George Pitcher

This is a transcript of a sermon delivered by George Pitcher at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, at Evensong on Remembrance Sunday, 11th November, 2007

I hope I don't impugn the memory of Laurence Binyon when I say that he was not a first-class poet. Though I should say that he was Poetry Professor at Harvard University - which is the best link to Emmanuel that I'm going to get for what I'm about to say. Born in 1869, he was of that late-Victorian tradition of sentimental-Imperial poetry - a sort of Rudyard Kipling without the gritty, cutting-edge realism. One of his plonking stanzas goes like this:

For Mercy, Courage, Kindness, Mirth
There is no measure upon earth
nay, they wither, root and stem
If an end be set to them....

In 1914, at the outbreak of the Great War, he wrote a poem called For The Fallen. Now, I'd like to tell you that by contrast it's a classic, his style burnished by the horrors of that war. But it isn't. It was actually written very early in the Great War, as a very remote reaction to the high casualty rates of the British Expeditionary Force at Mons and Le Cateau - and his style is nothing if not consistent. Here's the first stanza:

With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children,
England mourns for her dead across the sea.
Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of her spirit,
Fallen in the cause of the free.

It makes the doggerel of William McGonagall sound like high art. On it plods:...Solemn the drums thrill....a glory that shines upon our tears.

I have to read you the third stanza - steel yourselves.

They went with songs to the battle, they were young,
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow,
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted,
They fell with their faces to the foe.

But it's in the nature of dreary literature that sometimes we're taken by surprise by a burst of the sublime, like a shaft of divinity shining through our mortality. It happens sometimes in scripture - Paul's first letter to the Corinthians is for example, I think, a fairly dull piece of work, full of injunctions and regulations and the virtues of the severity of self-discipline for the nascent church in Corinth, then out of nowhere (probably as a consequence of some arbitrary editing) comes the sublime Chapter 13, starting: Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal; through the wonderful imagery of seeing through a glass darkly and concluding 12 sparse and beautiful verses later with ...And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity. Then normal, hectoring Pauline service is resumed in Chapter 14.

So it is with the redemption of Binyon's poem. Before we're treated to the truly shocking rhyme of They sit no more at familiar tables of home... with.... They sleep beyond England's foam, (honestly), we get these following four lines, familiar to us only because they cannot be improved and have earned their place in our liturgy where no other non-scriptural poet other than Cranmer has found a regular home. They are of course these lines:

They shall grow not old, as we who 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.

I think of November 11th as the concluding ceremony of the Festival of the Dead, a season that starts with All Hallow's Eve, originally the pagan end-of-summer festival of Samain that was co-opted by Christianity, became Halloween and now has been hijacked again by American trick-or-treat commercialism. There follows All Saints Sunday, when we commemorate the saints and the loved ones who have gone before us. At the pagan festival of Samain, the spirits of the dead were said to appear in the smoke of giant fires, lit to warm them ahead of the coming winter. Later, the pagan fire was adopted for the ritual burning of bones (ie "Bone-fire") from overcrowded church ossuaries, to make room for the next year's batch. The burning of effigies of Catholics on Guy Fawkes Night was a development of this tradition - and I avoid any connection with Emmanuel's Puritan heritage here. In any event, this is a time of year resonant of Eliot's hollow men, straw men, whose "voices are/ in the wind singing/ more distant and more solemn/ than a fading star." And 12 days on from Halloween, a sort of 12 Days of UnChristmas, we have Remembrance Sunday for the war dead, the going down of the sun into a stillness and darkness, a pause before the hope of Advent, when we start to look for the coming of the light in the morning, the new dawn of lively celebration that is Christmas Day.

At the going down of the sun/and in the morning...

Up and down the country on this Remembrance Sunday - and across the English-speaking world, these lines will have been intoned earlier today, around the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, with the congregational affirmation in the repeated last line as we all promise: We will remember them... Familiarity in this instance doesn't so much breed contempt as invisibility - yeah, yeah, we promise to remember, and perhaps we do as another year passes.

But it's worth pausing to look at these lines and asking what they mean. Here we are, a few hours on from the 11th hour, after the going down of the sun, and we can reasonably expect there to be a morning that will follow the protection of the night hours. What does this daily rhythm of remembrance mean? I'd like to suggest this evening that it provides us with an insight into living our lives Eucharistically and sacramentally.

Now this is dodgy territory. A sort of No Man's Land in Christology, where you can get caught in the aggressive crossfire of rival theologians. Because there are those who will get very exercised about any comparison between the violence of the Passion of the Christ and the violence of war. A priestly evangelical friend of mine objected to a war memorial on a rood-screen in his church because, he claimed, it put soldiers' sacrifice in war on a par with the sacrifice of Christ - and that, he thought, was heretical. Well, maybe; maybe not. But, controversially, the language we use for both, at least, would seem to suggest that we believe that there is some cultural relationship between these sacrifices. Some of what the Fallen in war have done has the resonance of a classic penal-substitution view of the atonement - we speak of them "giving their lives so that others may live." They laid down their lives so that we might live in freedom, we say. We speak of the Christ having set us free from the tyranny of sin - my brother-in-law has a certificate of honour on his wall memorializing his naval father who died in an Atlantic convey in the Second World War: It says simply "He gave his life to save mankind from tyranny." Christ-like or what?

