remembrance sunday

What if there were another Dunkirk?: Sermon Preached on 10th November 2024 (Remembrance Sunday)

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Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne

Romans 8. 31-39

“If God is with us, who is against us?”

On 10 May 1940, Hitler finally embarked on the invasion of France and Belgium which had been dreaded all winter. Within days the allied armies, outmanoeuvred and pummelled by Blitzkrieg, found themselves with encircled on the Channel coast. The German High Command was able to boast with confidence that its troops were ‘proceeding to annihilate the British Army’. Winston Churchill found himself preparing to announce to the public an unprecedented military catastrophe involving the capture or death of a third of a million soldiers.

Arguments about why that didn’t happen, and the Miracle of Dunkirk happened instead, still sell books for military historians. Very few of them, however, allow for the possibility that it may, indeed, have been a miracle.

How many of you know that in a radio address on Thursday 23 May, as the sheer desperation of the situation became known, King George VI declared that Sunday, 26 May, should be observed as a National Day of Prayer?

Late on Saturday evening the military decision was taken to evacuate as many as possible of the Allied forces. The very next day, this country devoted itself to prayer in a way rarely seen before and never since. Eyewitnesses and photographs confirm overflowing congregations in places of worship across the land. Long queues formed outside cathedrals. Many millions came out to pray for national deliverance.

One woman wrote about her wartime childhood in Hertfordshire: “It is one of my vividest memories as a child of people streaming along the roads and pavements of the Ware Road. All Saints Church was packed with people sitting and standing. Coming out, the churchyard too was full to bursting”

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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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