Remembrance Day Sermon

Why Remembrance Day? Why go on commemorating? Even if it is now reckoned to be a commemoration of all the wars of the 20th century - and maybe the 21st as well - why remember? Isn’t it better to forgive and forget? Forgive, certainly. But in this case, on Remembrance Day, what we must do is remember and forgive. Remember how things really were, and are.

It seems to me that Scotland - and who knows, maybe other small nations - has a particular attitude to war and conflicts.

A nation that can use ‘Flower of Scotland’ as its national anthem, even if only at sporting events, will see such things quite differently from one that uses ‘God Save The Queen’ (“O Lord our God arise, scatter her enemies And make them fall; Confound their politics, Frustrate their knavish tricks”) or the Marseillaise (“May their impure blood fill our furrows”)!

There has been some discussion about Scotland’s ‘national anthem’. I believe the main candidate for replacing ‘Flower of Scotland’ is ‘Scots wha hae’, and some have even suggested ‘Flowers of the Forest’. Oh dear!

In case any of you do not know these songs, what they have in common is that they commemorate occasions when the Scots fought bravely (and in the last case hopelessly) against a stronger, more numerous, invading foe. And, after all, even that victory against “proud Edward” was hardly definitive. You could add the ‘Skye Boat Song’ to the collection, and the appalling ‘Braveheart’.

Scotland, then, can hold herself absolved when remembering wars, can’t she?

Well, no, I think not. Charles Edward - underdog though he was - led an invading army, whatever the rights and wrongs of the situation, and Scots have always made up a large part - a disproportionately large part for the size of the country - of the great British army.

So, on Remembrance Day, we have to interrogate ourselves with the rest. Our fighting has not all been in self-defence. We have not always been outnumbered. We are not immune to the self-delusion that another small nation - Israel - seems to have fallen into.

In Habakkuk’s day, for much of Biblical times and in that war which - had President Wilson been right - should never have happened, Israel, the children of Israel, the Jewish nation, were indeed the small, oppressed, invaded and persecuted ones. The victims, the ones who could never act but only react against the aggression of others.

Like Scotland? Maybe. But this sense of victimhood, this sense of powerlessness, and the belief that attack is the best method of defence, has stayed with Israel to this day, to the extent that it cannot see that it has in turn become the aggressor and the oppressor.

And worst of all, there is the belief - maybe largely rhetorical now, but expressed nonetheless - that Israel has a right to do all this because she is fighting for land given her in perpetuity by God.

But of course the Palestinians also believe that they themselves, as the attacked and oppressed, have God on their side.

And in the Second World War, the Allies thought God was on their side. So did the Axis. So does the United States now. And so, with absolute conviction, does Osama bin Laden.

They are all wrong, but potentially they are all right: they are all children of God. Habakkuk came very close to understanding what so few of us who believe in God understand: if God is Adonai Sabaoth, the Lord of Hosts, those hosts are not human armies. God does not take part in human warfare, or, at least, not as a combatant. In human warfare God is, if not a conscientious objector, a member of the Ambulance Corps.

It seems at first in today’s reading as if Habakkuk cannot solve the conundrum that we all battle with: “How long shall I cry for help and thou wilt not save?” “Is he to keep on mercilessly slaying nations for ever?” But, like Job, he refuses either to despair or to fabricate an answer out of his own head. Like the author of the Book of Job he acknowledges God’s infinite power by recalling his past acts (as it happens, Habakkuk was probably wrong about God’s part in these events, but that isn’t the point) and expresses absolute faith for the future, even if there is, in fact, no visible salvation of the sort he was hoping for.

God’s greatness, God’s love, is not to be gauged by our good fortune in this life, as if he belonged to some people and not to others, as if he were the creator of some and not others.

God is not with us when we kill. Maybe he can tolerate a just war, if there is such a thing, or pure defence of self or others. I don’t know about that. But I do know that striving for peace and reconciliation always means God is “on our side” (or, better, we are on God’s side) - which does not mean that we will necessarily have success, humanly speaking. In this world we have tribulation, but he has overcome the world.

We are not different. Not because we are a small nation. Not because Christians are somehow specially God’s people and are free to dispose of those who are not. Or if we are specially God’s people, our great calling and duty is to work for the unity he prayed for, and which he will never force us into.

And Scotland’s national anthem? There really is no contest, especially in the present state of the world. If you do not know Hamish Henderson’s ‘Freedom Come-All-Ye’ I suggest you find a copy. But for the moment I will just quote you the verse that is central both in position and in significance. This is why we remember the past. Lest we forget what we have done, what we have all done, Israel, Assyria, Scotland, Germany, America, Iraq - all of us. We have marched to war, we have destroyed lives and families, we have all been caught up in the whirl of combat and propaganda and have claimed we were only obeying orders.

The instinct - yes - is to try to forget about it, but that is the last thing we should do. We must remember, remember we have all done it, and build on that remembrance a determination that it shall never happen again. Remember, but not remember and despair; remember and forgive; remember and hope.

Nae mair will our bonnie callants
Merch tae war when oor braggarts crousely craw
Nor wee wains frae pitheid an clachan
Mourn the ships sailin doun the Broomielaw
Broken faimlies in lands we've hairriet
Will curse 'Scotlan the Brave' nae mair, nae mair
Black an white ane-til-ither mairriet
Mak the vile barracks o thair maisters bare.