Today, as I’m sure you all know, is Remembrance Sunday. It’s the day we set aside each year to remember those who’ve died in defence of this country in times of war, and to give thanks for their sacrifice. And it’s right that we should do that. If it weren’t for their sacrifice, who knows what kind of place our nation would be today? If it wasn’t for their sacrifice, we might live under a dictatorship, in a police state in which there was no real freedom of speech, expression or action. We might live in a nation in which our ethnicity, faith, political opinion or even our physical characteristics were, quite literally, a matter of life and death. It’s from becoming this kind of nation, and to try to free other nations from this kind of existence, that our servicemen and women have laid down their lives in war, and so we should be thankful to them and remember them. But as we remember those who’ve laid down their lives in time of war on this Remembrance Sunday, today is perhaps also a day to wonder just how many more lives will need to be lost in the future, until human beings finally learn their lesson and make war a thing we can only know about and learn about from the pages of history books.
There is a saying, which I’m sure many of you will have heard, which goes, ‘The first lesson of history, is that people never learn the lessons of history’. And, as we read and watch the news, and see the state of the world we live in today, isn’t the truth of that saying clear to see? As we hear about China flexing her muscles in the South China Sea and South East Asia, in direct opposition to the USA, aren’t we reminded of the situation in the 1930s and 40s when another far eastern power, Japan, acted in a similar way? As we hear about China making land-grabs in surrounding countries, in India and Nepal, aren’t we reminded of the way Nazi Germany acted in Europe in the 1930s?
And I don’t know about you, but as I’ve been reading about and watching events in the USA in recent times, I’ve sometimes wondered if I’ve been reading and watching a programme about the USA in the early 21st Century, or a documentary about Germany in the 1930s. When we read and hear about armed militias wandering the streets, often with at least the tacit approval of the head of state, doesn’t that remind us of the SA, the Nazi Stormtroopers in 1930s Germany? When we hear a head of state calling for journalists who criticise him to be sacked, and publications and broadcasters who criticise him to be closed down, doesn’t that remind us of the Nazi censorship and suppression of the free press? When we hear a head of state who openly demonises those who oppose him politically, and speaks of an Afro-American/left-wing conspiracy against not just him, but the nation itself, doesn’t that remind us of what the Nazis called the Jewish/Bolshevik conspiracy against Germany and the German people? And when we see a democratically elected head of state, using his power of office to try to interfere with free elections and subvert the very democratic process by which he was elected, and his politically party colluding in their leader’s nefarious activity, aren’t we reminded that this is exactly what Adolf Hitler and the Nazis did in Germany in the 1930s? It’s looking increasingly likely that these shenanigans will not affect the result of the US presidential election, and that a new head of state will be elected. Nevertheless, as things stand at the moment, the person responsible for all this has won about 48% of the popular vote; well over 70 million people have still voted for him. And so it really does seem that people never learn the lessons of history.
In one sense that’s perhaps more difficult to understand now than it was in the past because, through the internet, people today have a vast amount of information, quite literally, at their fingertips. And so people today ought to be much better informed than they ever have been in the past. That means that there’s no real excuse for not being aware of the lessons of history and people can’t really claim ignorance of what’s happened in the past as an excuse for repeating the mistakes of history. And whilst knowing more doesn’t make us more intelligent than people were in the past, it doesn’t make us any less intelligent either. So, on the whole, people today are much better informed than those who lived in bygone days were, and there’s no reason that people today should be less intelligent than people in bygone days were. So why do people continually repeat the same mistakes? Why do they never learn the lessons of history? Why can we not stop doing the things that lead to war so that we can draw a line under war, and the names on our war memorials once and for all? The answer perhaps, is that people lack what the Scriptures call ‘wisdom’.
We hear something about wisdom in our readings this morning and the parable of the wise and foolish bridesmaids that we read in the Gospel, tell us something about what the Scriptures mean by ‘wisdom’. There’s no suggestion in the parable that the foolish bridesmaids didn’t know what to do when they went to meet the groom because they took their lamps with them, and they had oil in their lamps. So they weren’t lacking in knowledge. But they didn’t think about what would happen if the groom was delayed. The wise bridesmaids, on the other hand, did think about what to do in that situation. So the foolish bridesmaids weren’t foolish because they didn’t know what to do, but because they didn’t do the right thing. The wise bridesmaids had no more knowledge than the others, they were wise simply because they did the right thing. So scriptural wisdom isn’t really about intelligence, it’s not a measure of how much we know or how clever we are. Scriptural wisdom is a quality rather than a measure. It’s a quality of knowing the right thing to do.
The Scriptures tell us that the beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord, and by that they mean reverence for God and his ways. So the person who has wisdom and shows wisdom is the one who knows and does the Godly thing in any given situation. For us, in the Church, we could say that wisdom is about knowing what the Christian thing to do in any situation is and doing it. And, of course, Christ told us that the two most important of God’s ways, are to love God with all our hearts and souls and minds, and to love our neighbour as ourselves. Knowing these things and doing them leads to wisdom, and the Scriptures tell us that wisdom itself leads to justice, mercy, love and peace. How very different that is to the ways that human beings have usually taken throughout history. Rather than the way of wisdom, people, very often thinking that they know better than anyone else, have followed the way of pride and selfishness that’s so often led to injustice, hatred, vengeance and conflict. How much happier, safer and more peaceful a place could the world have been, and might be, if only people had a little less pride in their own importance and intelligence, less arrogance about their own ideas and opinions, and a little more humility and wisdom.
But sadly, it seems that, rather than ‘wise up’ as the saying goes, people prefer to follow their own ways and repeat the mistakes of the past over and over and over again. And so, over the years, the members of our armed forces have been called upon time and again to take up arms, to fight, to suffer and to die in defence of their freedom and ours, their homes and ours, and their loved ones and ours. And as they’ve done so, the list of names on our war memorials has continued to grow ever longer as more and more members of our armed forces have been called upon to make that ultimate sacrifice and pay the ultimate price for the world’s lack of wisdom and humanity’s failure to learn its lesson.
Two years ago, in 2018, we marked the 100th anniversary of the end of the First World War, a war that was so unlike any war that had ever happened before, and goodness knows there had been more than enough of them, but a war so much more terrible in its scale and in the death and destruction it caused, that it became known as the Great War. At one time it was thought that it would be the war to end all wars because surely, after such a war as that, no one would ever want to go to war again. Sadly, we now know that wasn’t the case. The First World War was merely the precursor to an even more bloody, and destructive, Second World War which ended 75 years ago, this year.
The Great War has now passed from living memory and in the not too distant future, the Second World War will too. But let’s hope and pray that the sacrifice of those who fought and suffered and died in those, and so many other wars, will never pass from our collective memory. Let’s hope and pray that their sacrifice will always be remembered and that through that, the people of the world may finally learn their lesson and become just a little bit wiser. Perhaps then we could pay the greatest tribute possible to those who gave so much in time of war and say that it was through them and their sacrifice, that the world finally learned enough wisdom to do things differently. Perhaps then, the peace they fought and suffered and died for could finally, and lastingly, be ours and we could draw a line under the very last name that we would ever have to carve on our war memorials.
Amen.
You will find the Propers for the 32nd Sunday of Ordinary Time (3 before Advent) here.
Parish Church of St Mark Chadderton 