Too Young to Die

A century ago, the Great War still had another year to cut short the lives of Europe’s young. More than 900 Balliol men saw active service. Nearly 200 died, another 200 were wounded. Most served as infantry officers. Their life-expectancy on the Western Front was about six weeks. It’s sobering to go through the Balliol College War Memorial Book online, take in the photographs and read the tributes. I searched for one who could represent the others, someone who died one hundred years ago this month. Edward William Horner was a well-liked member of the college who read Greats and was distinguished as a rower. He was called to the bar but when war broke out he joined the Hussars and went to France. He was injured in 1915 and assumed his war was over. But he recovered and insisted on re-joining his regiment. He died in November 1917 of wounds received in the 1^st Battle of Cambrai. He was 29. His tribute speaks about his playfulness and wit, his gift for friendship, his fearlessness, his love of argument. And this: “at times he could be exasperating, but he also had, to a marked degree one of the major virtues of a friend – an infinite capacity for being forgiven”. He is commemorated outside this chapel, and, with all the others, in this high altar that was given as a war memorial in 1927. On this Remembrance Sunday we honour them.

I said I looked at these winsome young faces in the memorial book, but the truth is that I had the unnerving feeling that they were gazing at me. It’s as if they saw in me their peer, someone like them who had come up to Balliol full of hopes and expectations, but who, unlike them, had been allowed to live on, take up my life’s work, marry, have children and grandchildren, retire and grow old able to look back on a rewarding lifetime. When you love life, when you can hardly bear the thought that one day you won’t be here any longer, the loss of these young lives is unutterably poignant. 

Our New Testament reading was about another young man. He too was privileged. He too had a lot to lose: wealth, power and standing. And that little aside where the story says that Jesus, looking at him, loved him, suggests he also had a gift of winsomeness, the capacity to attract people, draw out their affection. He too came to a crisis where he saw the paths diverging in front of him and knew that the road less travelled was the one that beckoned. That road would require him to lay down his life in dying to himself and all that he craved the most. But his riches were too much for the kingdom of God. To set out on that narrower way and find treasure in heaven was too demanding. You sense that Jesus is heartbroken. “How hard it is to have wealth and yet enter the kingdom of God!” 

We mustn’t elide the young man in the gospels with the young who fell in war. Laying down your life for your country is not the same as finding the kingdom of God. And yet… consciously or not, obedience to the call of duty and service echoes the summons of God’s kingdom to give ourselves gladly and willingly in the cause of what is right and good. That is not to ennoble war or impute heroic motives and ideals to those we commemorate today. They did not choose this. They were too young to die. Their deaths were wrong. But it is to say that the ordeals war inflicted on them did bring out the best and the noblest human nature is capable of, like laying down your life for your friends as Jesus said. 

Perhaps the young man in the gospel can help us to think about how we honour our war dead today. I don’t mean simply remember them, though the importance of collective memory can’t be overstated. But honouring means something more. It means recognising our debt to the dead, and unlocking the power of memory to change our lives, the lives we might not, would not have had but for them. Their deaths need to make a difference to us, make us better people, re-orientate our goals for living and reawaken our resolve to heal our broken world.

Here in Balliol chapel every day throughout the Great War, a prayer was said, written by the Master himself. We give thee thanks for the members of this college who have willingly offered themselves and have laid down their lives for us, for our country and for the liberty of the world. Give us grace to follow their good example, that we may never lose heart but may bear with patience and courage, as these have done, whatever thy providence calls upon us to endure. Comfort the bereaved, and grant to all of us that our afflictions may purify our hearts and minds to thy glory . This is a good prayer. It takes seriously the sense of loss. It doesn’t invest war with a glory it doesn’t deserve. It sets the service of the war dead within the widest possible horizons, not just for us and for our country but for the liberty of the world – the kind of enlightened, liberal, global thinking you would expect from Balliol. It asks that we don’t lose heart but allow adversity to show us a way of living more purposefully with patience and courage. 

Perhaps it was something like this that eluded that rich young man who, faced with the choice of his life, could not rise to the challenge. I often wonder what happened to him after that encounter with Jesus when he went away grieving. Was his sorrow for a moment or a lifetime? Did a sadder and a wiser man come back years later to choose the more excellent way? 

