In 1997 Clacton's Christ Church, United Reformed Church, was without a Minister. The congregation asked followers of other Christian traditions to help them by leading their Sunday morning worship. I had, by that time, acquired a 'Further Education Teachers' Certificate from the City and Guilds of London. I was an active member of Clacton Quaker Meeting and was fairly well-known locally as a capable public speaker. I was asked to lead the URC worship and accepted the challenge.
The task involved choosing the hymns and bible readings, leading the prayers, having a brief chat with the children (anything up to about a dozen) before they departed to their children's class and preaching a sermon that was the focal point of the service and was expected to be about 25 minutes long.
I was asked to lead the worship on Remembrance Sunday 1997. Below is the typescript of this, my very first sermon. The congregation must have liked my style because I was asked back again and again. Even after the appointment of a resident vicar (Rev. Chris Wood whom I am proud to regard as a friend) I was asked to lead the worship once or twice a year when he was unavoidably absent.
The experience that I obtained on those occasions emboldened me to contribute an occasional 'Thought for the Week' (a kind of five minute sermon used in the Tendring Talking Times, a weekly 'newspaper' for the blind and visually impaired within the Tendring District) and also, on one occasion, to lead a funeral service at Clacton Crematorium for an occasional attender at our Quaker Meeting for Worship who hadn't wanted a 'Quaker Funeral' but did want me to preside at his funeral because I, like him, had been a prisoner of war in Germany during world War II.
I always refused the offered payment for these services because of the Quaker testimony against paid ministry: 'Freely have ye received, Freely give'.
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Sermon – Christ's Church, URC, Clacton-on-Sea 11
th
November 1997
Remembrance Sunday
'They shall beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation shall not lift up sword against nation. Neither shall they learn war any more'.
This familiar prophecy, that we heard in our first reading this morning, was made some 700 years before the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ. It is to be found both in the book of the Prophet Micah and that of the Prophet Isaiah. It does not stand alone. The Scriptures offer us, among many other things, a vision of a world in which men and women of every race and nation live in harmony with one another and with nature under the fathership of God; a Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. The vision is of God, but since God has given us humans the gift of free will. It is only we who can make it reality.
St Paul, in his address to the Athenians, declared that God had made of one blood all nations of men to dwell on the face of the earth. Elsewhere he declared that 'In Christ is neither Jew nor Greek, Bond nor Free'..
In teaching us to pray to '
Our
Father in Heaven', Jesus acknowledged all men and women to be his brothers and sisters. He told us to ask that God's rule should be established on earth, as it is in Heaven. He also said that whatsoever, good or bad, we do to the very least of his brothers or sisters, we do personally to him.
That thought becomes even more awesome in the light of those wonderful' first fourteen verses of St. John's Gospel in which Jesus is identified as the Word of God, that was with God from the beginning, that was God, and without whom not anything was made that was made.
He was, and is, the Divine Light, that true light that St John tells us 'Lightens every man and woman who comes into the world'. It enlightened the people of the ancient world, long before the 'Word was made flesh' in Bethlehem. You'll recall that Jesus once said, 'Before Abraham was, I am'. It is available to enlighten every single one of the world's teeming millions of people today, including those who have never heard of Jesus Christ, and those who would deny him.
Early Quakers often referred to that inward light of Christ as the seed of God. It was an appropriate metaphor since seed and seedlings can be either nurtured or neglected. I believe though that not even in the most depraved person can the seed be totally destroyed, the light wholly extinguished. 'The light shineth in the darkness and the darkness cannot overwhelm it.
Such is my Christian faith today. It is the faith of a Quaker, and I have been a Quaker for nearly fifty years. It is not the Christian tradition into which I was born. I was brought up in the High Church tradition of the Church of England (to put it in a local context, closer to St. James than St Paul's!) My parents were loyal and committed members if our local church in Ipwsich, and so was I. I was a choir boy and then, when my voice broke and after confirmation, a server at the altar.
