People die. As we gather
here on a crisp Sunday morning, with the lengthening sun of a winter sky sloping
in through the window, and leaves piling up on the ground outside; as we
remember the fallen and venerate the sacrifice they made on our behalf; this is
what we are doing, we are identifying with our humanity and the cycles of life
and death of our world in ways which we shun for the other 364 days of the year,
unless death sidles up us unannounced and frightens us into reflecting on our
own fragility.
Which is why I think it appropriate for this to be a solemn day and us
to adopt a solemn tone in our service. For
today offers us a unique opportunity to reflect on our own lives and our own
destiny. Because people die.
We will die. This is the
bleak fact of human and divine reality. We
have an allotted span which, for some is short and others long; with a natural
term for some and an unnatural one for others.
For we are creatures and part of a created reality which has its rhythms
and its seasons. Eternal youth is
an illusion; in this world we cannot and will not live for ever.
Now this would be terrifying were there not also a Creator, if we were
not held in the hand and the memory and understanding of God.
Our humanity would terrify us were it not for the fact of our eternal
destiny, the fact that life is offered to us beyond death.
This is the insight which the Christian Gospel brings to our celebration
this morning. We have a destiny and
a dignity which cannot be encompassed by our humanity and its frailty; we have a
destiny which is written in the skies. God,
our Creator, breathes the life of being into our nostrils just as cleanly as
once he breathed life into the nostrils of Adam and, with the life and death of
the second Adam, of his Son Jesus Christ, God breathes the new spirit of the
resurrection into our nostrils as well. This
means that we can look at our humanity with a certain kind of lucid detachment
because it does not contain the whole of our truth.
We are more than our bodies.
I have said that our destiny is written in the skies. I have spoken
about the air which God breathes into our lungs. Is that why some people sail up into the skies, just as
surely as they have ever sailed upon the oceans.
Have you placed yourself in this heroic space for a reason which is about
your own desires certainly, but which encompasses a desire which is integral to
human living, the desire to transcend our shared earth-bound destiny and to
reach out to the stars? My sense is
that it is as though, in the public imagination, you occupy a space which is
poised between heaven and earth. That is why what happens to you there is so supremely
important to the rest of us. The
death of an airman is a tragedy for us all.
With you we reach out to heaven; when you fall from the skies, we all
fall; for we are cast back inexorable away from our access to the transcendent.
Heaven eludes our grasp. The
veil between heaven and earth which you made thin, suddenly becomes opaque.
Our vision clouds over.
This reminder of the fact that human beings do want to reach out beyond
themselves - and that you do this graphically across our skies -
is an important one. For it
changes the focus of our Remembrance Day service.
Ordinarily we think about what people die of or what they die from.
The beauty of today’s celebration is that it invites us to consider
what people die for. Think about
this for a moment. You know too
much about the reality of your own lives for us to be sentimental about what you
do or the reasons for which you do it. Your
motivation is as simple and as complicated as anyone else’s.
I know we use the rhetoric of sacrifice on occasions such as this and, it
is quite true, ‘Greater love hath no man, than to lay down his life for his
friends’. But strikes me as
astonishing about what you do is the fact that you lie down your lives for your
enemies, or for total strangers, for people all over the world whom you do not
even know. That is true of the men
who are named on your war memorials. With
the hindsight that comes from understanding the complexity of the human story,
we know quite well that many of them died for causes or plots or plans which
took them into a moral hinterland, an ethical jungle; as well as to counties and
situations which they did not necessarily comprehend and which we are only now
unravelling as we learn the lessons of history.
I would hate us to be sentimental about war heroes.
My ninety-one year-old mother’s younger brother was one of yours.
She still has his flying cap. Philippe
Macsherry died aged twenty-three in the Battle of Britain.
When I come to share in your service I do so as someone who is
implicated, not as an outsider. That
is why I hope you will forgive me for saying that I believe that his heroism and
your heroism comes from the fact that you do not claim moral superiority.
Indeed you know that you cannot. For
we can only do our best and history will be our judge and history may find us
wanting by condemning the causes we espouse.
But today we are right to think about what people die for.
There is glory, genuinely, in this consideration.
For there is something remarkable in the fact that you exist to serve
other people and to do your best. If
this is what you are prepared to die for, then you hold up a banner of hope to
the rest of us. Because think about
it, you say to the rest of us, ‘we know what we would be prepared to die
for’, and so, as it were, analogously, you show us what it is that
we should all be prepared to live for.
To serve other people and to do your best – and, as I have said -
on occasion to fly up into the sky and break the veil that conceals us
from God. That surely is the
vocation of every human being. It
is certainly the dignity I recognise in the life and teaching of Jesus.
With our Gospel reading, I rejoice in the fact that today is not simply
about death or the commemoration of death; it is about life and the celebration
of life.
Our Remembrance Day Service offers calm space in which we can be
tranquil and reflective whilst thinking about eternal verities, our own of
course and those of the RAF in which you serve. Today’s service requires of all of us a very simple
response: one by which we honour our Creator and acknowledge our own humanity
with all its fragility and with its remarkable God-given capacity for
self-transcendence; for, with the fallen whom we honour today, we too are to lay
our colours on the altar of life.