Remembrance Sunday says to us: never forget those who, by contrast, said yes when the summons came. Those young faces in the college memorial book hold our gaze and appeal to us to do in our time what they did in theirs. That is, give ourselves to mending a world that continues to be ambushed by war and the threat of it, do what we can to champion peace, truth, justice and reconciliation, and not least, say our prayers and ask God to have mercy on the whole human family. And begin where we already have influence, in our communities, localities, relationships, wherever God has placed us. Who knows where small things can lead? You might call it “remembering forward”, allowing Remembrance to make a difference to the future we are creating for our planet. This is how to keep hope alive, and save ourselves from being like that rich young man who glimpsed another country “whose ways are ways of pleasantness and all her paths are peace”; yet turned aside from the vision and went away in sorrow. 

Balliol College Oxford, Remembrance Sunday 2017
(Proverbs 3.1-18, Mark 10.17-31)

Poppies

Some of you will have travelled through Belgium and northern France across Flanders’ fields and the level plains of Picardy.  In high summer, the yellow corn fields blush with poppies. It is a smiling, happy landscape.

 But then you pass the war graves: rows of marble slabs aligned with mathematical precision, not golden like the lives of young men eager with expectation, not red like the passionate furies of the war they went to fight, but white and stark and cold with death. And you remember how those killing fields were ploughed up and liquified by engines of death, in the collective madness the world found it had walked into, the Great War that “slew half the seed of Europe one by one”. Sleep-walked into, indeed, a narcotic association that fits the black-shadowed poppy whose very profile seems to “hang in sleep”. 

A century ago the Great War still had a year to run. By then the association of poppies to the memory of the fallen had been made. We know how it was inspired by the poem:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,

In Flanders fields.

John McCrae its Canadian author captured the public mood. The point about the poppy was not just its colour that seemed to reflect the contradictory experiences of war: its passion and perplexity, its pain and its pride.  It was that poppies were the first flowers to grow in the churned-up soil where soldiers fell and the mud in which they lay. 

Fifty years earlier, the historian Lord Macaulay, writing about a 17^th century battle in Flanders, foreshadowed the symbolism. “The next summer” he wrote, “the soil, fertilised by twenty thousand corpses, broke forth into millions of poppies. The traveller who saw that vast sheet of rich scarlet could [imagine] that the prediction of the Hebrew prophet was [being] accomplished, that the earth was disclosing her blood, and refusing to cover the slain.”  

“Flowers preach to us, if we will hear” says Christina Rossetti in one of her poems. She is drawing from today’s gospel: “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.” Flowers stand for larger things says Jesus: good, noble, inspiring kingdom-shaped truths in the case of lilies, more paradoxical realities in the case of poppies. For the poppy is freighted with conflict, bloodshed, loss and lament, pride, our duty of care; our anger at this waste of human life. In classical myth it stands for the sleep of death, but can also represent immortality. So by extension, it symbolises our hope for those who have died, and our pleas for the better future we crave, our longings to live without fear of what tomorrow will bring as Jesus says in the reading.  

A flower is perhaps the best symbol we have of a truly innocent way of being alive. It grows because it can simply be itself. It flowers to please nothing and no-one apart from its own unconscious instinct. It realises its own life artlessly, effortlessly, without having to try. Mother Julian would have said it exists because God loves it. So it points to a love that is boundless in its possibilities. If only we could see it for ourselves, if only our world could live like that: joyfully, spontaneously, unafraid, open to the sky and the rain, the breezes and the sunshine!  For then, Jesus seems to say, we would be close to the kingdom of heaven. We would live and breathe not out of suspicion but out of trust. We would not succumb to worry but be sustained by a deep and lasting hope. We would feel after God and find him, would understand that we came from God and are going to God. 

