Provincial Priory of Surrey Service of Rededication and Thanksgiving - Address by the Revd. Ian Whitley
At a planning meeting for today’s service I was asked, as you are a Masonic Military order, to consider linking this talk to the 100-year anniversary of the end of World War One which I will, and I will come to shortly.
However before I sat down to write this I thought I would do a little research and I found that one of the obligations entrants to your order are required to declare is to protect and defend the Christian faith and I wondered what defending the Christian faith would look like particularly in the context of the horrors World War One, a conflict that was generally supported the established church in the UK and a war that was portrayed in several countries, and many churches, as a 'holy' war.
In November this year we will remember the end of a four-year conflict during which some two dozen countries had sent more than 60 million soldiers to fight, 10 million men had fallen, and millions more were permanently maimed. At least 7 million civilians had also died and countless were physically and mentally broken.
How do you defend a faith that, in the main, supported such horror? In fact, at the time the horrors of the war led many people to question how the church supported the state in pursuing this conflict in the way that it did, and many working men came home from battlefields disillusioned about God and religion and many never went back to church.
So, with this in mind, what is the faith we are called to defend, where can we find the answer to this? Well, as a Christian we can do no better than go back to Jesus himself and his earliest followers, known as followers of The Way well before the term Christian was coined. Jesus’ teachings seem to have been understood rather clearly during the first few hundred years after his death and resurrection. Values like nonparticipation in war, simple living, and love of enemies were common among his early followers.
For example, the Didache, written around AD 90, calls readers to “share all things with your brother; and do not say that they are your own. For if you are sharers in what is imperishable, how much more in things which perish.” At this time, The Way was countercultural, untouched by empire, rationalization, and compromise.
Yet despite this strong teaching from Jesus and adherence to it by his early disciples, ever since the imperial edict of AD 313 by Constantine elevated Christianity to a privileged position in the Roman Empire, the church increasingly accepted, and even defended, the dominant social order, especially concerning war, money, and class.
If you look at texts in the hundred years preceding 313, it was unthinkable that a Christian would fight in the army. The army was killing Christians. Yet by the end of the 4th Century Christianity had become the official religion of the empire and those in the army were now Christians and they were now persecuting and killing the pagans all in God’s name.
By the time we reach the 1st World war Christianity rather being the religion for those at the bottom, those on the edge, the marginalised, the poor and the sick it was now very much the religion of Kings and Queens, of those in power, the rich and the well healed. Yes, the other parts of society were Christians as well but now the faith was very much a top down institution rather than the bottom up revolution that Jesus started 2000 years ago.
So how do we defend our faith in 2018? I think Justin Welbey gave us good example over the lastly couple of weeks with his speeches on social justice. We must be ready to stand up against unjust structures in our society and seek to transform such structures of society, to challenge violence of every kind and to pursue peace and reconciliation.
Archbishop Welbey has been criticised for these speeches especially by those who probably felt they were aimed at them. He was told that religion should stay out of politics. "The trouble is that's not what Jesus did. He was never party political. No wing of politics - left or right - can claim God as being on its side”.
"But he was highly political. He told the rich that, unlike the poor who were blessed, they would face woes. He criticised the King as a fox. He spoke harsh words to leaders of the nation’s when they were uncaring of the needy."
"Jesus did this because God cares for those in need and expects those who claim to act in his name to do the same. That means action - and words." We also need to remember what has past and at this time especially those who were killed World War One and in all the wars since. This doesn’t mean we in any support violence, but we give thanks for their sacrifice, we remember what they fought and died for.
World War One was supposed to be the war to end all wars and those who paid the ultimate sacrifice did so in the hope that those generations that followed them wouldn’t have to. As well as looking back with thanks we must look forward with hope to a future that is without war.
So, I would like to finish this talk with a short reflection where we both remember what has past and hope for a better future. Can I invite you to close your eyes and picture a poppy.
The poppy
We remember
We hope
Amen.
Revd. Ian Whitley, All Saints Church, Banstead, 16th September 2018
At a planning meeting for today’s service I was asked, as you are a Masonic Military order, to consider linking this talk to the 100-year anniversary of the end of World War One which I will, and I will come to shortly.
However before I sat down to write this I thought I would do a little research and I found that one of the obligations entrants to your order are required to declare is to protect and defend the Christian faith and I wondered what defending the Christian faith would look like particularly in the context of the horrors World War One, a conflict that was generally supported the established church in the UK and a war that was portrayed in several countries, and many churches, as a 'holy' war.