Because forgive me for saying it but that sounds like the language of Christian salvation. I don't want to drive that comparison too far - one very clear difference is that soldiers defending us from the evil of, say, Nazism and the atonement of Christ is that soldiers are dealing in mortal redemption, liberation in this world, while the Christ is dealing in eternity, connecting on the cross the life of the divine with those of us standing at the foot of the cross.

But where I will claim a commonality is in the language of remembrance, particularly in the language of the Eucharist, the broken body and spilt blood of Christ - ironically enough described in one of those deathless passages of 1 Corinthians (11.23). The language of remembrance and thanksgiving are intimately related - in Judaism bread and wine were sacrificial elements. And the words at the institution of the Eucharist - "covenant", "poured out" and, vitally for my argument, "memorial" all have sacrificial associations. War memorials and the Lord's Table begin to share the same space, I think. Then, in the Eucharist, we are invited to "Do this in remembrance of me". The etymology of remembering is altogether richer than a mere act of recalling the event - we are asked to re-constitute the Christ, to put back together his broken body in the body of the church, we the limbs of Christ, the members of the church and the members of his body. We are enjoined, literally, to re-member him, the living eternal Christ, in the sharing of bread and wine.

So how does this act of remembrance, re-membrance, resonate with our acts of remembrance today, in the earthly business of remembering our war dead. Well, it seems to me that we're not just being asked regularly to recall the sacrifice of soldiers who fought for freedom, or who died for a pointless cause, but to re-vitalise them, not to live their lives for them but to live our lives for them, to re-member them by committing our own lives to life and hope and opportunity, where they lost their lives and hopes and opportunities. In the living of our lives, we will remember them. We will re-member them. It's sacrificial for both parties. And in this context, Laurence Binyon's poem becomes infinitely more potent.

So, if that's what remembrance - in the Eucharistic and the war-memorial context - means, what are we to make of being invited to do so "at the going down of the sun, and in the morning." At one level, yes, we're talking about the passage of time, the days that pass, the time that the prematurely dead have lost - "they shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old." They are not wearied by the sun rising and falling, they are not condemned by the passage of time. War is hell, in that it is antithetical to God's purpose and it fractures and disfigures his creation. In that fracture are the loves they never found - instead a generation of spinsters - the children that were never born, the homes in which other people lived.

But, as our gospel reading tonight asserts, as Jesus of Nazareth takes on those who claimed there was no resurrection, "our God is not a God of the dead, but of the living, for to him all of them are alive". So I'd also like to suggest that we're talking about darkness failing to overcome light, and more importantly darkness that becomes light. In the way we live our lives, in the darknesses and in the hope and joy of morning, that is the way in which our lives, sacramentally, will honour our worldly dead, who are alive to God, in a war-fractured world. And we will re-member them. It speaks to how we use our freedoms, how we celebrate life, how we treat our neighbours. This is not only to do with the narrow freedoms of our nationality, that we live in relative freedom in a democracy - important as cherishing that is - but also relates to how we live with freedom, how we honour those who died fighting for freedom by being vigilant in our own lives about oppressions, whether they relate to race, religion, culture, gender or sexuality. I'm glad I live in a free country - I'm less glad that it still fails often to welcome the stranger and the alien. And I'm less glad that I minister in a church that denies episcopacy to women, as though God graces apostleship only to those to whom he also gives the Y chromosome. At the going down of the sun in anyone's life, in the darkness of oppression and discrimination, we should remember those who fought and died for freedom and continue to strive for the light of a morning for any of those oppressed by any darkness.

I would go one step further. The passage of night and day is integral to Christian theology. It is at the heart of the creation myths of Genesis - he made lights in the dome of the sky to separate the day from the night; and he made two great lights - the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day (Gen 1:19) - at the going down of the sun and in the morning, as it were, he saw that it was good. And it's there in the nights and the days between the death of Jesus of Nazareth and the resurrection of the Christ, between the Fall of man and the salvation of God, between the death of God and the Eschaton. At the going down of the sun in our humanity and in the morning of our re-birth in the kingdom of God, when the dead will wake, like Solomon, as from a dream, knowing not in part but in full, God's wisdom. Meanwhile, we are the Saturday people, wedged between the Christ who shows us what God is like, the eschatological intervention in human history, between the darkness of Good Friday and the light of the Easter Sunday of resurrection. So at the going down of the sun of human life and carrying the dead forward with us to an end of history in which they will be raised with us is at the heart of Binyon's verse with which we have commemorated the dead today.

Of course, the waking to that bright morning - and the hope of it - is the most important thing that God has planned for his creation. But meanwhile we have our mortality, our frailty, our weakness, our war, our destruction, our deaths. And our dead. We have our dark night of the soul before that morning - and a light shines in that darkness and the darkness will not overcome it. So how we handle that darkness is important too, how we embrace it and look for the light, that is as important for us as for those who have gone down fighting the dark before us - at the going down of the sun and in the morning, we will re-member them.