Ministry of the word from The Campfire Church — Seeds of War, Seeds of Peace

 

[I recommend you to click on the link to the Youtube video, and actually listen to the sermon rather than just read it, for the best experience of it and if you are able to do that on the device you are using.]

In twenty years I have not brought the ministry of the word to the church on this second Sunday in November, which in the UK is observed as a remembrance of the two world wars.

It was the one Sunday when I withdrew from my pastoral responsibilities as a minister, and chose not to stand with my people in an occasion that mattered to them deeply, when they opened tender memories and allowed sadness and the grief of loss and dying to be expressed.

I think of Jan, a member of one of my congregations, a woman of unshakeable Christian conviction, for whom Remembrance Day was so important. She was born in poverty and in childhood went on to live in the workhouse. But she remained full of hope and got married as a young woman. By hard work and thrifty living, she might at this point have been able to climb out of poverty.  But her new husband was sent to serve in the war, and returned to her in short order, physically and mentally broken. Apart from that one snatch of time they had together before he went, her whole adult life until he died was spent as a full-time carer for him, eking out a living on his small army pension. And Jan’s husband was not a genius or a saint; he was not especially equipped to find anything good in his situation, or evade its bitterness. And then when he died the time had gone, and she was eking out a living on a small state old-age pension. The structure and daily reality of Jan’s entire life was conditioned and kept in poverty by her young husband being sent to fight in the war. And Remembrance Day, when she honoured the service for their country of her husband, was so important to her.  At first, as a new minister, I did all the things that mattered so much to Jan and others like her — kept the silence, sang “I vow to thee, my country”, found a bugler to play the Last Post. But then I quietly stopped.

I could no longer in good conscience continue, because a very selective narrative amounts to a lie, and what we were doing on Remembrance Day told a dangerously selective story.

The falling poppies, the sad, grand, solemn music, the bowing at the cenotaph and ceremonial laying of wreaths, the insistence on family connection that we knew should be honoured, and the vocabulary of service,  nobility, ultimate sacrifice, and courage — all added up to paint a picture that left out so much.

For one thing, it always left out the stories of the people we had fought against. Where Germany was mentioned, we were shown Hitler, and Auschwitz and goose-stepping Nazis — not the Germany of today, headed by the wise and practical kindness and humility of Angela Merkel, finding room for so many Syrian refugees, making such responsible political decisions to defend against climate change, sending ventilators to Britain when our own politicians had ignored their own briefings and failed to prepare us for a pandemic.

But it’s not as if Germany magically changed. We are just the same. In England today we are watching the rise of Nazism, edging ever more boldly into plain view, and employing the same political tools to make fascism attractive. The boot’s on the other foot, now.

My mother was a girl in the second world war, and her father and brother did not go to fight as soldiers, because they were farmers — and farming was a reserved occupation. So they took in children evacuated from the cities, and they also housed German prisoners of war, sent to work on the land. My mother, as a child, used to creep close to have a look at them. She had heard about the German, the Hun. Fascinated, she wanted to see what they were like. She never forgot her astonishment at discovering they were just like us. From first-hand encounter with those prisoners of war, that was her abiding memory. The Germans were just like us. 

That’s the thing we should be learning from. That’s what should make us alert to reality, and humble in making our choices. Just like us. And we are watching the truth of that unfolding, behind and beneath the faded glory of our stories of heroism, in which we are always on the winning side, and the suffering side, and the noble side — and always right.

For we do not include the stories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or the stories of grinding poverty in post-war Germany. We tell the stories of the Jews who suffered at the hands of the Nazis, because we gave them refuge; but we stay quiet about the homosexuals and the gypsies, to whom we have been relentlessly cruel ourselves — in the case of the gypsies, to this very day, and increasingly so.

We are highly selective in the stories we tell, and there is political motivation in that. It fosters compliance with aggression in the general population. 

So it came about that when Tony Blair came on board with George Bush in aggression against the people of Iraq, in spite of the thousands upon thousands of people in Britain and Europe who protested in the streets against any more war, parliament was ready to vote in favour; we had believed our own narrative, that we are inevitably on the side of truth and righteousness. Nothing was said on the BBC about the courage of Iraqis who fought for their country against the opportunistic aggression of the West, men who were not even soldiers — which we know because their dead bodies piled up wore not army boots but ordinary shoes.

And where was our heroism when our political leaders pressed the button to direct smart bombs to blow up cars and buildings far away? — taking out sheltering women and children, or a family of young men travelling to pick up their aunt.