In November this year we will remember the end of a four-year conflict during which some two dozen countries had sent more than 60 million soldiers to fight, 10 million men had fallen, and millions more were permanently maimed. At least 7 million civilians had also died and countless were physically and mentally broken.
How do you defend a faith that, in the main, supported such horror? In fact, at the time the horrors of the war led many people to question how the church supported the state in pursuing this conflict in the way that it did, and many working men came home from battlefields disillusioned about God and religion and many never went back to church.
So, with this in mind, what is the faith we are called to defend, where can we find the answer to this? Well, as a Christian we can do no better than go back to Jesus himself and his earliest followers, known as followers of The Way well before the term Christian was coined. Jesus’ teachings seem to have been understood rather clearly during the first few hundred years after his death and resurrection. Values like nonparticipation in war, simple living, and love of enemies were common among his early followers.
For example, the Didache, written around AD 90, calls readers to “share all things with your brother; and do not say that they are your own. For if you are sharers in what is imperishable, how much more in things which perish.” At this time, The Way was countercultural, untouched by empire, rationalization, and compromise.
Yet despite this strong teaching from Jesus and adherence to it by his early disciples, ever since the imperial edict of AD 313 by Constantine elevated Christianity to a privileged position in the Roman Empire, the church increasingly accepted, and even defended, the dominant social order, especially concerning war, money, and class.
If you look at texts in the hundred years preceding 313, it was unthinkable that a Christian would fight in the army. The army was killing Christians. Yet by the end of the 4th Century Christianity had become the official religion of the empire and those in the army were now Christians and they were now persecuting and killing the pagans all in God’s name.
By the time we reach the 1st World war Christianity rather being the religion for those at the bottom, those on the edge, the marginalised, the poor and the sick it was now very much the religion of Kings and Queens, of those in power, the rich and the well healed. Yes, the other parts of society were Christians as well but now the faith was very much a top down institution rather than the bottom up revolution that Jesus started 2000 years ago.
So how do we defend our faith in 2018? I think Justin Welbey gave us good example over the lastly couple of weeks with his speeches on social justice. We must be ready to stand up against unjust structures in our society and seek to transform such structures of society, to challenge violence of every kind and to pursue peace and reconciliation.
Archbishop Welbey has been criticised for these speeches especially by those who probably felt they were aimed at them. He was told that religion should stay out of politics. "The trouble is that's not what Jesus did. He was never party political. No wing of politics - left or right - can claim God as being on its side”.
"But he was highly political. He told the rich that, unlike the poor who were blessed, they would face woes. He criticised the King as a fox. He spoke harsh words to leaders of the nation’s when they were uncaring of the needy."
"Jesus did this because God cares for those in need and expects those who claim to act in his name to do the same. That means action - and words." We also need to remember what has past and at this time especially those who were killed World War One and in all the wars since. This doesn’t mean we in any support violence, but we give thanks for their sacrifice, we remember what they fought and died for.
World War One was supposed to be the war to end all wars and those who paid the ultimate sacrifice did so in the hope that those generations that followed them wouldn’t have to. As well as looking back with thanks we must look forward with hope to a future that is without war.
So, I would like to finish this talk with a short reflection where we both remember what has past and hope for a better future. Can I invite you to close your eyes and picture a poppy.
The poppy
- a resilient flower that grew in the fields that had been devastated by the warfare
- Red not to reflect the colour of blood because well, that’s it’s colour
- Worn by millions
- of Remembrance
- of hope
We remember
- Ypres, the Somme, Mons, and Verdun
- the Western Desert, El Alamein, the Normandy beaches
- Dresden, Hiroshima, the Burma Road
- Korea, the Falkland Islands, Northern Island, Iraq
- Syria, Afghanistan
- the call to arms, the patriotic songs, the posters
- the courage, the comradeship, the ingenuity
- the planning together for a better world that would come with peace
- prayer that God would be on our side
- the carnage, the colossal, stinking, bloody horror
- the ripped bodies on the wire
- the platoons of which only three out of forty lived
- the love that was lost, the wisdom wasted
- the minds that were twisted and the limbs distorted
- the children who will die this day while the world spends its wealth on arms
- the loss of hope when the war to end all wars wasn’t
We hope
- For our minds to settle during the time of silence so we truly remember
- For compassion to emerge
- For a sense of what to do next
- for a brighter, peaceful future
- for all guns to fall silent
- for a game of football on Christmas day
- for shalom
- for love and for justice and freedom
- for ploughshares and pruning hooks
- where the hungry are fed
- the poor are clothed
- the prisoners are visited
- where Love is not an emotion but a promise
Amen.
Revd. Ian Whitley, All Saints Church, Banstead, 16th September 2018