So, could the simple poppy and the associations we make to it lead us into a new vision of life? “Strive first for the kingdom of God and its righteousness” says Jesus. That’s as true in armed conflict as it is in every other walk of life. It defines who and what we aspire to be: human beings who live and die purposefully, for good ends, not in vain. War is only just if it is in pursuit of those good ends: freedom and justice and the welfare of the planet and the defence of the powerless and victims. The young men and women of today who sign up to serve in the armed forces know that they may find themselves in some faraway theatre of war, or ambushed by terrorists, or helping victims of cruelty or natural disaster. They need to know why they are there, and how it will contribute to the world’s safety, how it will help establish a more peaceable order where human beings can make a better life for themselves. To be able to think these thoughts and frame an ethical and spiritual response to the challenges they pose is what makes for goodness and keeps integrity intact.  

All of us need to be alive to these questions if we are to remember well and honour the fallen. Only then do we do justice to their sacrifice. McCrae’s poem ends on a combative note where the poppy is not just a symbol of memory and pride but also of the intention to strike down the enemy.  If you had just watched your friend die in the mud of Flanders, you would understand that. But we know what the true enemy is: pride, lust, avarice, greed, wrath, envy and sloth, the seven deadly sins that stalk the earth and degrade our collective and personal lives? Unchecked, they will destroy us in the end. Isn't this what our brothers’ blood cries out from the ground where the fallen have lain and the poppies grow? We need to be worthy of them and construct the better world for which they lived and died. On this solemn day, the poppy can stand for our resolve in Christ crucified and risen to arouse ourselves to do good and serve well, to heal the wounds of history, and keep hope alive. 

St Mary the Virgin, Oxford
Remembrance Sunday 2017 (Revelation 22.1-5, Matthew 6.25-34)

Life Can Begin Again: a sermon on Easter Day

On Easter Monday 1917, in northern France, the British and Commonwealth forces launched the Easter Offensive against the German line. The Battle of Arras cost over 160,000 British. One of them was a soldier who was serving in the Artists’ Rifles. He was one of the great poets of his generation. Among his closest friends was Eleanor Farjeon who wrote the song ‘Morning has Broken’, a woman who was more than a little in love with him. As Holy Week began Edward, holed up in his trench, received an Easter gift. Eleanor’s poem tells the story. 

In the last letter that I had from France
You thanked me for the silver Easter egg
Which I had hidden in the box of apples
You like to munch beyond all other fruit.
You found the egg the Monday before Easter,
And said. 'I will praise Easter Monday now -
It was such a lovely morning'. Then you spoke
Of the coming battle and said, 'This is the eve.
'Good-bye. And may I have a letter soon'.

That Easter Monday was a day for praise,
It was such a lovely morning. In our garden
We sowed our earliest seeds, and in the orchard
The apple-bud was ripe. It was the eve,
There are three letters that you will not get.

Deceptively simple, it charms us until we get to the last line and realise what it conceals. That painted Easter egg (or was it chocolate?), kept for a week with such anticipation was possibly the last thing he ever ate. A few hours later on that Easter Monday Edward Thomas would be dead, struck down by a rogue shell as he was lighting his pipe.

There are three letters that you will not get. Think of the millions of letters those who fell in battle would never get. This is the first Easter of this Great War centenary that began last summer. I doubt if you came here wanting to be reminded of war on Easter morning. It was such a lovely morning Edward had written. Perhaps on a beautiful spring day in Picardy where, even in the desert of the front line a daffodil or two might dare to raise its head, perhaps Edward could forget the war for an instant. Maybe it’s possible as we keep this beautiful and holy feast in the Cathedral to forget the conflicts of our own time for an hour.  

Or so we think. But we must not leave those worries outside the church door. ‘Lest we forget’ matters just as as much on Easter Day as it does on Remembrance Sunday. Let me say why. Like the poem, St John’s Gospel takes us back to a garden. Peter and John come running to Jesus’ tomb. They find the stone rolled away, the cave empty. But someone else has been there all along, ever since before dawn: Mary Magdalen, the woman who had loved Jesus so intensely. When the two men go back she stays there, ‘weeping outside the tomb’. On that first Easter morning there are tears, just as there are tears today for so many in our world. But then comes the wonderful moment of recognition. She thinks the stranger is the gardener, wants to know where he has taken the body. ‘And Jesus said to her…’ But how do you possibly put into a word all that is conveyed as he calls her by her name. At that instant she understands, and believes. After the terrible ordeal of God Friday when she had stood close to the cross watching Jesus die, she has a rush of conviction, a surge of hope. Rabbouni! she exclaims.