We never seem to learn the lesson. When the decision was taken to bomb poor, beleaguered Syria, bombarded from every side, the bombers were waiting on the tarmac with their engines running as parliament voted; and when the word was given to send them, there was George Osborne rubbing his hands in glee, crowing “Britain’s got its mojo back!”

But we bury those stories on Remembrance Day, when in truth we should include them.

War does not spring up unbidden, and take us by surprise. War has seeds and sprouts. War begins as small things that grow. If, on Remembrance Sunday, we are serious about ending war and working for peace, we should know how to recognise the seeds of war, and uproot them from our community.

There will be others, but significant seeds of war are — 

Othering

Poverty

Inequality

Degradation of the land

Othering is crucial to getting your country to agree to go to war. Stories that dehumanise and demonise people we have never met, that bolster our own good opinion of ourselves.

When I served as a minister in West Wickham, a man in my congregation said to me, “You can never trust an Arab.” 

“What are you talking about?”, I said to him. “Abraham was an Arab.” But he clung stubbornly to his position.

Prejudice, persecution, and ultimately war, all rely heavily on othering. It is the primary seed of war. The almost universal mistake of comparing the inside of me and those like me; with our feelings and our stories and our reasons — with the outside of them and those like them; with their behaviours and their actions and their appearance.

The seeds of peace are found in learning the stories of others, seeing their feelings and their reasons, the inside of them — and looking at our own behaviours and actions and appearance (the outside of us) through the lens of their culture. Trying to understand.

Poverty is a seed of war. So many soldiers are recruited from families with no money and no hope. In poverty, people become desperate, and willing to believe the whispers of “They’re stealing our jobs, they’re claiming our benefits”. People are willing to believe in scarcity when they are poor. Permanently occupied with survival, they lack the time and the means to obtain enough distance to see and analyse the political engineering and manipulation of their situation.

Inequality is likewise a seed of war, and it is politically exploited as leverage. People have no motivation to fight and hurt and kill each other, when they are helped and included, when they are housed and fed and educated, when there is a health service. 

The attitude of the UK Home Office, towards desperate refugees trying to reach safety here, sows lavishly the seeds of war. That we should be content to stay safe and warm in our homes, while refugees from torture and war try to live under tarpaulins in the wastelands or shelter under bridges in the cities, in mid-winter, this is a seed of war. We have bombed their homeland. What did we expect? We too are refugees if a foreign power bombs our homeland. 

An often neglected seed of war is degradation of the land. The unrest in Syria grew from the seed of climate change — people who had to move from their ancestral farmland into the city, because the desert was spreading. 

If we are serious about peace, and about sowing the seeds of peace, we will work with all we have for regenerative farming practice. 

If we regenerate the land — and with patience, permaculture, protection of our forests, and correctly managed herding, that is surprisingly easy to do — then we shall sow peace throughout the world.

So long as they have the land — somewhere to settle, rivers that flow, trees and livestock and fertile grasslands — people don’t need war.

So on this Remembrance Sunday, I beg you to be one of those who sows the seeds of peace.

Make friends with those who are other than you — find out what it means to live with their disability, or their gender identification, or their cultural heritage, or their income level, or their sexual orientation. Make friends with them, and listen to their stories. Be alert to othering, and refuse it, because it is a seed of war.

Fight against poverty in your community. Vote for the politicians who will lift up the poor. Speak up for Universal Basic Income. Donate to the food bank, and the refugee programmes. Do what you can with what you have to help those who have nothing; and vote to include and strengthen and rescue them. Poverty is a seed of war, and relieving it sows the seeds of peace.

Stand up for equality, for inclusion. Equality is a seed of peace, it brings wellbeing and contentment. Inequality creates bitterness and jealousy, fosters a sense of scarcity, creates social divisions and enmity. Inequality is a seed of war. Stand up for equality.

And with all you have, work in favour of the regeneration of the land. Educate yourself about it, use the purchasing power of your purse as a vote for it, vote for the politicians who will tackle climate change. The seeds of peace lie in the regeneration of the land. Grow a garden. Plant trees. Live sustainably. This is an indispensable component of working for peace.

So, on Remembrance Sunday, let me assure you, it is not that I have forgotten, or do not care. Deep in my heart I carry the pictures of men suffering from shell-shock in the trenches, of soldiers in Vietnam, of the smoking chimneys of Auschwitz. I see terrified children grabbed by Israeli soldiers, buried under rubble in Syria, fleeing naked with their skin in shreds in Hiroshima. Believe me, I do not forget, it is deep in my heart.

So I say to you, because I remember, brothers and sisters, let us sow the seeds of peace and root out the seeds of war — starting with our own homes, our own lives, our own consumer choices and our own votes.

Let there be peace on Earth, and let it begin with me.