The Sermon . . .

Bishop Gerald Beaumont

A question often found in the trivial exchange of mundane delights, but not on this day!

Today, we are bound to consider the question in the light of decisions, made by others, and even by us, with often the most fatal of consequences.

Would you die in defence of your country? And, if you were an Iraqi, what would that mean?

Would you die as a testimony to the depth of your faith in God and all God's promises? And what would that mean if you were a Palestinian Christian, a Jew or a Muslim?

The question is immediately complicated by a thousand considerations, which is probably why so much that has always been written by religious and political propogandists, has sought to simplify in order to persuade.

Given that all we are and can be is challenged by the question, it may be helpful to use the solemnity of the Anzac commemoration to make our own serious, and reflective journeys through this day.

If there are no immediate and easy answers, then we may, at least, honour the dead with more than just a minute of silence.

I have an old copy of that remarkable work of the German journalist and novelist, Erich Maria Remarque: "All Quiet on the Western Front." A story from the battlefields of the First World War.

I bought and read it first 32 years ago. It made a profound impression on me then, and it is powerful still. Utterly contemporary in its painful and clear-eyed examination of the terrible realities of war.

The book has the shortest of Forewords. It reads: " This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped its shells, were destroyed by the war."

The story is told in the first person by nineteen year old, Paul Baumer who, late in the novel, finds himself sharing the same shell crater with the French soldier he has killed. A man who has transcended in death the status of enemy.

"The silence spreads. I talk and must talk [Paul relates from the cold misery of that blasted pit]. So I speak to him and say to him: ' Comrade, I did not want to kill you. If you jumped in here again, I would not do it, if you would be sensible too.

But you were only an idea to me before, an abstraction that lived in my mind and called forth its appropriate response. It was that abstraction I stabbed. But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me.

I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are just poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony -, Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy?'

"We always see it too late".

These may have been, also the sentiments of Jesus' disciples, huddled for security in the little house in Jerusalem. Thinking of all that might have been, and of their betrayals. Of their failure to know and understand how the terrible events they had just witnessed were an inevitability, if they had only had the wisdom to know. And would it have made a difference?

So then Jesus comes to them with only the words of Peace, out of all the pain of his dying. He displays the marks of his fatal wounds, so that we will all know forever the nature and cost of the Peace which God offers, as the "normal and proper condition of [humankind] in relationship with one another."

Peace is not simply the absence of conflict. It is the condition of harmonious "community with others, the foundation of life" [ Johs.Pedersen - Israel ].

Would we die for such a peace? How much less than that would we be prepared to offer? What wounds might we endure - of heart and mind and soul - so that such a peace might emerge?

When confronted with such a challenge, do we find ourselves having to confess, with Spike Milligan, that we are "just heros, with cowards legs!"

Certainly, it seems, that John Mark, whom we also honour today as St Mark the Evangelist, discovered his limitations as he fled the Garden of Gethsemane quite naked, having left his clothes in the hands of those who would have marched him off with Jesus.

And that was not the only occasion when he found the going too hard to contemplate!

Full of the rhetoric of God's will to peace, but foundering in the rocky shallows of a thousand sharp opinions, and angry challenges to our Godly certainties, we all know those waters!

And it is not so much that we should be apologetic for our weaknesses to pursue even the smallest of peaces with our neighbours, as that we so easily fall to the seductions of proffered options that will ease our journeys, and salve our consciences.

It seems to me that Jesus offers a way into that great Peace of God that alone has the power to prevent the endless and bitter loss of young human life that continues to bring us all so much grief.

When Jesus displays his wounds, it is not just a question of establishing his identity, it challenges those who thought they were already community to understand that they had barely begun.

Jesus twice says to his startled friends:"Peace be with you". The priority of harmonious community is thus established.

There can be no credibility for disciples of Christ who do not long to have this peace as the essential basis of all their relationships.

Jesus' wounds evidence the cost, but also proclaim that any wound is worth the establishment of this most profound peace.

So are the wounds of so many over such tracts of time an inevitable cost, not just to Jesus, but to all those millions of others, on all sides, who have gathered under the banner of Peace?

Does the dying of Jesus simply demonstrate the way it always has been and will ever be?

Is the promise of eternal life merely a way of coping with all of the grief. Or is it perhaps, as some have proclaimed, just "pie in the sky when you die?"

Well, so long as we do not seriously pursue peace in all our relationships, then others will sit in bomb holes and find, in that desolation, that they are dying for our weaknesses. By their wounds we are, not very completely, healed!

In a little postsript to his book, Remarque now takes over from the narrator and speaks of Paul:
" He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence:' All quiet on the Western Front.'

He had fallen forward and lay on the earth as though sleeping. Turning him over one saw that he could not have suffered long; his face had an expression of calm, as though almost glad the end had come."

It is important for us to honour those fallen in war on this day, which offers us such a tangle of grief and thanksgiving. And it is important for us to do that first and without reservation.

These were young men and women in all of whom ran strong strands of hope, and visions of glory. Those who returned were forced to confront quite other possibilities, and whose lives were marked forever - for good and for ill.

I remember, this day, my father-in-law, Bill Sampson, who died on the eve of this Christmas just past.

Lyn now works where he once returned to find healing from the ravages of his years as a prisoner-of-war in Chang and on the Burma railroad. He spoke little of his experiences, but maintained to the end of his days a close relationship with the friend who was his mate during all that terrible time.

Bill's salvation was in the friendship he had with Max. They looked after one another, and as much because of that as anything else, they both survived. Bill maintained that if you did not have a mate, you died.

What a precious gift is community, and how fragile it is. Its maintenance requires much of us. Patience, humility, kindness, faithfulness, forgiveness, and perseverance in love.

Such is the community that brings us to life.

In just such a community we may begin to find, and to be extravagant advocates for, the Peace of God.