This Easter garden is full of symbolism. Go and visit ours in the Galilee Chapel of this Cathedral. In one way it’s the beauty of spring time, the yearly marvel of nature’s renewal. ‘The winter is past, the flowers appear on the earth, the time of singing has come.’ But it’s much more than that. This garden takes us back to creation when, said the ancient story, God planted a garden in Eden and placed Adam there to look after it. St John is saying to us: here is a new paradise, indeed, a new world, a new creation. And yes, Jesus is indeed the gardener, just as Adam was, for this Last Adam comes into his garden on the first day of the week to begin his great work of re-making the world as God wants it to be. Morning has broken, like the first day. The day after Jesus has finished what he came to do, and has kept the Sabbath and rested in the tomb, the week begins all over again with a sunrise of wonder that heralds a new dawn for the world. It brings a new hope to raise up broken spirits. And with it the promise that the risen Christ will one day make all things new.

At Easter in 1917, like first century Judaea and our own 21^st century, there are tears. They may be tears of personal grief and loss like Mary’s, like the bereaved who have lost cherished loved ones, with memories of Easters past that come flooding back this morning. This morning I am grieving a good colleague and friend I suddenly lost a week ago and trying to share the heartache his wife and children are going through. I am thinking of Jewish people keeping Passover this week like our ancestors, in fear of the future; thinking too of Christians under the iron fist of Islamic State who will celebrate Easter in terror; and Christian refugees far from home in Turkey and Jordan, and the families of the students in Kenya shot without mercy last week because they were Christians and not Muslims. Is it possible that human beings can be so cruel? If we have any feeling for humanity, our hearts break for the pain of the world. Just as God’s heart must break too as he weeps over us.

Yet Easter says to you, to me, to all of us, to the entire human family if only it would listen: do not lose heart. Do not be afraid. Reawaken the hope you once had. Or if you never had it, if hope has eluded you for a lifetime, go to the garden. Go to the empty tomb, go to the very place where it seems he is absent, and find that he is alive and present and among us. Find that as then, so now, he calls us by our name and invites us to step out of the shadows of the tomb into the marvellous light of resurrection.

Edward Thomas’s world was not very different from ours. Even on a beautiful spring day in Eastertime, death can stalk us as it did him. His widow’s memoir tells how he went to France deeply afraid, with an awful sense of foreboding. Yet his last letter to Eleanor recalling a hidden Easter egg still rises to the conviction that he will keep a day for praise. Like her poem, we sow seeds today, seeds of faith, of hope, and of overflowing love. What are they when the world is so dark and we protest ‘O God, why?’, when events baffle us and make us afraid, when our burdens and our planet’s feel just too heavy to bear? Faith and hope and love are everything. They give us back our disintegrated lives, put back together by the crucified and risen Lord. We glimpse how we can learn to trust once more, how life can begin again. The good news of Easter is that even at the grave, even when everything seems hopeless and we feel at our most helpless, we sing alleluia. Morning has broken! This is the day that the Lord has made. It’s a day for praise. He is risen.

Durham Cathedral, Easter Day 2015. John 20: 1-18

Christmas Truce

A hundred years ago this Tuesday, the German navy stole up on the coast of North East England and assaulted Hartlepool. Over 100 people died, most of them civilians. Missiles also fell on Whitby and Scarborough. If the rest of England was deluded into thinking that the war would be over by Christmas, I suspect that up here they knew better. In 5 months the British had already suffered 90000 casualties. But in 1914, the nation tried to celebrate Christmas as usual. In Belgium and France every member of the British Expeditionary Force received cards from the King and Queen, and from Princess Mary a brass tobacco box, tobacco and cigarettes.

