Thank you for
the privilege of being with you this ANZAC Day morning as the community of Knox College,
Salmond College and the School of Ministry share in the commemoration of our
sometimes very personal links with
wars that shaped our world. Today we renew our identity across nations and
generations as those who value faith, community and duty; and in the face of
our memories we seek God’s Word for meaning and purpose in our own time.
Today the
sounds and movements of enduring rituals, the words of new hymns and the
associations of familiar music, help give voice to the mute feelings of old
soldiers and new generations, that the biblical prophecy may yet come true, of an
age when nation shall not lift up sword against nation, and neither shall we
learn war any more.
As we gather,
we are aware of other conflicts today which call for sacrifices that cannot
often be made in comfort, conflicts we face with others and with ourselves,
violence in our homes, the theatre and horror of suicide bombings, countries
were evil simmers, and near at home the easy permission we give ourselves to
allow the rage that our own failure releases to become a bitter moralising.
As well as to
the readings from the Psalms, from Revelation and from Jesus’ teaching; I want
to bring to you the images on the back page of our order of service, and draw
out links with our community here.
Psalm 91 may
strike us as either reassuring or naïve – and sometimes perhaps faith is both
those things. It has a powerful sense of the protection of God, of survival in
battle as a sign of God’s providence. It is written out of experience’s of life
in the midst of death. It can to some seem callous – I knew a secretary at the Ardmore School
of Engineering where I trained who had been in France during the War and for whom the memory of people thanking
God that they were not among those shot for their support of the Resistance
made it difficult for her to believe. Perhaps we should note that this is not the only word in the Bible.
The Bible also affirms those who in faith did lose their lives in war and
conflict.
Its story is
a story of God’s love in Christ both for those who suffered and those who
survived. J D Salmond and his sister both of whom Salmond Hall is named after,
as you will know, could speak movingly of God’s care, “that underneath are the
everlasting arms” like a safety net on a construction site; but he also knew
what it was to lose a brother in the Great War, at Passchendale, and some of you
may have seen last night on TV1, his granddaughter Robyn Malcolm and
great-grandson Charlie follow George’s experiences as a signaller in the mud and
tragedy of the trenches of WWI.
The book of
Revelation speaks the language of cosmic battle, and its images reflect a sense
that in our earthly conflicts there are other things going on; the powerful
evocative symbolism, words drenched in meanings which touch us deeply but elude
our definition, of things that we don’t want to believe, but speak to truths
that connect to us in alarming depth. Whatever else these promises of victory
and last battle might mean, the drama and force of the vision of New Jerusalem
and a new heaven and a new earth connect, not just with a romantic England
troubled by industrialisation as in Blake’s poem, or with a not so green God’s
own New Zealand, centuries later, but with a faith that in all the chaos of
humanity, the reality of evil, and the astonishing power of good, God will have
the last word.
Jesus
teaching about people who seem to be the losers who are blessed, may also seem
impossible – a standard we cannot reach, a work which Christians who believe in
salvation by faith cannot even try to attain and perhaps shouldn’t. I don’t
think so.
One of the
features of the experience of war that soldiers do talk about, is what it meant
to them in terms of friendship, of who you could rely on, on the qualities of
life that really mattered. These were things that they discovered. Many of those qualities are here,
in Jesus teaching. They are qualities tested and proved in community;
communities like Knox College, Salmond Hall, and the School of Ministry. They
are a gift and a promise for us to appropriate and realise.
Like others
gathering today we are caught up in communities which connect the experiences,
learnings and failures of War to life together today. There are those for whom
the experience of War was first hand and personal, memories of waste of life and
yet the call of God. Some may have served in current and recent conflicts as
peacekeepers in East Timor or the Middle East. For other generations, including
largely my own, the experience of War is mediated through the lives of others,
fathers and grandfathers who were in Vietnam Malaya Korea, in WWII in the
Pacific, in North Africa, Greece, Crete or Italy, who served in the armed
forces, airforce, army, navy or merchant marine. Our mothers and grandmothers
who lost brothers fathers husbands and sons; generations who have stories some
of which they cannot tell and many of which they cannot forget. There are family
stories which go back to the Great War to Anzac itself, to families of brothers
lost one by one, leaving to others the farms, the homes, the families and the
young country to which they would never return.
Our memories
and links may also be to those whose faith and courage and conviction lead them
to speak out against these wars and war itself, people accused of cowardice who
showed a bravery of a different kind, who marched to a different drum, and who
paid a sacrifice of which it is at last possible to be proud.
