A sermon for Remembrance Sunday: Matthew 25.1-13

Matthew 25.1-13

 

“At that time the kingdom of heaven will be like ten virgins who took their lamps and went out to meet the bridegroom. Five of them were foolish and five were wise. The foolish ones took their lamps but did not take any oil with them. The wise ones, however, took oil in jars along with their lamps. The bridegroom was a long time in coming, and they all became drowsy and fell asleep. “At midnight the cry rang out: ‘Here’s the bridegroom! Come out to meet him!’ “Then all the virgins woke up and trimmed their lamps. The foolish ones said to the wise, ‘Give us some of your oil; our lamps are going out.’ “‘No,’ they replied, ‘there may not be enough for both us and you. Instead, go to those who sell oil and buy some for yourselves.’ “But while they were on their way to buy the oil, the bridegroom arrived. The virgins who were ready went in with him to the wedding banquet. And the door was shut.

“Later the others also came. ‘Lord, Lord,’ they said, ‘open the door for us!’ “But he replied, ‘Truly I tell you, I don’t know you.’ “Therefore keep watch, because you do not know the day or the hour.

When I was teaching, I had a poster on the inside of my office door: In it a somewhat nerdy-looking boy is trying to enter the Midvale School for the Gifted. He’s carrying a book under one arm and leaning with his other arm, with all his weight, against the door, straining, trying to push open the door. On the door there is a sign in great big letters that explains his problem. It reads, “PULL.” That’s us. We’re not too good at reading the signs. We anticipate one thing, whether we agree with it or not, and are surprised and/or confounded by the reality of the result. How many times have you heard recently from British or American friends, “That’s not what I thought I was voting for”?

Today’s Gospel passage is a well-known parable about the end times and it anticipates the return of Jesus with all its talk of preparedness or lack of it. The sort of language in today’s Gospel was never meant to foster speculation about when Jesus would return but Matthew is grappling here with the tradition of an imminent Second Coming. It is a warning not to attempt to read “the signs” because they mislead us. Every generation has done that to no avail but will we learn?

It was certainly the case that the people of Jesus’ time had an expectation of his quick return  but the key warning, of course, lies in the last verse of today’s passage, “Keep awake, therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour.” As this expectation of an imminent return began to wane, the Gospel writers developed instead a growing sense that discipleship would be played out over the long course of history and, of course, that includes us today and we need to continue in our discipleship: to walk the Christian walk and talk the Christian talk and not to seek to second-guess signs of the end times. The warning, “Keep awake, therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour.” is as much for us today as it was for Matthew’s audience.

In the Gospels the Spirit will guide the church during the time of Jesus’ absence but it is Jesus remembered and Jesus present by his Spirit, rather than Jesus expected, which began shape their communities as it should ours today.

What does it all mean for us today? How can we apply this passage? Can it speak to comfortable people like us today?

That assumes, of course, that we are still able to be totally comfortable when we look at the daily news – if we can get beyond our current governmental melt-down; ISIS and the ongoing fighting in Syria; another nasty little war in The Yemen; the festering ceasefire in Ukraine; Boko Harem in Nigeria; our continuing fear of home-grown terrorism and the rise in the West of Islamophobia not to mention thousands of refugees drowning in the Mediterranean and the ongoing refugee crisis; President Trump’s game of who’ll blink first with North Korea? Could events such as these be signs of the end times?

Every generation has had these thoughts: “Are we in the end times now?” people have wondered down the years as they confronted what they saw as the signs of their age. They were wrong.

We look back to such times this weekend in our acts of remembrance.

The services and ceremonies of this weekend draw human beings together in a way which is almost unique.  All over the country young and old gather to remember and reflect; each allowing some aspect of the reality of war to touch their soul. Some who gather will bring new or not so new memories of active service. Some will carry in their heart the memory of an especially loved one who made the ultimate sacrifice. Many will be stretching their imaginations to try to grasp what those people must be feeling. All will be praying that as time rolls forwards, human beings will find ways of resolving their differences which do not involve warfare.

I have no personal experience of armed conflict, nor were my parents old enough to serve in World War 2, although my father did serve as a Royal Marine in Malta, Cyprus and Egypt.  His father, my grandfather who I never knew, fought as a Sergeant-Major in the trenches in WW1 for the Yorks and Lancs Regiment, and I have his service medals including a Distinguished Conduct Medal: he died about fifteen years after the Armistice as a consequence of wounds he sustained during the fighting. He was shot from above in his right eye: the bullet exited through his left cheek, entered his shoulder and exited his rib-cage.