Thus it was that early in 1939, while I was still seventeen, convinced that war with Germany was inevitable and firmly believing that Nazism and Fascism were evils that could be overcome only by force, I joined the Territorial Army. I was called up into the Royal Artillery the day before war was declared and I served in the UK and in North Africa. I took part in the battles that raged in the Egypt/Libya frontier area from November 1941, and was captured when Tobruk fell to General Rommel's Afrikakorps on 21
st
June 1942.
I have fallen comrades to remember on this Remembrance Sunday; some killed in battle, others died of diphtheria in an epidemic that swept through the Prisoner of War transit camp in Benghazi. Over fifty were drowned when the prison ship that was transporting them from Tripoli to Italy was torpedoed by a
British
submarine. Others died – I watched them sicken and die – of starvation related illness in an Italian prison camp. One died by my side in an accident at a railway siding during the last eighteen months of the War while we were at a small working camp (Arbeitskommando) in Germany. As I remember them, it is difficult for me to realize that had they survived as I did they would now – like me – be old men!
I survived. Why me? I sometimes ask myself if my survival had a purpose and, if it did, have I fulfilled it? I fear that the only honest answer to the second part of that question is 'almost certainly not'.
I met the girl who was to become my wife on 3
rd
September 1939, the day that war was declared. We were married on 27
th
April 1946, just four days after my discharge from the army. She was a Methodist. My faith had worn very thin during the war years but we were, and are, both church-going people. Neither of us settled happily into the Methodist and Anglican Churches that we attended, first in London and then in Ipswich.
We were, partly as a result of the war, disenchanted with the mainstream churches as we saw them at that time. Early in 1948 we visited, on impulse, the Quaker Meeting in Ipswich's Fonnereau Road. We were made welcome, began to attend regularly and became members after a few months.
We came to Clacton in 1956 and could, I think, be regarded as active members of Clacton Quaker Meeting. We have both served as both overseers and elders. I have twice been Clerk of the Meeting and my wife's voice on the telephone is well-known to many Clactonians who have never met her personally, as she has, for nearly twenty-five years, organised the letting of the accommodation at the Quaker Meeting House to local organisations.
It has been in the based-on-silence Quaker Meetings fo Worship that I have, over the years, regained my Christian faith.
Quakers are well known, and proud to be known, as a 'Peace Church'. We have a very strong historic peace testimony and most, though not all, of our members of military age registered as conscientious objectors during two world wars. It should not be forgotten though that Quakerism was born in the wake of the 17
th
century English Civil War – Cavaliers versus Roundheads as they used to teach us at school. A great many early Friends were, like me, disillusioned ex-servicemen who had been discharged from Cromwell's army and had been unable to find spiritual fulfilment in any of the churches of their day.
I hope too, that we never forget that Jesus Christ didn't say 'Blessed are the Peaceful' but 'Blessed are the Peacemakers'. We Quakers can claim to have played a small part in active peace-making. Wherever there is a trouble spot there is usually a reconciling Quaker presence. Quaker are active in Northern Ireland and there is a permanent Quaker Office at the United Nations.
Remembrance Day tends to split me in two. I am an old soldier and I find myself deeply stirred by the sounding of the Last Post, concluding in a message of hope with Reveille. Yet I remember that most of my dead army friends thoroughly detested ceremonial parades of any kind.
For many years therefore I have remembered and honoured them in quiet Quaker worship. Yet, on that particular day, I am never completely comfortable in the company of those whose experience has been very different from my own. I am grateful therefore to have been invited to attend, and indeed to play a part, in your service of remembrance today. I can only hope that you don't regret your invitation.
Christianity is a 'doing' as well as a 'believing' faith. Jesus Christ said, 'Not all who call unto me Lord, Lord, shall enter into my kingdom, but those who do the will o0f my Father who is in Heaven'. What we know of the will of his father is set out in the passage from St. Matthew's Gospel that we have had read to us this morning. It is to feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, visit the sick and comfort those in prison. Those who have failed to do that, however outwardly respectable and law abiding they may have been, have failed.
A favourite parable of mine is the one about the rich man, we usually call him Dives, and Lazarus, the beggar. The rich man may well have been a pillar of society and a willing subscriber to worthy charities, generous to his friends and family and kind to animals. We know nothing to his detriment except that he was wealthy – and that he failed to help the beggar at his gate, whom he saw every day of his life.
