Sermon at the Sung Eucharist on the Third Sunday before Advent 2017

God says of the cities of Judah, ‘They shall be rebuilt, and I will raise up their ruins.’

By November 1918 the ribbon of land which formed the Western Front was utterly devastated.  Four years of trench warfare over, perhaps, a 50 mile wide strip snaking through Europe for 750 miles had left a quagmire of mud, corpses, shell holes, dugouts and pillboxes crisscrossing the German, French and Belgian borders.  In hollows and valleys where the November mists lingered, the air stank of rotting flesh and high explosives, here and there mingled with the faint whiff of gas. One hundred years on, it is still shocking to see dog-eared photographs of pitted battlefields and war-weary soldiers. This ‘war to end all wars’ cost Europe, the world even, far more dear than we dare to acknowledge, even today.

The pleasant farmland around the Flemish city of Ypres – Wipers to the British soldiers who fought there – was an early casualty of the war.  By the time the first gas attack was launched to the northeast of Ypres during the 1915 campaign, most of the farmers in the surrounding countryside had fled their farms. Few civilians were left in the city. From a bustling prosperous market town, it was now a dangerous staging post for troops and medical personnel passing through to man the trenches of the Ypres salient to the east. As the war progressed, the city’s buildings were gradually battered into the ground by continuous shelling, until by November 1918, only one jagged part of the wall of the medieval Guildhall remained standing, standing like a solitary tooth in a bleeding gum.

But go to Ypres today, and you will find the town completely rebuilt; the ruins were literally ‘raised up’ by the mid-1930s. Where there was devastation, there is now what looks for like a charming medieval city complete with medieval buildings, and a twentieth century road system. And the land beyond the city gates looks as peaceful and untouched as it did in July 1914. Farmsteads have been rebuilt, and cows graze in tranquil fields now dotted with mobile phone masts and telegraph poles. 

Some years ago I was shown around the ridges and battlefields of Ypres by a local Flemish man, named Lode. For generations Lode’s family had been farmers in the area around Ypres; they experienced the terror of having to leave their land and their livelihood as war broke out around them in 1914. And when they returned after the war, they had to help with the rebuilding of the city and the restoration of the farmland. Lode’s own grandfather fought with the tiny Belgian army during the Great War, and somehow survived the hell of the trenches.  And now Lode lives his life in order to remember – to remember his family and his land and the continuing effects of war upon them. 

When Lode is not showing visitors around the craters and cemeteries of the Messines ridge and Passchendaele he is a member of the ‘Diggers’, a group of local people who are supervised by professional archaeologists as they dig for artefacts and other evidence of the great war in the fields around Ypres.  Almost a century after the end of the war, there are still about 200 metric tonnes of shells, gas canisters and ammunition found or ploughed up by the Diggers and local farmers in the fields around Ypres. Every year 3 or 4 local people on average are killed or maimed by ordinance that comes to the surface of the fields and explodes. Nearby there’s a factory specially built to deal with the unexploded gas bombs which are still being found. The canisters mostly contain jars of mustard gas set within unstable high explosive and packed into shells. These gas bombs were lobbed by the British at the Germans quite as much as the Germans lobbed them at the British.  But today it is the Belgians who are paying the price of this indiscriminate shelling. It’s going to take the specially built factory another 50 years simply to disarm the canisters it already has in store – let alone the new ones which remain to be found. On average, every square yard of ground in the ten square miles or so of the Ypres Salient was hit by three shells per day on every day of the war between August 1914 and November 1918.

The brunt of that shelling was, of course, borne by the troops in the trenches. But the bitter harvest of that shelling is still being reaped today. 

What motivates Lode to retell the story of his grandfather and the troops who fought near Ypres, and to dig to uncover the remains of the war? Lode has discovered just why the act of remembering is so important to us all, just as the prophet Isaiah did some two and a half thousand years ago.

Isaiah was speaking to a people who knew what it was to have to flee a city which had been razed to the ground by foreign troops.  Jerusalem had been torched by the Babylonian army, and her leading citizens had been carted off 400 miles across the desert into exile.  For the Israelites, this invasion and exile was the end of all life as they knew it.  Their nation was no more.  Their God seemed to have deserted them.  They could see no future worth living for. 

But to a people who despaired of any future at all, the words of the prophet Isaiah came like the shock of icy water thrown over them:  ‘Remember these things, O Jacob; O Israel, you will not be forgotten by me’, says the Lord.  Remember, do not forget.  Remember what has happened to you; remember your exile and the destruction of Jerusalem; remember them truthfully.  Remember why you have suffered like this.  Remember what has caused your pain and desolation.  But above all, remember me, your God – remember that I am your creator, remember that I hold your future in my hands, remember that that I am a God who keeps his promises, who will not break faith with his people.  Remember, my people, remember me in order that you may learn to hope once again, and that you may live.

Remember. That’s what Lode’s family did whilst they lived in exile from their farm during the Great War.  And in their remembering they looked forward; and because of their remembering they and their neighbours had the strength and determination to return to the shattered remnants of their farms, and to rebuild them again after the war. They remembered in order that they might live.

We remember too. We remember with gratitude and sorrow the huge sacrifice made by millions of soldiers and civilians during the wars of the twentieth and, sadly, the twenty-first centuries, in order that we might live.  We keep our silences, we bow our heads at the Last Post, we remember with all due solemnity.

But what do we remember for?  It is right and proper to look to give thanks for the bravery and suffering of those who have died or been injured on our behalf; to be being moved by the heartrending sight of thousands of red poppies dropping into the arena of the Albert Hall; to salute the veterans as they march past the Cenotaph. 

But can we also hear the words of the prophet Isaiah this morning, and act on them?  Remember, remember in order to set your priorities straight.  Remember all war and suffering, all exile and hopelessness, and remember that it is our God holds all these things in his hands.  Remember for a reason.  Remember that, with God’s help, we can work for a different world; remember in order that others can live.  Remember - in order to hope and work truthfully for our future.

The reality and truth of any war and its long aftermath are often bitter to the heart, and leave deep scars in our human consciousness.  We do well to remember truthfully: not to be romantic or jingoistic, but to be humble and penitent for the very mixed motives which lead to conflict.  And then to be open to the new work to which God always calls us in Christ. 

Remember …. remember, in order that others may live.