And Jesus said to them, When you hear of wars and insurrections, do not be terrified; for these things must take place first, but the end will not follow immediately. I doubt my grandfather had those words ringing in his ears, but the men of his generation who served in the trenches, and the men a generation later who liberated the concentration camps or witnessed the aftermath of the nuclear attack on Japan must have wondered, however fleetingly, whether they had witnessed the worst of humanity and what that meant for the future of our civilization, or even whether their experiences were part of the end of civilization in a world that has such capacity for destruction.

My father came to occasions like Armistice ceremonies out of a strong sense of duty, out of a sense of solidarity because he had been a member of an elite group of servicemen and that linked him for all time to those others who had served in whatever capacity.

Every year we would watch together the Service of Remembrance from the Royal Albert Hall and even as a young child I could sense the deep symbolic importance of the rain of poppy petals at the close of the service which I would watch with a sense of awe and of desolation which I couldn’t then fully understand or explain and which the passing of the years has never diminished, somehow as one untouched by conflict, entering into this powerful sense of communal loss. It’s that sense that’s still evoked by the poppy and I think back to the hundreds of thousands who travelled from all over the country and further afield a year or so back to stand for a moment in silence at the Tower of London and to look at the cascade of poppies that had been set there as a reminder of the enormity of the sacrifice of those who fought and died.

But in all his remembering my Father said very little. In fact he was almost entirely silent on the subject of his own military experience - as I learnt his father had been before him. Silence was the only language that could somehow do justice to the feeling, the memory, and the imagination.

So silence is the true language of remembrance: a silence that is calm and mutual; a silence that is the recognition that what matters is so much more than we can ever say, so much so that it seems most appropriate to honour that fact through reflection and remembering.

The silence of Armistice Day and the silence of Remembrance Sunday is this sort of silence. It is the recognition that in order to do justice to what has happened, to do justice to the cost of war – its sacrifice and its shame - we don’t need to tell another story or sing another song. Rather we need to be silent together. We need to recognise that sometimes the most important thing we can do is hold our tongues. You may have noticed that with veterans the important thing is often not the war stories they tell but the war stories they don’t tell: the memories that are unspeakable, the experiences which can’t or shouldn’t be told.

And we must remember, too, those who survived but whose lives have been shaped by their experiences: the wounded in body, mind or spirit. Those of us who have not served can never fully appreciate the power of sound or smell to trigger dark and difficult memories. I have heard that some who served in the Falklands are transported back there in an instant simply through the cold smell of the sea and while many of us celebrate the fun of fireworks night, others who served in Northern Ireland, Iraq and Afghanistan are left trembling and vulnerable because those noises evoke much less happy times. It must have seemed like the end times to them at that moment of their military experience. So we also remember today those who live with post-traumatic stress disorders which can be triggered by things that for the rest of us are simply a normal part of daily life.

Memory and silence, the senses of smell and hearing: we mustn’t forget these basic human experiences and the effect they have on each of us in different ways at this time: a time of fellowship, solidarity and empathy which makes us want not only peace and prosperity for ourselves, but makes us strive for the peace that passes all understanding for all the peoples of the earth, which is why we’re so deeply moved by the images that come to us from Aleppo and other Syrian and Yemeni cities. That’s a mark of our shared humanity and our understanding that in modern warfare, it is the innocent who are increasingly the victims.

But we know too that the power of remembrance is that while it connects us with sadness, it also inspires us in hope and it is a terrifyingly ambitious hope because we know that in our search for it there will be many more sadnesses and tragedies, many more sacrifices, many more broken hearts, bodies and minds, more fear that we are living in the end times.

We remember, not to allow the past to capture us in its worst moments, but to build us up for the future.  We remember not only to honour the fallen and the wounded, but to raise them in our hearts and to promise to live lives worthy of their sacrifice.

It is our duty today to ensure that those who, in the cause of peace, have given, and continue to give of their life, their health, their youth, are honoured and remembered. But in our remembering we must also vow to give of ourselves for the good of humanity, especially for the generations yet to come who will themselves one day stand in silent remembrance and live in hope for the future rather than in fear that the world is ending.

Our role is to continue to walk the walk and talk the talk of the Christian life through the good times and the dreadful times: to live out the Gospel in word and deed; to be, in the words of last week’s Gospel, the Peacemakers, who Jesus said were blessed and to pay no heed to what others see as the signs of the end times, remembering Jesus’ words in Matthew, “keep watch, because you do not know the day or the hour”.