And something happened that no-one who was there would ever forget. I have an illustrated book of reminiscences written in 1915 by an army padre called Douglas Winnifrith. This is what he says about it: ‘The opposing forces left their trenches and fraternised on the intervening ground, exchanging gifts and good wishes!...For his enemy individually “Tommy” has no hatred. He is goodness itself to German wounded and prisoners to whom I have seen him give the last of his precious Woodbines’. To him, the trenches were an extension of the rugby pitches of Charterhouse and Eton. Sportsmanship was everything, playing the man. So ‘one was not surprised to find him prepared to shake hands with his foe on Christmas Day’.

The following Christmas things were very different. The high command of both sides were determined that there should be no more truces. Anyway, soldiers were no longer in the mood for it. There had been too much suffering. The Manchester Guardian, in its Christmas leader, spoke about ‘a Europe fast bound in misery and iron’, this ‘great disaster to civilisation’, the ‘bitter irony’ of the contrast between the conduct of the war and the spirit of Christmas. It looked back to 1914 across a brutalising year of civilian air raids that had begun on Christmas Day itself, mechanised warfare, the misery of the trenches and poison gas. It spoke about ‘the strange and pathetic episodes of temporary friendship men who were seeking each other’s lives…. We seem to be “dug in” against the essential meaning of Christmas with a thoroughness that leaves nothing to be desired.’ It warned against moralising, saying that ‘the conflict has grown ever vaster and more impersonal, and we should treat it like a terrible earthquake where we know what duty and compassion require of us without being able to answer the question why?’.

The Sainsbury’s TV Christmas Truce advert has been criticised for its sentimentality, ‘smearing chocolate’ over the stench of death that permeated the trenches. I didn’t see it that way: 1914 was early enough for men still to believe that reaching out across no man’s land could betoken a future they all longed for. Far too soon it would seem like a broken dream. The Battle of the Somme 18 months later must have felt like the ultimate mockery of those fraternal carols and football games, as if they were a bizarre aberration in the history of war. But that is what makes it poignant. For it asks the questions: what happens when beautiful dreams break up under the weight of catastrophe, cruelty and darkness that are too heavy to bear? Was it just a child’s fantasy that was best forgotten? Or did those lads glimpse a better future that Christmas day as they played at being a world free of threat and foreboding, healed, reconciled, filled with friendship and delight? If so, it was important to remember it.

I expect many a preacher this year is drawing a message out of this centenary of the Christmas truce. The symbolism is powerful as we have seen in the touching memorial unveiled last week in the National Arboretum and designed by a 10 year old from Tyneside: those precious hours of shared humanity in which enemies were drawn together by the Christ Child. Even the terrible attrition that followed did not undo the significance of that moment. It was like a sacrament, presenting combatants with the possibility of a better world in which swords would be turned into ploughshares. That day it felt near enough to be grasped. How wonderful it must have seemed. And if it laid down somewhere in the combatants’ souls a memory of peace-seeking, the realisation that the enemy we are commanded to love is bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh, well, that is the purpose of every good dream.

And so it should be at this Christmas time 2014. No-one pretends that the message of ‘peace on earth, good will to all people’ is the truth of things today; like those later Great War Christmasses, it seems further off than ever. Violence, terror and hatred seem ‘dug-in’ in ways that we did not imagine even a year ago. And the worst of it is that so much of it is fuelled by the furies and hatreds of radical practitioners of religion. I mean Islam, that noble religion of dignity, truth-seeking and peace. It is terrible to think that faith can be so debased by atrocities perpetrated in the name of Allah the Compassionate, the Merciful. And if that were not enough, we now have more refugees and asylum seekers on the move than at any time since the last war. Then we have Ebola, and unending revelations about child abuse, and the plight of the hungry in our own midst, something that took even the Archbishop of Canterbury – who has seen many dreadful things – by surprise. Meanwhile there is scant progress among leaders trying to address climate change, and isolationist politics are pulling us apart from our neighbours precisely when we need one another most. As 2015 dawns the prospect of a better world is bleak.

Yet Advent and Christmas speak into the state we are in just as they did in 1914. Our seasonal stories touch us because they are always fresh and new; they invite us to rediscover innocence. It is like looking at an old master painting: exquisite, beautiful, filled with adoration and joy. But peer into the dark places and shadows on the canvas. Sometimes you can trace a broken world in there: a poor family crying out for bread, the crippled and diseased longing to be healed. Often they conceal a frozen river or skeletal trees, metaphors of deadness. Or the shadows may just be dark, symbolising human hearts breaking under the weight of fear or grief, guilt or worry or pain, waiting for the illumination the birth of Jesus brings. ‘The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light.’ That is what we love about Christmas. It holds out the possibility that we can find hope, and life can begin again.

