REMEMBRANCE SUNDAY 2015
Preached in Exeter Cathedral
The Right Reverend Robert Atwell, Bishop of Exeter
If, like me, you are an admirer of the art of Stanley Spencer then at some stage you may have made the pilgrimage to Cookham in Berkshire where he worked for much of his life. His studio is now a gallery-come-museum where you can discover the inspiration for much of his painting.
What I had never visited until this August was the Sandham Memorial Chapel in Hampshire. Now maintained by the National Trust, the chapel was built by the Sandham family as a memorial to their son, Lieutenant Harry Sandham, who was killed in action in the First World War.
The family commissioned Stanley Spencer to paint a series of murals to decorate the chapel’s interior. Like some Home Counties version of the Sistine Chapel or Giotto’s Chapel in Padua, the murals are monumental, though on a much more domestic scale than their Italian counterparts.
I find the murals incredibly moving, in part because Spencer chose to depict not the carnage of war, but scenes such as soldiers drinking tea and frying rashers of bacon outside their tents. Spencer had a gift for infusing the mundane with spiritualty.
In the First World War Spencer had served in the Royal Army Medical Corps. Far from being a soft option, it exposed him to the futility of war, carrying mutilated soldiers through the trenches to make-shift field hospitals, assisting at operations while gangrenous limbs were amputated by exhausted surgeons.
One of his murals depicts the interior of Beaufort mental asylum in Bristol, complete with soulless corridors and paint peeling off the walls, which in 1915 had been hurriedly converted into a military hospital and where he worked with soldiers suffering from shell-shock.
Unusually, Spencer also paints scenes from the Balkans where he was posted in 1916. He paints a soldier nursing his frost-bitten feet while in the background, like some parade of ghosts, starving local people look on bewildered. It is easy to forget that in 1919, weakened and exhausted by the war, even more people died of the ‘flu than had been killed in battle.
Spencer’s murals remind us of what happens on the fringes of war in terms of the destruction of families and communities.
So too in our commemoration today, as we remember with thanksgiving the courage and sacrifice of those who died in two World Wars and in more recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is also important that we remember the co-lateral damage that war causes, if I might use that term.
For example, in 1919 with the collapse of both the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires, a tide of refugees flooded Europe. It happened again in 1945 with the Russian occupation of Eastern Europe.
War is never tidy and once again we are witnessing the devastating effects of conflicts in distant places we cannot control, with streams of refugees fleeing oppression and violence. 'You will hear of wars and rumours of wars,' says Jesus (Matthew 24.6). We do indeed.
In the myth of human progress it is easy to indulge the fantasy that things are getting better and better. We like to think that we are set full-square on the escalator of scientific, economic and intellectual progress. In part, the picture is true. The trouble is not everyone in the world shares equitably in the benefits such progress generates and it is a source of grievance and a stimulus to economic migration.
Which is why Remembrance Sunday is important. It disturbs our complacency. It confronts us with the unpalatable fact that our moral and spiritual maturity does not match our scientific achievements.
It is a frequent cry of atheists that religion is the cause of more wars than anything else. Violence is undoubtedly a fault-line through humanity and no religion has been free of it.
One of the scandals of the Church is that so many persecutions have taken place in the name of Jesus Christ. It’s not many years ago that there were photographs of bishops blessing tanks.
But to assert that religion is the source of all the violence in the world is ludicrous.
In the twentieth century secular dictators and their atheistic ideologies caused the death of more human beings than in the whole history of humankind. It is estimated that between them, Stalin and Hitler accounted for the death of between 58 and 59 million people, and Mao Tse Tung a further tens of millions.
Historians estimate that during the last century wars killed between 167 and 188 million people. The twentieth century may go down in history not as the era of scientific progress, but as the era of wars.
In the teaching of the Bible, war and violence are not part of God's design, but are products of our dysfunction as human beings. It is no coincidence that in the Book of Genesis, hard on the heels of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, comes the murder of Abel by his brother Cain.
The lesson on page three of the Bible, as it were, is that jealousy and violence breed in the human heart and can poison even what should be the most nurturing of all human environments; namely, the family.
It is out of the human heart, says Jesus, that thoughts of murder, violence, greed and jealousy flow. It is why he says that what is important is ‘purity of heart’. Only the ‘pure in heart will see God’.
So let this spiritual commentary on our human relating inform our act of remembrance today.
We remember with thanksgiving the courage and sacrifice of so many men and women, both known and unknown, in whose debt we will forever stand. We pray for members of our armed forces, particularly those from this county who are currently working to maintain our freedom.
We remember those who have lost limbs or who have been maimed in war and pray for them as they try to rebuild their lives. And we remember too the unforeseen consequences that war causes and the tide of human desperation that comes in its wake.
On Remembrance Sunday we remember lest we forget the lessons that history is eager to teach us. We remember not to nurse grudges but in order that the seeds of forgiveness may germinate because in the end only forgiveness will heal our fractured world. So today let us pray for grace to forgive and be forgiven. So may God give each of us purity of heart.
+ Robert Exon