It is a favourite parable – but it is also a searching one. I know that there have been times when I have failed to help the beggar and have failed to do all that I could to help others in trouble. I have, as it says in the Anglican General Confession, 'followed too much the devices and desires of my own heart and have left undone those things that I ought to have done. I am grateful for the Christian doctrine of forgiveness of sins of those who are truly sorry for them.
The late Archbishop Temple once said that Christianity is the most materialistic of religions. It expects the faithful to do, not just to believe and pray. William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania and a very well-known early Quaker once wrote that, 'True religion doesn't turn us out of the world but helps us to live better in it and excites our endeavours to mend it'.
I don't think that George Bernard Shaw would have wished to be described as a Christian, but he was certainly a shrewd observer of life. He once remarked that our faith does not consist of the things that we think we believe but of the assumptions on which we habitually act.
Among the best-loved titles of Jesus Christ is that of Prince of Peace. He said 'Blessed are the peacemakers' - but how is peace to be made.
My father had been a regular soldier. He wore his first world war medals with pride on those between-the-wars Armistice Days. When I volunteered for the Territorial Army early in 1939 I had not the slightest doubt that I was doing the right thing. I saw the developing war situation as a crusade against evil that could be destroyed only by force of arms.
Old soldiers who, like me, fought in the North African campaigns of 1941 and 1942 will, I think, agree that in the desert at that time we and the Germans fought a pretty civilised and gentlemanly war. On our battlefields there were no civilians to be killed or turned into refugees, no occupied towns to be sacked. Neither side shot prisoners, fired on the Red Cross or poisoned wells. The white flag of truce or surrender was always respected.
I saw the realities of war as a prisoner in Germany with the brutal treatment of Soviet prisoners of war and civilian slave workers from Russia, Poland and the Ukraine. Later I saw convoys of hopeless German refugees, half-starved, half-frozen and terrified as they fled from East Prussia and Silesia from the inexorable advance of the Soviet Army.
They were making for Dresden. Thousands of them – and, of course, many allied POWs and civilian slave workers – perished in the terrible British and American firebomb raids in February 1945. We were just sixty miles from Dresden and we spent the night in an air-raid shelter. It was only in the immediate aftermath of those raids that I encountered any personal enmity from German civilians.
Later, as I made my way to freedom, I saw towns reduced to piles of rubble, smelling of death, and with a few pitiful survivors grubbing through the rubble for anything useable. It was, of course, only after I got home that I learned of the death camps in which millions of Jews, gypsies, and – though this is sometimes forgotten – dissident Germans, were mercilessly slaughtered
I hesitate to describe myself as a pacifist. I d not think that someone who volunteered for the forces when he was seventeen, has the right to claim that title when he is far too old to fight.
I am though, horrified by the realities of modern warfare; the nuclear weapons that may yet destroy us all like worthless flies, the transcontinental missiles, the nerve gases, the antipersonnel land mines, the heat seeking and life seeking missiles that target inexorably on their prey, and against which there is no defence.
The army in which I served had more in common with Queen Victoria's redcoats than with today's armed technologists.
Let us all strive to be peacemakers within the limits of our abilities. We may only be able to fulfil that role among our family and friends. Others, through church organisations, trade unions, or political parties, may be able to influence a wider field. None of us should shrug our shoulders and bury our heads in the sand while our streets are filled with violence, while Trident submarines patrol the ocean depths, while the arms trade flourishes, and children are losing their limbs – or their lives – daily on unmarked minefields.
I look forward to a future, distant though it may be, in which the arms trade is as unthinkable as the slave trade, in which the world has been at peace so long that not even the oldest person living has memories of war; a future in which there are no longer war-wounded ex-servicemen and women or war-wounded civilians.
Then Remembrance Day will have become a timely reminder of horrors long since past. Then it will be possible to feel that those whose names are engraved on our war memorials did not die in vain – and that a small step has been taken towards the realisation of our prayer, 'Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven'.
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