Other than the medicine of the gospel, I don’t have any cure for our ills. If I did, you wouldn’t believe me. But the voice of the prophet in our first reading heralds good news for victims, freedom for captives, release for prisoners, comfort for the sad, gladness for a people who wait with longing and who keep hope and faith alive. It’s the advent of the Lord’s great jubilee. So we must never give up on God and his love for the world he made and will always cherish. We must never despair. This precious Infant in the manger is for life, not just for Christmas. He will know soon enough the bitterness of dark and pain; a sword will pierce his mother’s heart. But by embracing evil and making it his own, he draws the sting out of death and hell. He gives us back our broken selves, our future, our freedom, our happiness, our life. He inspires us to believe that transformation can happen in our world, in our human family, in ourselves.

Was this what those soldiers glimpsed, however partially, in the trenches a hundred years ago, that the true light that enlightens all people was coming into the world? Like Advent, it was a moment of awakened longing for something better. Far off, yet coming one day: a truce that lasts forever, an eternal reconciliation and peace, a healing of the world’s pain, a love that is without limit and without end. We have a reason for the hope that is within us.

Durham Cathedral, Advent 3 2014 (Isaiah 61.1-4, 8-end; John 1.6-8, 19-28)

A New Window for Durham School

What is a stained glass window for? Three things: it is something to look at, something to look through and something to look and see by. 

The first is that it is something lovely to look at, a thing of beauty to enjoy. This new window in Durham School’s chapel is a worthy addition to a place that is already beautiful. We must thank the OD Lodge for funding it, to those who created and installed it, and to Alex Douglas for his design, the winning entry in a school competition. I think you’ll agree that it’s a remarkable achievement that deserves hearty congratulations. 
 

The brief was to incorporate key aspects of the school’s history. The dates tell of the school’s foundation 600 years ago – it was a privilege to preach at the anniversary service this summer. Floreat Dunelmia indeed in the next 600 years. You can see our founder’s mitre and seal, the great bishop of Durham and chancellor of England, Cardinal Langley’s. VIII is for King Henry who re-founded the school in 1541 after a fire in the original buildings on Palace Green. There are 98 poppies, standing for the former pupils who died in the Great War whose centenary we are keeping this year. The globe reflects the international nature of the school. At the top are the house colours. You can see a section of the school badge with the cross of the Cathedral Priory, your mother house, and St Cuthbert’s cross to remind us of our beloved native saint. The OD Lodge is commemorated to remind us of a generous gift. It’s a beautiful design, and a rich one that brings so many themes together. Looking at it gives us pleasure and reminds us of so much that is important in the story of our school. 



That brings me on to a second gift that stained glass can give us. It’s not only something to look at and admire for its own sake. We also need to look through it. I don’t mean literally, though what we see of sky and trees does show up in a new way. I’m thinking about how beauty lifts our imaginations and spirits. We glimpse new horizons. This is a window to make us think about our vision for our school and for ourselves. It says to us: remember your past where your roots are. Be thankful for this school and all who have enriched and served it. But take a larger view of it: let your vision be as broad as the globe in the window. And like the 98 who died in the First World War, let your aim be to serve, to make a difference to the world by your loyalty and devotion.



And let Cuthbert’s cross inspire you to what matters most of all, to live good lives of service, kindness and generosity, faithful to Christ who laid down his life for his friends. These are truths you will see if you look not just at the window but through it. In our reading today, Jesus spoke about the two great commandments of the law: love God, and love your neighbour as yourself. This is what exalts our school, our communities, our world, our own selves. This is what makes life into a work of art, something beautiful for God and for the human family. It brings us near to the source of all that is good and lovely in life. This is when, in Jesus’ words, we are ‘not far from the kingdom of God’. 



