Be Still and Know (Remembrance Day Sermon 2014)

Psalm 46.1-11

If you have travelled to London to see the amazing installation around the Tower of London you will have been deeply impressed I'm sure. There’s a picture of it on the back of your booklets when our Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh visited it a few weeks ago.

888,246 ceramic poppies, each one representing one British life cut short in World War I, planted into the ground surrounding the tower, making a sea of red.

It takes something like this to help you see the scale of the loss of life not only our country, but others, suffered from 1914 to 1918.

I am so pleased today that we have a surviving relative of one of our parishioners who fell in that conflict. When, in August, Miriam showed me the scribbled letter announcing the circumstances of John Flower’s death sent to his next of kin I was very moved to hold it and read it. But, of course, hundreds of thousands of similar letters had to be written, despatched, opened and read as that atrocious war raged on.

Its pain was still felt decades on. In 2007, a ninety-seven year old woman laid a wreath at her father's grave at a war cemetery in northern France. Her note said: "Thank you for five years of real happiness... I've missed you all my life."

One of the things I have become aware of in this 100th anniversary year of the outbreak of World War I is the standard issue Saint John's Gospels, that were given to any serving soldier who wanted one, during the conflict.

I never knew this before, but 42 million Active Service Gospels like this one were printed and given away, which is a testament to the huge demand there was for them.

I came across an extract from a soldier’s diary this week that shows how they were sometimes used: “My pal was mortally wounded only a yard from me. I showed him his wife's photo and read her last letter to him, and part of St John 17, and so passed away a real Christian soldier. It was with a heavy heart and wet eyes that I left him with the snow falling on his body. All around lay dead and wounded, and I did what I could... You will gather how we suffered when I tell you that out of forty-two in our platoon, only eleven are left and I am one of them.”

I wonder what words from John 17 he read to his dying comrade? Maybe it was the verse where Jesus says, "Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent."

Chaplains on the front line asked if a decision form could be added to the back page of the gospels and their request was granted.

This is what it said. Decision Form. Being convinced that I am a sinner, and believing that Christ died for me, I now receive him as my personal Saviour, and with his help I intend to confess him before men.

Servicemen were invited to sign underneath as a gesture of commitment, for their own assurance as they faced the ever-present reality that this day might be their last on earth. And many did sign that decision page, drawing strength and peace from their spiritual commitment.

The trenches were a place where some lost faith, such was the raw horror of what they witnessed. But, in those years of hell on earth, many found faith too.

Scripture Gift Mission who printed these gospels, received many letters of gratitude from serving personnel and here’s a quote from one of them:

“When your small Testaments were distributed on the Common at Southampton I, among others, accepted one in a more derisive than complimentary manner. I little dreamed that I should use it and find in it great consolation in lonely hours. I have learned to realise the great personality of the saviour. When at night I have been on duty alone with him by my side, and the Germans but 30 yards away, I realised that I needed more than my own courage to stand the strain. When the shells of the enemy have burst periodically at my feet I have marvelled at the fact of still being alive.”

Here’s an extract from another letter: “Only recently I was in a very big engagement, when bullets and shells were bursting around us every minute, and none of us knew when one would burst and blow us to pieces. That was the time when I turned to God and prayed for protection, and he has answered my prayers.”

And just one more: “Last night during my watching time I remembered what you told me about the Lord Jesus and sin and the mercy of God. I was feeling the wings of death flying over my head, and at that solemn moment I prayed for the first time in many years.”

Our first reading from Psalm 46 affirms the truth of human conflict. “Nations are in uproar” it says. But it goes on to affirm this great reality; “God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble.”

Those letters sent from the front lines are hard evidence of how true that is. This is not some academic lecture from an ivory tower. To have to leave your trench, go over the top, dash through no man’s land towards the enemy front line, with grenades going off all around you and deafening machine-gun fire taking men down on your left and your right - to do that and still be able to say “God is my strength, I can face without flinching the possibility that this may be my last day alive” - is a powerful testimony.

At the end of the Psalm it says, “Be still and know that I am God.”

The former head of the British Army, Lord Dannatt spoke two years ago about coming to saving faith on the field of combat as he himself did. "Many soldiers came to know that in the Somme in 1916" he said. "Others have come to know it today in southern Afghanistan. And I got to know it on 11th November 1977. That is the date of the anniversary of Armistice Day when… in 1918 the surrender of Germany to end the First World War was announced. A surrender is two things; it’s the end of the fighting and it’s the beginning of the peace. I found that day that if we surrender our lives to God’s will we can gain the peace and purpose in life that only trust in... Jesus Christ can give.”

As we make our bitter-sweet remembrance today, looking back with both sorrow and gratitude, let us also look forward and entrust our lives and our future to the God of peace who, as our Psalm says, makes wars cease to the ends of the earth.

As later this morning we stop and become quiet for two minutes, let us also be still and know deep in our soul that he is God. 

Sermon preached at All Saints' Preston on Tees, 9th November 2014