peace

Prayer, Persistence, and Peace: Sermon Preached on 27th July 2025 (Sixth Sunday After Trinity)

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Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot and St Mary’s, Potterne

Colossians 1. 15-28; Luke 11. 1-13

“…everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds…” `

A painting depicting a central figure in a white robe standing on a hill with arms raised, addressing a group of people seated around him. The background features a cityscape with ancient buildings and a golden sky, suggesting a sunset or sunrise. The people, dressed in robes and headscarves, appear to be listening attentively, with some raising their hands. The scene is set on a grassy hill with a distant view of mountains and a walled city.
James Tissot, The Lord’s Prayer (1886-96), hangs in the Brooklyn Museum.

I always enjoy Matthew Syed’s programme on Radio 4 called Sideways, which often gives quirky, unusual, perspectives on quirky, interesting issues. It is currently running a three-part mini-series on ‘Chasing Peace’. Exploring different approaches to peace-making and peace-building, it doesn’t shy away from hard questions about human nature, and whether we are hard-wired for war.

I listened to the dedicated peacemakers he interviewed, some of whom had taken enormous risks with their personal safety in very dangerous environments to end conflicts, and I was full of admiration. Some interviewees also said things like that to prevent war we needed to train people to be more emotionally literate, I found myself muttering, “Good luck with that!”

Over this last decade or so, many of the things we’d previously taken for granted about the direction of humanity have broken down, and the idea of progress which animated us for so long has stalled. We seem a long way, for example, from the days when people really believed that the United Nations might ultimately bring an end to war.

One of the lessons I’ve learned from these years of gathering crisis is that too many of those dreams of progress thought they could change human nature, or flew entirely in the face of it. At their worst, especially in the darkest days of the Communist world, it was precisely the possibility of building a perfect society in the future that allowed people to justify to themselves their barbaric behaviour in the present.

Indeed, if we look at the world through the lens of Faith, then we know this world can never be made perfect, and that none of us can ever be all that good for all that long, or otherwise Jesus would not have needed to die on the Cross.

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Remembering: Sermon Preached on 12th November 2023 (Remembrance Sunday)

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Henry Allingham, the last British survivor of those who fought in WW1 trenches, aged 110 in 2006. He is wearing medals, smiling, and shaking the hand of someone located off-camera.

Preached at St John’s, Devizes

Readings – Micah 4: 1–5; Romans 8: 35–39

Henry Allingham, the last British survivor of those who fought in WW1 trenches, aged 110 in 2006. He is wearing medals, smiling, and shaking the hand of someone located off-camera.
Henry Allingham in 2006, when he was aged 110.

Henry Allingham died in the year 2009, at the age of a hundred and thirteen, as the oldest man in the world. An air mechanic, he was the last survivor of the Battle of Jutland, and later served with the air reconnaissance units supporting the offensive at Passchendaele.

For eight long decades, Henry tried to forget what he’d seen on the Western Front. It was only towards the end of his life that he began to open up about what he remembered. Then, it was obvious why he’d wanted to forget. He once said that his Remembrance Day was the 22nd of September, when he lost three mates. He spoke of men standing in two feet of water in mud-filled trenches waiting to go over the top, knowing exactly what their likely fate was. He once spent a night in a shell hole. “It stank,” he said. “So did I when I fell into it. Arms and legs, dead rats, dead everything. Rotten flesh. Human guts.”

It is more comfortable, in some ways, to forget. So why do we remember? One reason is the sense of duty that we rightly feel to honour those who made the supreme sacrifice. Another important reason for remembering is because those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.

But to remember also means something else. The word ‘member’ can mean a body part; indeed originally that was its only English meaning. Member is a word that came into English, via Norman French, from the Latin word membrum, which means limb. The word remember also has its root in this Latin word, membrum. So to re-member someone is literally to put their limbs together again. When we remember the dead, we bring them to life in our hearts and souls.

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