This year we commemorated the 80th anniversary in June of D-Day and the Normandy landings that led on to the liberation of Paris and to eventual Victory in Europe. On Remembrance Sunday we remember that these events of World War II involved people, real people, who had homes and families, a generation that will not be with us much longer.

So I was intrigued a few weeks ago, when I was told by one of our Lay Canons, Robert Solomon, about his father’s war time memoirs. Gerald Solomon, had been a young curate who felt called to sign up as an army chaplain in 1942. He found it, as he put it: ‘Quite a culture shock to move in a month from being the Curate of Broadstone to being the Padre of a gunner regiment.’ They sailed later that year and his ship, though damaged by torpedos, reached port in North Africa just before Christmas. He found himself near Tunis holding a strange yet moving Christmas service in a brickwork factory. But then there was the fighting, a baptism of fire, he said, when he was constantly with the wounded and burying the dead, burying them where they fell and making careful map references of the graves.

Services were arranged on an ad hoc basis and sometimes Gerald found it too dangerous and then, as he wrote, it was simply a matter of going round the chaps and having a few words with as many as possible: he said ‘service rather than services was so often the key note… Some of the most moving experiences of my whole ministry have consisted in taking a short service, or even saying a few words, to some little group under a tree or in a barn when they were lonely and old and bored or frightened – as at times we all were.’

After the fall of Tunis Gerald’s division was posted to Sicily - another success, but at high cost. Gerald mentioned being introduced by the major to a new young captain who had just arrived in post. Within 24 hours, tragically, Gerald had to bury both the major and the new captain. ‘What a brutal thing is war’ he commented. After Sicily it was up the Adriatic coast and then to Monte Cassino where Gerald was chaplain for a Forward Surgical Team located as near the battle line as possible to save lives at speed rather than risking moving the injured to hospitals. After a break for his division that summer, and a refit in Egypt, he had ‘another cold beastly winter’ in northern Italy where he remained until the end of the war.Then he was sent to Austria to fill a peace-keeping role and support the poor and deprived population, people as he noted that had only recently been enemies.

After the war Gerald stayed on as a chaplain with a full army commission, eventually retiring in 1963. I’m very grateful to Robert for sharing his Father’s memoirs. The war drew many into the services. Some were conscripted, others had a choice. And it occurs to me that there is a close link between Christian vocation and a life of military service. Every Christian at baptism is called to be a soldier and servant of Jesus Christ. The soldiering bit is about playing our part in the battle with evil in the world in its many forms. It won’t take us all into conflict zones, but it will take all of us into engagement with the evils of greed and complacency, violence and acquisitiveness, envy, injustice and exploitation. But then there is also that sense of service which goes with the struggle for good against evil. Just as Gerald found himself ministering to the wounded, offering prayer and healing, burying the dead with as much dignity as possible, helping those who had been enemies to rebuild their lives, so we are called to practise what we preach, to bear fruit, fruit that will last.

Christian faith does not do much good in the world if it is not offering service and building peace and friendship. Which is why our readings call us to worship with this in mind. We are called go up to the House of the Lord in worship and, out of that experience and commitment of worship, to build societies that are fair, where everyone has a chance of contentment, where the weapons of war are rebuilt into tools that can better provide for all humanity, bringing life instead of death: swords into ploughshares, spears into pruning hooks. And everyone sitting under their vines and fig trees – a lovely Holy Land image of shared contentment. This is the vision of peace that comes through scripture, again and again. Which is why Jesus calls his disciples not just to tolerance but to love, to love one another and to let that love extend outward to friend and neighbour, and also to stranger and enemy too. In this way love becomes fruitful and bears fruit and lasts.

Gerald’s memoirs show is what it is like to follow a choice and a commitment at a time when the world is convulsed by war. Faith lay behind his choice and the war provided a host of opportunities to struggle and to serve. Hardship and challenge were part of his story, but so was companionship and love. Our commitment to Christ and to the peace that he brings was made in our baptism – and then again at our confirmation. We are enlisted into the army of the King of Peace. We were chosen, perhaps before we knew anything about it, and now we choose. Not just once, but everyday. To be on the side of life, and not death, and to follow wherever God in his intriguing and extraordinary mercy may choose to deploy us. As Christian faith gets rarer in this country every disciple counts, every conscript is needed in the service of light over darkness, truth over falsehood, life over death.