Of course
there were many in all these events for whom participation was not a matter of
conviction so much as an absence of choice. Today we remember and we honour them
all.
But I want to
return to those images on the order of service.
The bottom is
taken from the cover of a souvenir printed in Dunedin and given to school
children in NZ as a souvenir. It is also an interpretation of what that meant at
the time. The person who is best to talk to us about the detail of its symbolism
and flags is the Ab Epistilus, John Milne, who in his studies is already an
authority on New Zealand’s involvement and history.
The tone is
one of victory over an evil and the celebration of sacrifices in a just cause.
From a later perspective one is sure about the evil, wishing also to honour the
sacrifice, but rather less certain about the justice of the cause, and doubtful
about the way in which the conflict might still properly be called a great war.
The quote
from Bishop George Bell has a different perspective again.
A link with
us and Bell, is that Bell was responsible for the migration to New Zealand of
the German Helmut Rex, whose memorial plaque is on my right in this chapel.
Helmut had trained for the ministry in the Confessing Church in Germany in 1936
to 38. His fiancé Renate had a Jewish mother and they fled separately and
secretly to London where they were married in February 1939. Rex and Renate were
some of a group of 90 pastors families that Bell helped migrate, but the only
ones who came to NZ.
During WWI
Bell was secretary to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Randall Davidson. After the
war he became involved with Archbishop Söderblom of Sweden and the Life and Work
movement which paralleled the ecumenical streams of Faith and Order and the
International Missionary Council which lead to the formation of the World Council
of Churches in 1948. He was strongly committed to church union and to
inter-church relationships. He believed in the art of the possible and worked to
create the instruments and documents which would make it actually possible for
Christians of different traditions to function together and address the
missionary needs of Christian countries like those in Europe on both sides of
the War who had lost their way in social injustice, inequality, materialism and
who faced new threats in the growth of communism in Russia and national
socialism in Hitler’s Germany.
From 1933
Bell came in contact with the young Dietrich Bonhoeffer and became an important
ally of the Confessing Church in Germany. Like Churchill Bell warned of the
seriousness of the threat that Hitler presented and like Churchill was regarded
as a dangerous warmonger. The International Affairs group of the Church of
England was dominated by a bishop sympathetic to the regime emerging in Germany
and Austria, and Bonhoeffer explained to Bell that it was perhaps difficult for
Englishmen to understand the evil that was represented by Mr Hitler.
Bell acted to
help some of Jewish descent at least to migrate. Bonhoeffer for a time took that
opportunity himself, but returned. His is another story, but during the War he
and Bell were able to meet in Sweden. Bell took back to Britain information on
the opposition to Hitler and unsuccessfully pled with the British government to
distinguish between the Hitler regime and the German people. Alone in the House
of Lords, as a Bishop, he passionately condemned the area bombing of German
civilians in Dresden and Hamburg, as undermining any possible theory of just war
or tactical necessity. In 1944, it was not unconnected to his opposition to the
conduct of the war that he was passed over for the position of Archbishop of
Canterbury.
Bonhoeffer
was hung in the last weeks of World War II sending to Bell through a fellow
prisoner, “Tell him that this is for me the end, but also the beginning – with
him I believe in the principle of our Universal Christian Brotherhood which
rises above all national hatreds and that our victory is certain.”
In
Christ Church College Cathedral Oxford, Bell’s old College, in a memorial
unveiled by Her Majesty the Queen in 2000, are Bell’s own words:
“No nation,
no church, no individual, is guiltless, without repentance and without
forgiveness, there can be no regeneration.”
It is to that
insight and to that commitment which the voices of Anzac may also be calling us.
John
Roxborogh
Anzac Day Hymn, (words Shirley Murray, music Colin Gibson © 2005)
Honour the dead, our country’s fighting brave,
honour our children left in foreign grave,
where poppies blow and sorrow seeds her flowers,
honour the crosses marked forever ours.
Weep for the places ravaged by our blood,
weep for the young bones buried in the mud,
weep for the powers of violence and greed,
weep for the deals done in the name of need.
Honour the brave whose conscience was their call,
answered no bugle, went against the wall,
suffered in prisons of contempt and shame,
branded as cowards in our country’s name.
Weep for the waste of all that might have been,
weep for the cost that war has made obscene,
weep for the homes that ache with human pain,
weep that we ever sanction war again.
Honour the dream for which our nation bled,
held now in trust to justify the dead,
honour their vision on this solemn day,
peace known in freedom, peace the only way.