Remembrance Sunday, 9th November by Fr Jack
Job 19.23-27a
2 Thessalonians 2.1-5, 13-17
St Luke 20.27.38
Today we remember. And as ever, as Christians, we are doing several things at once on different layers.
The remember out of love and respect those who have lost their lives in conflict. We remember those who have made the ultimate sacrifice for a greater cause, innocent bystanders and many other types of loss.
We remember as prayer. We remember as a means to not repeat these mistakes - to work and prayer for peace.
We remember to ask God’s mercy on them, and us now. Remembrance as prayer, flowing from the greatest and most prayerful form of prayer we have, which is itself a remembrance: the Eucharist. By our remembering Christ and His Kingdom of mercy and justice are made present in our midst, and we put them, put Him, in our bodies, in order to live this powerful, radical remembering.
Remembering is a deeply political, transformative, hopeful, thing to do. And we do it in all these ways and more today.
And in our world where peace and justice, where understanding and tolerance, where welcome and trust feel further away, not closer, even after all these years we remember as an act of resistance and revolution.
With all that in mind, I would like to give the sermon today to a friend of mine. He speaks into this space so well today, that I think its best you hear from him and not me. His name is Br Carlo Carretto, one of the Little Brothers and Sisters of Jesus. He died the year before I was born, but I was given one of his books 10 or 15 years ago, and he has been a good friend to me. Br Carlo spent his life alternating between living amongst the poor in European industrial cities, and being a hermit in the Sahara Desert. The Little Brothers and Sisters of Jesus, a RC religious order, were founded inspired by St Charles de Foucauld, the Sahara hermit from the turn of the last century. So Br Carlo’s perspective on God, people and life is rather wonderful - fed by those two very different alternating sides to his life.
His most famous book is Letters from the Desert. But today his sermon for us comes from the opening chapters of ‘In Search of the Beyond’ (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1976). I’m going to read it, and say no more, and we will turn to this great act of Remembering [the altar] at the heart of our lives.
I think it speaks for itself this Remembrance Day. Br Carlo wrote in a nuclear age, we still live in that shadow, but we can insert our own shadows of violence, social disintegration and everything else too.
This passage speaks for itself in terms of the continuity between the Resurrection life and this life - the question posed by today’s Gospel.
It speaks for itself in terms of the awe and wonder Job feels in today’s first reading, despite, or perhaps because of all he has been through.
It speaks for itself in terms of the orientation in life St Paul wants the Thessalonians to find today in the epistle: a life shaped by who God is, and what God has done in Christ, because that is all in all.
I think I’d better let Br Carlo speak. (Page 26 - 28) he writes from the Sahara this time:
‘This sand which runs through my fingers is all that remains …of the civilisation which flourished in a Sahara that was once…teeming with life. Some of these civilisations have left a record of themselves, superb, incredibly well preserved inscriptions, evidence of a high degree of development. Now cities and villages alike have disintegrated… The sun and wind of the Sahara have reduced them to sand, mountains of sand… Will the steel of our own technological civilisation be able to resist any better? The civilised world of science and culture?...Will they hold out against the forces of time, against the sun and wind? New York, Paris, Moscow, Beijing, Athens, Rome, all will become like these sand dunes…Everything will be reduced to sand, because sand is the symbol of death, and everything must die. Some people imagine a connection, or better some kind of real continuity between the level of technology and maturity reached by human civilisations and the Kingdom of God. But they are wrong, there is no such continuity. The Kingdom belongs to a different order…Our technology will end up in the sand, just as the first wheel constructed by some gazelle hunter on these same Saharan plains… At this point I can well imagine that some people are worried, even scandalised: ‘What is the good of all our…work? Will anything remain of the earthly city?’ Yes, love will remain. The house will disappear, but the love that held us together will remain… This hope is given us in the Resurrection of Christ.’’