The third gift is about how colour and artistry give us light to see by. A stained glass window brings a different light to this chapel. It adds new vitality to this interior. It changes it, and how we feel about it. And who knows: it may change us too, our own interior lives just as it changes this chapel interior. Sometimes colour adds to our sense of joy by making us happy to be alive, thankful for the goodness of the world, for all the benefits we have in a place like this school, above all, for God’s great love for us. But the poppies and crosses should help us feel the pain of the world too, the tears of things as Virgil put it. That helps make us more sensitive, more compassionate, more kind. It might even hint at how we can contribute as only we can to this school community, and how we can be good citizens in the future. 



So this window could touch us in many ways depending on what we see in it, or perhaps, what it sees in us. Light has a way of exposing us to truth in ways that are sometimes hard but always in the end, wholesome and healing. We need to be open to the possibility, let light and colour in so that it can illuminate our lives, remind us us of what in the end counts the most. 

Jesus said: ‘walk while you have the light so that the darkness may not overtake you’. 

Something to look at, to look through and to look and see by. Here is a window to inspire this school and all of us to look and see in new ways. Thank you to all who played a part in helping us to enjoy this wonderful gift. And thanks be to God. 

Durham School Chapel

26 September 2014





An Unimaginable Disaster

I wonder what we think we are doing, commemorating the outbreak of the Great War a century ago? Many things. Some are obvious, but no less important for that: remembering all who would fall in the war, trying to understand why Europe slept-walked into war in the first place, maybe draw tentative lessons about conflict, patriotism, national politics and how we construct a better world order than the one that crashed to the ground in August 1914. But it is just as important to try to reflect spiritually on our history, offer it to God, hold in our hearts peoples broken by the conflicts of today, pray for peace in our world. Let me offer these thoughts today.

My first reflection is about history. My predecessor Hensley Henson was dean of Durham a century ago. His sermons and writings give us a glimpse of both how well and how badly the Church of England responded to the unexpected crisis of summer 1914. ‘When the stroke actually fell’ he wrote, ‘it seemed to have the benumbing shock of an almost unimaginable disaster. The nation… was reluctant to admit the possibility of war between nations so closely linked by ties of interest, culture and tradition’. He did not fall for the easy recruiting slogans of some of the war’s more fervent supporters; yet he never wavered in his belief that England had a duty to engage with the war. Its causes were unbelievably complex, the ambitions of European empires, their unstable alliances, the vicissitudes of trade, the hubris of flawed leaders, and the simmering tensions in the unruly but far-off Balkans (about which people in England knew little and cared even less). Even now it isn’t easy to unravel an intricate history, but aspects of it may look clearer a century later than historians of the last generation found it to be. In some ways the events of June 1914 strike us as surprisingly modern: the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo was a familiar mix of radicalised young men wielding the terrorists’ guns and grenades, and all in a city-centre with heavy traffic and a baffling one-way system.

What brought Britain into the war was the German invasion of neutral Belgium. It was this that appalled the nation, precipitated the declaration of war and galvanised most of the church into supporting the war effort. To stand in solidarity with the victim is honourable for people and for nations, and it’s important to remember this when we might easily conclude, viewing it through the lens of the disastrous Battle of the Somme, that this conflict was avoidable. I doubt it was more avoidable than the Second World War once Germany had decided on its course of action. I dwell on this because it is important, in remembering those who went to war on both sides, that most were not starry-eyed dupes dazzled by the rhetoric of dulce et decorum est. Thoughtful people believed it was the right thing to do to defend a downtrodden nation. They asked what Christian obligation should be amid the messiness of actual historical circumstances. Ethics is never straightforward in extreme situations like war. But we should pay tribute to those who went to war a hundred years ago believing it was their moral and spiritual duty. We must try to read the history with a critical yet sympathetic insight.

