Remembering Our People, Our Values and Our Resilience
Malachi 4, Luke 21
Sunday 13th November
8am, 5.45pm
In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Have you ever tried to make a prediction? There are some spectacular examples of people who have tried to make predictions but come a cropper. Here some from people who were trusted as surely knowing a thing or two:
Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, apparently said in 1943, "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." I suppose that at the time, he was right but as a prediction it wasn’t great. A Popular Mechanics magazine once made this prediction: "Where a calculator is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and weigh only 1.5 tons." How grateful are we that that was wrong!
At a time when many people are clearly struggling with so many challenges and with great concerns about the future cost of living, it might be something of a comfort to know that even experts don’t always get it right! That said, the denigration of well-informed experts over the last few years because they were out of touch with government messages has been awful to behold and done little to increase people’s confidence being based on even less of a foundation.
Often predictions are a fool’s game, and that is before you get to all cultish stuff, end of the world doom mongers, and David Icke followers. In the Church we are in that season of the year when our Eucharistic readings get spectacularly apocalyptic with lots of predictions. We get to the end of this year’s lectionary – that is our cycle of Sunday readings for Year C - with Christ the King next week so it is hardly surprising that this is building up to it. After that, in two weeks’ time, it will be Advent Sunday and we start back with the Year A cycle of readings and preparations for Christmas!
For now, we have Malachi talking about the burning up of the arrogant and the evildoers, and Luke, largely quoting Mark’s gospel, talking about the Temple stones being thrown down, and then rumours of wars, insurrections, earthquakes, famines, and plagues, followed by disciples being arrested and persecuted even to death. How awful it must all have sounded.
Malachi seems to be writing around 500 BC after the return from exile, promising that the arrogant and the evildoers would find a sticky end but for those who were faithful, ‘the sun would rise with healing in its wings’. It was less of a prediction and more of an encouragement to those who were his hearers to reform their lives and follow Yahweh, forthtelling more than foretelling.
In Luke, we heard more concrete predictions directly from Jesus to his disciples. In fact, the Temple really was destroyed in AD 70 and this was about all those things happening quite quickly. The problem the early Christians faced was how to understand and explain what they perceived as the delay in Jesus’ return.
Since then we have continued to experience wars, and floods, and famines and earthquakes. The only difference now is that these are not rumours, we have them on our screens – it is all there starkly in front of us. If you watch the news on some of the foreign channels, then it also comes unfiltered unlike on BBC or ITV. It can be awful. But that is the reality of war. It is always awful; always a failure; always the lesser of two evils but sometimes there is no other choice, if we are to stand up for truth and freedom and defend lives.
Today on this Remembrance Sunday, we do that more than at any other time of year. In recent years, we have been particularly aware of the significant anniversaries surrounding the first world war. We have also had the 75th anniversaries of things like D Day and VE day. This year we note in particular the 40th anniversary of the Falklands conflict, which is so particularly remembered in this city as so many who died came from here and served in ships which were struck, including HMS Sheffield, HMS Ardent, HMS Glamorgan, HMS Coventry, HMS Antelope, the RFA Sir Galahad, and the SS Atlantic Conveyer. In all 255 British personnel lost their lives defending the Falklands, of whom 86 were Royal Navy, 27 Royal Marines, 124 Army, 6 Merchant Navy, 4 Royal Fleet Auxiliary, 8 Hong Kong sailors and 1 RAF.
Today we give thanks for all those who have given their lives in the service of their country, and we remember them with honour and with sorrow at their deaths. We mourn along with families and friends those we knew, and those we didn’t know. Each death is a tragedy. It may represent a failure of diplomacy but if we do not stand up for our values, who will be left to do it?
But, right now, if all we do is mourn, then we are most to be pitied, and we risk the deaths of those who have served their country and the values for which they stood, being for little or nothing. The only thing that makes sense, is if we also aim to learn from the past, from the sacrifices they made so that the likelihood of others having to do the same in our own time will be reduced. We honour them best by remembering them yes, but also by redoubling our commitment to waging peace and standing up for truth, justice and freedom.
Right now, we face again the challenge of how to respond to the invasion of Ukraine and that mean standing up again to the bullies and extremists who would reduce our world and our values to rubble. As a country, we are continuing even now to uphold those same values. There may have been wobbles but what else are we doing with our clear support for Ukraine or with British troops currently deployed in Somalia, South Sudan, Nigeria, Kenya, Iraq, and Mali, to say nothing of the various permanent bases around the world.
For people of faith, the gospel is a gospel of peace certainly, but Jesus didn’t condemn soldiers for being soldiers, rather he told them not to extort money from anyone by threats or by false accusation, and to be content with their wages. And he set out for his disciples the cost of following him and explained clearly that they would be prosecuted, persecuted, and even put to death. The key was to endure all this and remain faithful. Faithful endurance. Malachi’s point was no different. Revering God’s name meant not being arrogant nor justifying wrongdoing or evil, but rather following his laws faithfully. Faithful endurance in the face of trials and tribulations was the challenge for them and is the same challenge for us, in our own time.
As I said earlier, we are now seeing more people than ever before who are struggling. I was at a Cost-of-Living Conference for Portsmouth this week, run by the City Council and with many local community and voluntary organisations. There is widespread concern at the almost tangible feeling of precarity and worry about what the next 2 years will hold and how people will cope, especially those who are already poor and struggling to pay for food or heating. There was an acknowledgement that many people are less able to withstand knock-backs, less tolerant of others, and more tribal. They are less resilient than they have ever been in many cases than ever before. Whether you want to put that down to the era, the cost of living, or the delayed mental impact of covid, our task in the face of it all is to endure and to remain faithful and not to give in to the forces that would undermine us or make us less tolerant or less resilient and to do all we can to build one another up in love, compassion, and mutual care. We need to try to be resilient for the sake of all those who aren’t right now.
We can wring our hands in despair at some of the awful things we see going on or we can say, we will not be brought down by them, because we stand for something different, for a worldview that is based on the kingdom of God, that is more important, more enduring, and for which some people have fought and died.
The hill on which we stand is that love and peace, truth and justice, freedom and democracy, are worth standing up for and being counted for, and that we stand now and will stand, with all those who have gone before us, for those same values, in order to uphold them in our own time for us and for our children, as they did for our sake in theirs, and as demonstrating something critically valuable and significant about our faithful endurance and our faith in the God of peace and justice. Amen