This is the text of a sermon I preached at Magdalen College, Oxford, yesterday.
In 1980, after leaving university with a degree in German and French, I went to work at an establishment in Cheltenham called GCHQ (the Government Communications Headquarters). Along with a number of other graduates I was to retrain in Russian and then serve as a Russian linguist during the Cold War. We had to go from not knowing the Cyrillic alphabet to degree standard in nine months in order to go onto operational training with Russian graduates joining from university. It was an interesting challenge. After several months an elderly gentleman in a black suit and a built-up shoe came to give us an hour’s conversation practice on a Wednesday afternoon. I only knew him for several months, but the few details I captured of his personal history haunted me for 45 years. His name was Dr Wlodzimierz Otocki and I am now working on a book about him.
Wlod was born in Manchuria during the Russo-Japanese War (1904-5) where his father was in the Tsarist forces. He grew up in Kyiv and Odessa (Ukraine), was on the wrong side during the Russian Revolution and escaped to Poland. His father, Konstantin, was executed by the NKVD in September 1937 during the Stalinist ‘Great Terror’ … accused of being a spy for Poland … on the grounds that he had maintained contact with his own son, Wlod. During World War Two Wlod served with the Polish Underground and was integral to the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 – after which he was sent to four German prisoner-of-war camps before being exiled to London until his death in 1985 (not long after I knew him).
This man lived his life entirely through conflict, terror, crisis and slaughter. In my few conversations with him he never once uttered those words “Never again”. He knew that such an aspiration might be noble, but that the reality of human beings, caught up in other people’s pursuit of power or possession, meant that conflict would not be ended by a single victory or defeat. Wars will be ended and new wars will begin. Human nature does not change – even if the technological sophistication of our weaponry does.
I tell this story as an illustration of how easy it can be to utter trite sentimentalisms about war and peace on a day like this … without an honest recognition of the way the world is, has always been and, presumably, always will be.
Last week’s elections in the United States exposed the power that money, power itself, threat and corruption hold even in places that see themselves as a ‘light upon a hill’. Of course, that light might simply emanate from the burning of values and settlements we had complacently assumed would be ‘normal’ into the future. Democracy, political integrity and the institutions that are created to protect, develop and enshrine those ‘norms’ take generations to build up … and weeks to demolish. As seen since 2016, these are neither a right, nor a given.
For the centenary of the 1918 Armistice (in 2018) I invited Bishop Ralf Meister, the Evangelical-Lutheran Bishop of Hannover, to preach in Ripon Cathedral on Remembrance Day. Two thousand people, many serving in the military, saw him get soaked to the skin by the Yorkshire rain as we processed to and from the city’s war memorial … and then heard him preach about the Great War propaganda lies printed in the German media that he keeps – framed – on the piano in his home. It belonged to his mother, but now reminded him every day of the potential threat to any civilized people. We are easily deceived and too easily corrupted by lines we want – for other reasons – to hear.
So, given this rather pessimistic – or simply realistic – reference to human nature and our propensity to violence and the pursuit of questionable interests, what are we to make of the readings we heard this morning? What, you might well ask, is the point of reading every year texts that come to us from several thousand years ago that sound good and reassuring, but make no actual difference to our world? Is this an indulgence in some collective pseudo-therapeutic fantasy?
I would argue not.
The prophet Micah was writing over 3,000 years ago to a society in the Middle East that saw power claimed and lost by tribal or national leaders, and he was no stranger to bloodshed or violence. Addressing himself to his own leaders, he writes: “Should you not know justice? – you who hate the good and love the evil, who tear the skin off my people, …” (3:1-2). He – somewhat tactlessly has a go at “the prophets who lead my people astray, who cry ‘Peace’ when they have something to eat, but declare war against those who put nothing into their mouths.” (3:5) Micah asserts that justice can be perverted or prevented by the powerful, but they had better believe that they will be held to account. It is only once the reality check has been articulated on human greed and corruption that the prophet can move on to the holding out of hope for a more just future.
In other words, hope depends on humility and integrity – not hubris and pride. The beating of swords into ploughshares and spears into pruning hooks is a consequence of kneeling at the feet of a God whose character is rooted in love and justice. “We will walk in the name of our God forever and ever” represents a commitment to build a society that reflects the nature of a God who gives himself away, who loves justice … even if those who claim his name (his character) keep forgetting this. As one poet once put it: “If we break up justice, we are left with just ice”.
