The Rector’s Chronicle

Remembrance Sunday 2025

When I was a boy, we played what we called “Cowboys and Indians” and, more often, soldiers' games with titles that I probably can’t repeat in this context. My own father fought in Burma during WWII and that conflict obviously formed part of my early view of the world.

These games wouldn’t, you see, pass the test of political correctness today. Some would say they glorify violence and bloodshed, but they really weren’t about hate or cruelty or a desire to kill. They were about courage, daring, and adventure. We imagined ourselves standing against danger, defending our friends, taking risks for something bigger than ourselves.

Some Psychologists like the Canadian Jordan Peterson, have reflected on this instinctive pattern in boys’ play—the fascination with heroes and warriors. When boys pick up sticks and turn them into swords or guns, they are not actually learning to be violent; they are rehearsing to be virtuous. They are learning the difference between strength used to dominate and strength used to defend. They are testing themselves against fear and chaos and imagining that one day they might have the courage to do in reality what they now do only in play—to face the dragon, to protect the innocent, to fight for the good.

Today, in the Act of Remembrance, we honoured those for whom that imagination became real.

We remember the men (and women) who stood between the innocent and evil, who went when called, who fought and died not because they hated those in front of them, but because they loved those behind them. Representatives of the Britain, the Commonwealth the US and of several other nations have laid wreaths here today, in solemn remembrance of the fallen in all the wars. The poppy, (the invention of an American lady from Georgia called Monia Michael actually) the wreath laying, the silence—they all speak of a gratitude that words can scarcely express. We are particularly honored to have the most senior

serving officer in the American Armed Forces, General Dan Caine with us today to lay a wreath on behalf of all American military personnel who were willing to face the dragon, to protect the innocent, to fight for the good and to lay down their lives for this country and, in many cases in our history, for many of the other countries represented here today as well.

Our prayers particularly rest today with the fallen from those countries where war has raged and still rages in our own day. We offer our hopes for a lasting peace in the Middle East and for a just end to the war in Ukraine.

In Britain today is called Remembrance Sunday; in America it is Veterans Day. The two grew from the same root—the 11th hour of the

11th day of the 11th month, when the guns of the First World War fell silent, at last. But while our ceremonies take different shapes, their heart is the same: a moment of national humility before the vast cost of human conflict and in the face of the great body of self sacrificial service of all those who served and who serve today.

War, as we know, is never as simple as good versus evil. It is tangled with pride and fear, with politics and human frailty. However brave our service men and women are, the countries they serve, including our own countries, have not always behaved as honourably as they might. The poet Wilfred Owen, who died just a week before the Armistice, saw through the romantic language of patriotism to the mud and blood of the trenches. The title of Owen’s most famous poem is a line written by the Roman poet Horace, “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori”—“It is sweet and noble thing to die for one’s country”. It’s a line I remember very well

from my time as Chaplain at the British Officer Academy Sandhurst since it is spelt out in huge letters on the arch above the entrance to the side transept of the Royal Memorial Chapel there. Owen, full of the horror of the endless death he saw in the trenches called it “the old Lie.” And yet, though the carnage of war is never noble in itself, the willingness to face it, to endure it for the sake of others, is noble. Indeed, it is, in its truest form, the love that says, I am prepared to do this for you.

As Jesus said in the Gospel: “Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.”

That is what makes this day not only solemn but holy. Those we remember today lived out that truth.

They enacted, in the real world, what we only imagined as children: they became defenders, protectors, warriors and sacrificial lovers. It is no wonder that, in both Britain and America, and I would guess in most countries represented here today, the armed forces are still among the most trusted professions in public life—far more than clergy or politicians, I’m sorry to say! For they embody something that our culture often forgets: that peace is not merely the absence of conflict but the fruit of courage and self-sacrifice, which has to be hard won, again and again.

And yet, if that were all—if remembrance were only a catalogue of tragedy and loss—it would be unbearable. Even the  comparatively small numbers of young men (and young women) I said prayers for as their bodies were carried on the shoulders of their friends onto aircraft at airheads in Iraq and Afghanistan draped in the National flag, even those few dozen would be unbearable were it not for what we hold up in the face of the darkness in this Church today.

The only reason we can remember with gratitude and hope, rather than despair is because of faith. Without faith, there is nothing more to be said. They are dead.

But, as our first reading from the Book of Wisdom tells us: “The souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and no torment shall ever touch them… In the eyes of the foolish they seemed to have died, but they are in peace.”

That is the Christian difference. We do not remember the dead as lost, but as found—received into the eternal mercy of God. We do not believe that courage and love end in the grave. We believe, as Christ promised, that there is a resurrection: that those who have laid down their lives are not gone, but live now, in the life of God, awaiting the day when all creation shall be made whole and peace shall reign forever. And then, our games, as children and adults, will be games no longer, but nobility, courage and love will be all there is and those things, in as much as we live them, will be what is left of us.

So, we remember, yes, with tears—but also with hope.

Because beyond every battlefield and beyond every tomb stands the Cross, and beyond the Cross the empty tomb of Easter morning. Laurence Binyon’s immortal lines from “For the Fallen” we heard read earlier, point to how their youth and life remains as light to us as we remember.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning

We will remember them.

You will have noticed that the bugle call taps, what the British call Last Post preceded the silence, but that the silence is broken by another call called Rouse or Reveille. Wake up, wake it calls. To summon the fallen to wake to the life beyond the sleep of death.

We do remember them—

not only for what they suffered,

but for the love that conquered fear,

for the peace and liberty won for those they loved and left behind

for the light that still shines in the darkness,

and for the promise that, in God’s eternal kingdom,

war and all our human brokenness and bitterness and our failure to be the people we longed to be as children playing in our gardens and back yards, shall be ended, and we shall be changed and made new, as St Paul, says “in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet call of God.

Rest eternal grant unto them O Lord and may light perpetual shine upon them. May they rest in peace and rise in glory.

Amen.