Remembrance Day: A sermon preached in the Chapel of Trinity Hall,Cambridge,13 November 2011

Abstract

This sermon, preached on Remembrance Sunday 2011 in the Chapel of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, addresses some of the particular conflicts and paradoxes which war, and the commemoration of it as an act of public, annual national remembrance, pose for Christians and Christianity. It considers the often troubling relationship between the ‘big words’ of Christianity – sacrifice, love, body, blood, glory, redemption, for example – and their connections with, or appropriation by, nation states as powerful tools for military or propagandistic ends. It considers, too, some of the implications of the uncomfortable and painful fact that for many serving men war gave them some of their richest and most valued experience, and asks how we square the circle of acknowledging human courage and self-abnegation without glorifying the conflicts which called them forth.