My second reflection is about memory. It was the Great War that bequeathed to every church, town centre and village green a war memorial. They existed earlier: both Sheffield and Durham have memorials from before the First World War. In Durham Cathedral, the Durham Light Infantry (pals as well as officers) is commemorated for campaigns going back to Crimea, the Sudan and the Boer War. But it was the terrible attrition of the First World War that brought loss to every community and almost every family in the land that gave nationwide impetus to the need to remember. If anything, this instinct has accelerated in our own lifetimes and spread out from war memorials to roadside shrines in memory of accident victims and other symbols that record loss and grief. The Great War also gave us rituals to remember with: the Cenotaph in Whitehall, and local observances of Armistice Day around every war memorial look back to the same watershed. And again, if Durham is anything to go by, we have seen a huge increase in attendance at these commemorations in the past decade especially – and this interests me in particular - among the young. Perhaps this is because war and the pity of war is relentlessly on public view nowadays through television and social media; but perhaps it is also that the public has a better awareness of the covenant between the armed forces and the nation than it did in past generations. 

How we remember is a rich theme in the scriptures. It lies at the heart of this eucharist as we remember in bread and wine the one whose body was broken and blood shed through an act of cruel violence. We do this in memory of him for many other reasons, but his victimhood is not the least of them. I believe that the eucharist gives us important clues about how we should remember before God. One of them is good remembering is always an occasion for thanksgiving. It’s what eucharist means. These next four years will present opportunities for us all to remember thankfully those who fought and fell not just in the Great War but all the conflicts of more recent times. Another is that we must remember in ways that connect the past to our own day. Anamnesis means allowing the past to become actual to us, telling the story so that we can inhabit it and let it shape our lives now and in the future. If we don’t do this, we shall not only fail to emulate all that ennobled so many who served, but we shall also risk falling into the half-truths, brutalised rhetoric and cant that war so easily fosters. And then, remembering at the eucharist is linked to offering: Christ’s offering for us, our own self-offering in him and, I want to say, bringing all humanity, all the world into the offering of the eucharistic prayer to God, pleading in Christ that like the bread and the wine, our broken, spilt lives, wrecked by conflict and hatred, may be transformed and the new creation heralded.

My final reflection is about where understanding, memory and prayer might lead us. Alan Ecclestone, a much-admired priest in Sheffield in the 1960s said: ‘what matters for prayer is what we do next’. That is to say, to give ourselves to reflection in the ways I’ve suggested must always lead to action of some kind, something we do. This ‘doing’ is about expressing Christian discipleship in ordinary life, making some difference to the world in which we live, to others whose lives we share, to ourselves. So we need to be changed by how we think, how we remember, how we pray. The key word here is ‘we’ as the church that celebrates this eucharist. It may sound grand to speak about being the conscience of the nation, though together, the faith communities can wield inestimable influence in the shaping of a better order in our society and in the wider world. They can bring people together, create dialogue, help bring about reconciliation. In a world so divided by radicalised dysfunctional religion, we shouldn’t underestimate how people of healthy faith can bring understanding and wisdom.

In one way especially, the church has a special vocation. This is to be a witness in every generation that the church is a worldwide society that transcends the divisions between peoples, nations and continents. Christianity, said Hensley Henson, ‘is not a national religion and can never tolerate any national limits to its message’. Peace-making is inspired by a larger vision of human beings living together in the spirit of reconciliation and friendship, which in the gospels is how the kingdom of God is depicted. When Jesus fed the crowd in our gospel reading today, he meant it as a powerful enacted symbol of how we were created to be one people, sitting down as one human company, literally, ‘bread-sharers’ who distribute to all the resources that God out of his abundant generosity has endowed us with. War is always a terrible denial of that fundamental truth about humanity. So a worldwide fellowship of faith, the church, can help recover the vision by living out what it means to be a human family of grace and justice, truth, peace and freedom.

We should use the commemorations of these four coming years to ask ourselves what this means in practice, and commit ourselves not only to praying for it but to helping bring it about. It is one way of both praying and living the petition we say at every act of worship: ‘give us this day our daily bread’, our bread for today, our bread for tomorrow, the bread that the victims of war and conflict hunger for. What matters for prayer is what we do next. As we reflect, as we remember, as we pray, we do not forget what we could do to make a difference in our own time. And maybe, just maybe, this unique centenary that has fallen in our lifetime will give us a new resolve to do it.

Sheffield Cathedral, 3 August 2014.
To commemorate the centenary of the outbreak of the Great War, August 1914
Matthew 14.14-21