Remembrance and Resolve

A sermon preached in Appleton on Remembrance Sunday 2026
Micah 4.1-4; John 15.9-17

What does it mean to remember on Remembrance Sunday? Someone clever will have written a book about all the different types of remembering. We also might try to list them, as we fathom what we’re doing each November as the date of the Armistice approaches.

This is not ‘effortless and immediate’ remembering, like remembering the stuff that’s always just there, such as your name, address and most frequently-used PIN number. Neither is it ‘natural forward remembering’, like remembering to put the bins out, or take the sausages out of the freezer. It has elements of ‘remembering by reconstruction’, a bit like like remembering that school-trip you all went on and, when you talk about it at reunions, all your friends recall a different bit of the story, until together you have reconstructed a complete and reliable memory of the past.

But today’s remembering is really a more deliberate sort of remembering. Today we are saying, This is what happened; this is what it means; and these are the consequences. This is an important type of remembering, even the first simple act of saying, This is something that happened. Because we live in a post-truth era, we can never be sure that what we are seeing on our screens is actually happening. (And sadly our screens have become the place where we get most of our sense of reality. We ourselves have chosen to give away that authority, that power over us.) It means that things that did not happen can be made to look as if they did, while something that absolutely took place can easily be wiped from the record; and even if film footage does later emerge, people can then say it’s just an AI-generated fabrication; the fakest of ‘fake nooz’.

So, standing together to honour the memories of those who were actually there, and to acknowledge the work of reliable historians to tell us what actually happened, and to establish the closest we can get to the truth of the matter, is critically and urgently important, in pushing back against the false words of the deceivers and the deniers, and against anyone willing and able to twist the truth to their own selfish money-making ends.

And what does it mean, this thing that has happened? What do we learn from the two World Wars, as well as from the other significant military conflicts – from Bosnia to Belfast, and from the Gulf to Goose Green – engagements which the Royal British Legion is keen that we should also not forget, not least as the World Wars recede into deeper history, down towards Waterloo and Corunna, Culloden and Agincourt?

This long, long litany of names means that there is a dangerous propensity among human beings to take arms against each other and to posture behind strutting nationalism and stubborn pride. The generals and the politicians can get locked into a thirst, not for blood, but for power and glory; with the result that, as The Parable by Wilfred Owen puts it, they quickly slay not only the children and grandchildren of their own people, but ‘half the seed of Europe, one by one’.

On the other hand, history also indicates that, at our best, we can act with immense sacrificial courage, for the sake of neighbours who are attacked by a belligerent enemy, with none ever more vicious than the forces of the Third German Reich in 1939. It is a strong indication of this instinct to repel aggression that Churchill famously remarked that ‘if Hitler had invaded hell, the British Army would have rushed to the aid of Satan.’

It is this moral quality, this instinct to create and preserve just and thriving societies that is referred to in each of the Bible readings set for today. The prophet Micah, twenty-seven centuries ago, envisages a community living at peace with itself, sheltering under its own heavy-laden vines and living on its own produce, having first turned the weapons of war into the implements of agriculture: the famous swords into ploughshares transformation. He writes of a people who have returned to their God in order to find their true identity and live their fullest life.

In Saint John’s gospel, Jesus picks up the same image of the grapevine, not as something that offers us shelter on a hot day, but as a metaphor of our relationships with each other and with God. Like those branches that turn and twist and tangle into each other, our lives are mixed and mingled, wholly interdependent; and although charity may begin at home, it certainly doesn’t end here. In remembering the fallen, we remember the courage and immense moral strength of those who reached out to strangers in need, as to drowning men; removing the threat, and defeating the attack launched against them.

We may well wonder whether we in this era remain capable of such qualities, softened as we are, perhaps even hollowed out, by obsessive individualism and personal choice, by decades of plenty, and a supposedly endless supply of domestic devices, exotic holidays and high-tech toys. Perhaps our remembering might re-kindle a deeper humanity; and begin to re-fashion us in it.

This involves the sort of remembering we will need if we are to live in the present with the strength and wisdom of the past. It is the sort of remembering Christians go in for, every time we share in bread and wine just as Christ did, the night before he died. This remembering is not just a looking back, a ‘D’you remember when … ?’ Rather, it’s a remembering in the sense of a re-staging of the drama; a new telling of the old, old story. The historic gospel is carried onwards into a new age, but in this remembering, our re-membering, we are the new members of the cast, and our voices are telling the story afresh.

You and I also, Christian or not, here on this Remembrance Sunday, remember those who gave their tomorrow for our today. We too might demonstrate the courage and sacrificial living which belong to any who answer the call of sovereign and nation; to any who defend their neighbours and allies against the fire of their foes.

Such remembering will teach us who we are; and will remind us how we are to be. It will show us that the always-talking heads that fill our screens, telling us only to bother about ourselves, are empty heads with an empty vision for humanity, selling gold-sprayed emptiness to anyone who will buy it.

Those who fought and fell in past conflicts knew what was required of them, and had the courage and capacity to see it through. We live at a time that is surely more perplexing, dangerous and unpredictable than any other era through which humankind has so far travelled. We will need to learn to embody the best of all that our race has ever been, if we are to continue to live in freedom, justice and peace.

So later, when we stand in silence at the memorial and re-member, let it not just be a silence of sorrow and respect; let it be also a silence of resolve – a resolve to rise above the narrow interests of tribe and nation, and to work, however humbly, for the peace and justice of all our neighbours; of all who, like us, are interlocking branches of the same universal vine.