This goes to the heart of our remembering today – in a world that looks very different from Micah’s of 3,000 years ago, but in which human beings are recognizably the same.
In our second reading the apostle Paul writes to a small Christian community in Philippi. “Whatever is true, whatever is honourable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, … think about these things.” Sentimentally unrealistic? But, remember: he was writing this in prison, anticipating his own execution at the hands of the immense Roman Empire where power was everything and human life was cheap.
The point is that we can’t wait until conflict ceases and fear is expunged; we can’t let go of a vision for justice, peace and love and mercy just because we are sometimes condemned to live in times when such virtues are ground under the jackboot of people whose currency is violence. As the Canadian singer-songwriter-poet Bruce Cockburn put it, we must listen to and promote “rumours of glory” where the drumbeat of conflict refuses to be dimmed.
If we didn’t have Remembrance Day, we’d probably have to invent it. We need the annual rhythm and ritual of forced remembrance. This is where a society demands the space to stop and contemplate how we got to where we are … and how we are. To recall with honesty the conflicts that have shaped us, paying attention to our failings as well as our noble sacrifices. For Brits, for example, this means not colluding with romanticised accounts of our island story (as if there was only one), standing alone against Hitler’s fascism, … whilst ignoring the role of Commonwealth citizens joining battle at enormous cost. Or the deaths of over 20 million Russians. Or, a particular interest of mine at the moment as I learn more about Poland during the twentieth century, what such conflicts look like when seen through the eyes and lived through the skin of people who don’t stand where I stand. Thousand of Poles settled in England after 1945 despite the deeply-rooted resentment that they had been betrayed by the Allies at Yalta and Tehran.
History is complex – a truism, I know. But, stopping to remember invites us into complexity and away from simplistic or self-serving romanticism. It brings us back to the humility that sits at the heart of God’s appeal to his people.
It is, in my view, this appeal to humility and honesty that awakens us from the slumber of complacency which allows dangerous anti-human notions and practices to infiltrate our consciousness and behavior. It is salutary to recall that Adolf Hitler – against whom the Second World War was ultimately fought – used democratic institutions and procedures in order to gain power. The Topografie des Terrors museum in Berlin illustrates how German society in the 1930s and ‘40s gave away, bit by bit, freedoms and values, allowing civil society to be slowly corrupted; the Nazis did not mount an overnight coup without warning. The rule of law was used in order to gain power and then to make law that permitted and sanctioned industrialised cruelty and slaughter. Hence Pastor Martin Niemöller’s Stuttgart Confession 1946 that famously begins: “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out – because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me – and there was no one left to speak for me.” Feel free to use your own categories.
Remembrance, if we are to take it seriously, is about the present and the future. Remembering the past – with humility and honesty – shines a light onto how we live in the present. Whether we do the hard work of loving justice, rejecting corruption, articulating not only a vague vision of hope for the future, but building the institutions that make collective virtue both possible and credible. Or the easier option of simply assuming that peace will prevail in the end … and leaving the hard work to someone else.
Last March I published a report into the future of Europe. I interviewed sixty individuals and groups, including diplomats, politicians, academics, journalists, school and university students and thinkers. (Only Nigel Farage refused to be interviewed.) Following a couple of hours with PhD and Masters students from the London School of Economics, I asked them what they hoped for in the future. An Italian expressed with some passion a desire, as he put it, for “things to go back to normal”. By this he meant: a growing economy, space for raising a family, a secure future, and peace. I suggested that, in the light of history, this was actually abnormal. The last eighty or so years since the end of the last World War have been an aberration, not the norm. And even in that time we have seen ethnic cleansing and military invasions on the fields of Europe where, on days like this, politicians constantly repeat the “Never again” mantra.
Democracy cannot be taken for granted. Human dignity cannot be merely assumed. Institutions of justice and the rule of good law cannot be self-evidently perpetuated. They have to be articulated in fresh language for each generation; they have to be argued for and, in some cases, fought for; they can be lost in a flash of well-meaning neglect.
That is the challenge for our generation as today we gather to remember the cost of freedom. There is hope. But, if it is to capture the imagination and energy of a new generation, it must constantly be built, not merely inherited.
On a recent research trip to Warsaw I saw a plaque on the outside of the main cemetery, quoting Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński, Roman Catholic Primate of Poland during the War. It said (in Polish, obviously): “When human memory fades, the stones continue to speak.” Perhaps we need consciously and deliberately to shape the stones and build them in such a way that they will not let us forget … either the benefits of freedom or the cost of wilful amnesia.
