Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne
Readings – Micah 4. 1—5; Matthew 5.1–12
“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called the children of God.”
Men outside the Duke Hotel in Bratton, Wiltshire, in August 1914, on their way to enlist.
As the November days shortened a hundred and twelve years ago, people were starting to work out that it wouldn’t all be over by Christmas. Kitchener, in fact, had warned the cabinet in August that the war would last for at least three years: they were, to put it mildly, sceptical. In November, his German equivalent, Falkenhayn, also warned his Prime Minister that Germany could not now defeat the allies outright and that a long war was increasingly likely.
Yet when Christmas came, truces broke out up and down the line of trenches that stretched from the Channel coast to Switzerland. British and German troops emerged into no man’s land, often after hearing one another singing carols, and exchanged gifts of booze and tobacco. In some cases, the locally agreed truces lasted until the New Year – then the killing resumed. By the time it stopped, between nine and eleven million soldiers and another six to thirteen million civilians were dead, and twenty-one million soldiers of all nationalities wounded. The world would be at war again barely two decades later. That one was even worse.
When I was a young man, I knew numbers of people who had fought in the second of those world wars or otherwise taken part in them. One of the people who helped me get through my ham radio exams when I was in my teens was a merchant seaman who had volunteered for the Arctic Convoys. They weren’t exactly young men, but many of them weren’t far past their prime. Today, the youngest are nearing their century. It would be easy to start to forget, now.
Indeed, it is more comfortable, in some ways, to forget. So why do we remember? One important reason is the sense of duty that we rightly feel to honour those who made the supreme sacrifice. Another is that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.
No war on such a scale has afflicted the world for more than eighty years – but the scale of violence in the present ‘local’ conflicts is terrifying enough – the horrors in the Middle East and Ukraine that have filled our screens for years now; the horrors of the wars in Sudan and Nigeria that don’t seem to be considered worthy of the headlines. Humanity has much more powerful weapons than it had in 1914 or 1945. The prospect of them being used on a continental or global scale is horrific.
That is why we must remember the human cost of war as it affected those who came before us in this place and places we know, and as it touched our own families. The young men saying goodbye to their sweethearts on the platform of Devizes station on their way to the trenches; the dashing young pilots pulling stunts as they trained over Salisbury Plain before heading to their deaths over Hitler’s Germany; the sailors making a brief, crackling telephone call to their wives and children back home before their ship was hit by an Exocet missile in the South Atlantic.
Our first reading today presents a vision of universal peace that would be easy to dismiss as a naïve pipe dream. But this vision was written down by a man who had seen peace crumble after the international political situation changed suddenly. His name was Micah, and he lived around 2,700 years ago. He experienced a devastating invasion of his country by an Assyrian emperor given to violent conquest and all its attendant horrors – deportations of whole peoples, terrible suffering, especially of the defenceless young and elderly and, in the end, a fragile and compromised ceasefire.
That warmongering emperor was eventually killed by his own sons; but it is the vision of Micah, a humble man from the countryside, which inspires the best in people across the centuries, perhaps because of the deep longing in his words. This vision of hope for justice and peace springs from bitter experience of how horrible war is. Micah says it will emerge once people of many nations go to the house of God to learn His ways and how to walk in His paths.
What are God’s ways? Our second reading comprises one of the most famous parts of Jesus Christ’s teaching, the Beatitudes. This is a blueprint for a world turned upside down, in a good way – a world where the suffering and needy will be comforted and nourished, and where those who suffer in the cause of right in this life will receive great rewards in heaven. A world where the weak will be blessed and the strong will risk everything they have to make God’s kingdom real.
The full consummation of Micah’s vision – when the nations will no longer study war, but each will live securely from its own resources – waits for a time when God will have spoken and, for once, we will have listened.
But we can each of us make this vision a little more present in today’s troubled world. Back in 1914, ordinary men, without asking permission, created a moment of God’s peace in the middle of the worst war the world had ever seen. All of us have a role to play as peacemakers – most likely in our own families, our workplaces, our schools. And when we play our role as peacemakers, then we truly live as children of God.
Now glory and honour be to the Holy and Undivided Trinity, the Father who made us, the Son who redeemed us, the Spirit who sustains us, this day and forevermore. Amen.