I wonder what – or who – you remember on Remembrance Day?
Steve and I are old enough to be on the tail end of the Baby Boomer generation and our parents’ lives were profoundly shaped by the second world war. So on this day we remember Jim Eccleston, the gentle giant from Worksop, who went from mining community of Worksop to serving as a Military Policeman in Hong Kong, and then Singapore, where he was captured by the Japanese. Jim lived for several years in the terrible privations of a Japanese Prison of War camp, where many of his fellow prisoners died from starvation and exhaustion. After the Hiroshima Bomb fell, a confused situation arose in the camp. With some of the guards melting away into the jungle. Jim, a natural leader, was resolved that order should be maintained in the camp, and that the British prisoners of war should not take revenge on the Japanese Guards. Resuming his role as military policeman, he led a formal delegation to the officers hut, demanding they formally surrender, The officer in charge of the camp surrendered by handing his Samurai sword over to Jim – a trophy which remains in our family to this day.
I have mixed feelings about this sword– it is a weapon after all. But actually this sword represents an action of justice and peace. At a moment when bloody revenge could have been wrecked upon these Japanese guards, there was an orderly transition to surrender.
Love your enemies, says Jesus. Bless those who curse you. I don’t know whether Jim found it in him to love his captors, but he did the right thing. He recognised their humanity, and treated them with decency. I never met Jim – like many inmates of the Japanese camps, he died early, another invisible victim of World War Two. But our family remembers him today, with love and gratitude.
I grew up in Birmingham in the 1970s. I was out in town at the theatre on the night of the Birmingham pub bombings when half a mile down the road 45 young people out enjoying a drink with friends were killed in an atrocity that shook the city and the whole country. On another occasion, a bomb was found at an office just by my secondary school, and a member of the bomb disposal unit was summoned to make it safe. It could have exploded just as we were turning out from school. Instead, it exploded as the bomb disposal officer
attempted to diffuse it, killing him instantly and blowing out all the windows in school.
Birmingham post 1974 was a city shrouded in fear. Bag searches were the norm everywhere you went. It was clear in the public mind who the enemy was – it was Irish people, and for Birmingham’s large and overwhelmingly peaceable Irish community, it was a terrible time. My Dad, who was a Christian, and churchwarden at our church, would regularly explode with rage about Irish people in a way that made me feel deeply uncomfortable.
On Remembrance Day I remember the bomb disposal officer who could not diffuse the bomb next to our school, and lost his life in the attempt. I don’t know his name, but I want to thank God for his courage and self-sacrifice. And I want to thank God for the courage of those who began the risky process of dialogue that led to the Good Friday agreement and the ending of hostilities in Northern Ireland.
Love your enemies, says Jesus. Bless those who persecute you.
Yesterday we heard the death of the great Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. He memorably said: We need to respect out opponents’ integrity and include them in our embrace.
Love your enemies, says Jesus. Love you opponent. Love those who stand across the other side of the political or religious divide.
Just as we in our family have our own stories which we bring to Remembrance Day, so you and your family will have your own stories too. And this community of Whaley Bridge has its own stories, its own roll call of the names of those fallen in war. Remembrance Day matters day because it is a day that joins up all our own individual stories into a bigger national story. It is a day for coming together, which is why it is sad that we are not able to gather physically in the park this morning. The two minutes silence is something we all do together across the country: it binds us.
War is terrible, and never an end in itself – it is a last resort means of enabling the establishment of a peace. Remembrance Day opens out the question of how we will ensure our shared future is a peaceful future.
The bible, of course gives us a vision for that shared future. We have prophetic vision of the prophet Micah:
“They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore; but they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees, and no one shall make them afraid.”
Micah’s vision is not where the weapons are simply disposed of - rather, the machines of war are melted down and re-shaped into ploughshares and pruning hooks, useful agricultural tools, that can bring economic prosperity. And this vision is not one where wealth and prosperity is only for the wealthy few. Not at all. All shall sit under their own vine and fig tree. Everyone will have a home, everyone will have access to some land to cultivate. And none shall make them afraid. Everyone will live free from the fear of tyranny and violence. It’s a vision which echoes Jesus’s proclaiming of the Kingdom of God, where all are welcomed, all are fed.
We face different challenges from those faced by our parents and grandparents who lived through World War. We face the challenges of climate change and global pandemic. Our problems are shared with our neighbours across the world and call for global action and co-operation.
Today on Remembrance Day we give thanks for the courage, self-discipline and self-sacrifice of earlier generations. We will need those same qualities to address the issues we face in our world today. Let us all work and pray for a world shaped by Micah’s vision, a world delivered from fear of the enemy, a where the weapons can be decommissioned, where industry is not for building bombs, but building homes and livelihoods.
Let us learn to love our enemies, to respect our opponents’ integrity, and include them in our embrace.