Sermon for Remembrance Sunday 2024
Preached by the Revd Dr Trevor Jamison at
Saint Columba’s United Reformed Church, 10 November 2024
Isaiah 52: 7-12; Romans 8: 31-39
Unfortunately for technical reasons, it was not possible to livestream this service
I once worked with a woman who sized up men as potential boyfriends, or even future life partners, not on the basis whether they had a pretty face, or according to their height or muscles, but on the size of their feet. She was very partial to neat pair of feet! If you had shoes the size of boats you were crossed off her list, no matter what other pleasing physical attributes you displayed.
Different things appeal to different folks and there’s no accounting for it, but I think making someone’s shoe size the first item on your list is probably pretty unusual. Perhaps my colleague would have warmed to the prophet Isaiah, probably not for his own feet (about which we know nothing), but for what he had to say about someone else’s feet: ‘How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of the messenger who announces peace, who brings good news, who announces salvation, who says to Zion, “your God reigns”.’ (52:7)
To be fair to Isaiah, and to the disappointment of my former colleague, it’s not the messenger’s feet as such which makes them seem beautiful. Rather, it’s the message that is brought to the people by the feet of one who brings such positive news; news of peace and salvation.
Peace and salvation! There’s a combination for which many people yearn in today’s world, just as they did in Isaiah’s world two and a half thousand years ago. Back then, Jewish people hoped for salvation from their exile in Babylon. They had lost a war against this much bigger power and the victors had carried off many of the vanquished, far, far away from their homes in Judah, in Jerusalem. How might the defeated ever know freedom without fighting yet another war, one which they had no hope of winning?
Now, however, Isaiah declared, God was at work. The message was that the people were going home; they had been saved. People who by the rivers of Babylon had laid down and wept when they remembered Zion (Psalm 137, possibly familiar to us via Boney M) were now invited to sing songs of rejoicing instead. They were going home, and no further fighting was required: ‘Depart, depart! … You shall not go out in haste, and you shall not go out in flight, for the LORD will go before you, and God of Israel will be your rearguard.’ (52:12)
Today, people in what we call the Middle East also yearn for peace and freedom. Israelis, members of the modern secular state which shares both a name and an ethnic connection with a little kingdom from millennia ago, are yearning for peace and freedom from murderous cross-border incursions, rockets and missiles. Palestinians and Lebanese also yearn for peace and freedom from longstanding oppressive Israeli control over their lives, and deadly retaliations to an attack which happened just over a year ago which have long ago lost any touch with the ancient ethical limitation of taking only and eye for an eye.
And closer to home, here in the UK, as we remember the cost of past wars, today, conflict grinds to our East, with the recent Presidential election result in the USA looking like better news for Russia and for the Ukraine. Are we going to be saved from war proliferating across, and outside of the Middle East? Will European conflict spread West in our direction, or will we be sucked more and more into military struggle in Eastern Europe? In situations such as these today is there a credible message of peace and salvation to offer people, just as one was proclaimed in the time of Isaiah?
I suppose the answer to that is that maybe there is and maybe there isn’t. We can pray for peace. We can argue for peace. We can do so on a wider political level, or within communities and families, and in our personal relationships. We can strive to offer peace to and model it for others. Of course, if praying for something – like peace – simply made it so, the world would be a very different place today, but be careful what you pray for.
Think of how the Apostle Paul’s words – ‘If God is for us, who can be against us’ (8:31) – has been used (misused) as justification to pray one’s own side in time of war, even whilst one’s fellow believers are praying equally fervently against you, and for their side in the same conflict. Many of the faces we have seen on screen, and whose names we have remembered this morning, after all, died in a war fought between nations most of who proclaimed themselves to be “Christian.”
That’s not to say that there is no place for a Christian witness for peace, whether through prayer, example, or other activity, or to suggest it’s all a heroic but hopeless endeavour. At the very least God will use our prayers for peace to attune us to being more peaceful. Continuing to make the argument for peace in public settings, which needs to include a component of justice if it’s to be the real thing, helps to set the boundaries for discussing what is possible and what’s desirable.
Acts of remembrance, such as we undertake today, as long as they are not used as opportunities for national glorification, are a yearly reminder which confronts people with the cost of conflict. Taken together, appropriate arguments and actions do constitute a credible message of peace and salvation which have an impact in the world we inhabit today, and where we remember the conflicts of yesterday.
That said, none of this has put an end to war so far, and it’s difficult to envisage that coming about before the time when God brings all conflict to an end and puts to death death itself. (Revelation 21:1-6) So a significant part of Christian life and witness today, and for the foreseeable future, involves finding good reason not despair (despite the many temptations to do so!), and to live with hope. And that’s where the Apostle Paul’s words carry such weight.
Paul was writing to Christian congregations in Rome almost two thousand years ago, but his words still have currency today. Just prior to the part of his letter that we heard read to us this morning he was writing about the relationship between God, us, and the rest of creation. He was commending prayer to God, even when we can’t find the words. He was declaring that God has plans for our future and our fate in the present. And that brings us to his opening line today: ‘What then are we to say to these things? If God is for us, who is against us.’ (8:31)
Now Paul is realistic about the downside of human life. He lists some of the things that might be seen as coming between us and living the good life in the presence and company of God: hardship, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril, and the sword. (8:35) When I look through that list of negative experiences which people suffer I’m struck by how many arise in situations of warfare – hardship, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril, and the sword. Peoples who lived in the shadow of the Roman Empire in Paul’s time were well acquainted with such experiences, just as so many have been since and are today.
Paul’s contention, though, is that despite appearances, ‘we [Christian believers] are more than conquerors through him [i.e. God] who loved us.’ (8:37) And the way God loved us, says Paul, is through God’s Son, Christ Jesus: ‘For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything in all creation will be able to separate from the love of God in Christ Jesus.’ (8:38)
Note on Paul’s list on the list of those things which cannot separate us from God’s love, the inclusion of ‘rulers’ and ‘powers’, those entities which begin and prosecute wars. Note also that even ‘death’ – which wars bring in abundance – will not succeed in separating people from the love of God in Christ Jesus.
Looking at the wars that rage around the world today – and I have only named two among many of them in this sermon – and contemplating in remembrance wars that this nation has fought in the past, and at great human and material cost, what might a plausible prophetic, Christian message of peace and salvation look like? As Paul would put it, ‘what then shall we say about these things?’ (8:31)
Well, three things. First, we proclaim that God is working towards peace and our salvation, and has acted decisively to do so through the life and teaching, the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, who declared that we were abstain from retribution even when injured by another, and to love not only our neighbours but also our enemies. (Matthew 5:38-48) And furthermore, that what Jesus taught he practised in his life and his death, whose power and significance God affirmed through his resurrection.
Second, since Jesus not only talked peace and salvation, but lived it out in his life, we also need to move beyond right thoughts and good words. We need to practise and demonstrate peaceful living and its benefits in our church, our community, our family, neighbourly and personal settings. When did you last turn the other cheek when injured by another?
And third, we need to have hope, even when our best thoughts, prayers, words and actions do not lead to a lasting peace in our own settings and in the world at large. If nothing else we will have been changed by making the effort. Also, our efforts should be seen as a small part in God’s greater plan for that assured future where all of those things which we fear might separate us from the love of God are themselves swept away.
For nothing ‘will be able to separate us [or those who have gone before us, including those who have been taken from us in time of war] from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.’ (8:38) They and we know, or will know, God’s peace and our salvation. Amen.