation, Martin McGuinnes had this to say...

“Conflict resolution is about much more than ending conflict. The conflict is over, but the work of conflict resolution must continue.  If we approach conflict resolution on the same basis that we approached ending the conflict then I firmly believe acknowledgements about the past can become a powerful dynamic which will move us again to new places that many believe are beyond us.”

We can see that, just like the heating pot in the brewery, we cannot just look at the calm reflective surface, we need to be aware of what is going on underneath.  

The Isaiah reading this morning is a familiar one this time of year, beating swords into ploughshares and spears into pruning hooks.  Is this idealistic  Does it actually have any real world merit?

The war in Mozambique, the only country in the world that has a machine gun on its flag,  raged between 1977 to 1992.  As one way of finding ways of reconciliation between communities, The right Reverend Bishop Dinis Sengulane arranged the collection of 600,000 weapons, exchanging guns for books, bicycles, and sewing machines.  One village exchanged enough guns they bought a tractor.  Not a plough, but close enough.  There was a genuine fear that the guns would have been shipped to another part of Africa and they would have fueled a conflict elsewhere.  

 There are millions of weapons circulating Africa from the colonial days, Belgian, French, Russian, even British army rifles, all still deadly.  In a project that brought together artists from all sides of the divide, some of the guns were turned into art, Two examples, a tree of life, and a throne, both recently on display in the British Museum.   

The artworks are the visible part of swords into ploughshares, but perhaps more importantly, swords are not just physical weapons, but a willingness to seek conflict rather than reconciliation.  It’s not enough to calm the water by taking away the guns, you have to change hearts from swords to plowshares as well.  Through his work supported by Christian Aid, Bishop Sengulane continues to seek to do this.  

We hear that “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends”  I would argue that to devote your life to peace, to spend your every waking hour uniting communities, breaking down barriers and softening hearts that have been hardened through years of warfare, that is the same thing.  That is showing great love for your friends.  And who are our friends, and who are our neighbours?  I’m going to  leave you to answer that yourselves.   

I will close today with some words from Archbishop Desmond Tutu: “You can only be human in a human society. If you live with hate and revenge, you dehumanise not only yourself but your community. You must forgive to make your community whole.”

Blessed are the peacemakers.  So pray for them, support them, wherever they are.  Help make them stronger.  Then you too will be doing your bit, beating swords into ploughshares, one gun and one heart at a time.