'To him all of them are alive': Remembrance Sunday and the Christian hope
Luke 20:38
“He is God not of the dead, but of the living: for to him all of them are alive.” [1]
On 4th August this year, I stood in Nine Elms Military Cemetery, near the village of Thelus in northern France. I was visiting the grave of my great-grandmother’s brother, Private David Henry Beattie, 1st/4th Seaforth Highlanders. David was killed in action in the Battle of Arras, on 10th April 1917 - Easter Tuesday.
Standing at his grave was, for me, a personal pilgrimage of remembrance - remembering a young Irishman, born in 1891, a soldier of the Great War, who died, far from home and family, in the fields of France and Flanders.
But why do we remember? Why Remembrance Sunday? Why, over a century on, do we on this day remember those who fell in the service of King and Country in the Great War? Why, in this 80th anniversary year of its end, do we remember the dead of the Second World War?
We do so, fundamentally, because it is what Christians do: we prayerfully remember the departed.
In words from the traditional service of Holy Communion in the Book of Common Prayer: “And we also bless thy holy Name for all thy servants departed this life in thy faith and fear; beseeching thee to give us grace so to follow their good examples, that with them we may be partakers of thy heavenly kingdom”. [2]
We prayerfully remember the faithful departed, because of the truth proclaimed by Our Lord in the Gospel reading of this day: “He is God not of the dead, but of the living: for to him all of them are alive”.
The gracious, faithful love of God in Christ holds us, holds them after death, in the life everlasting. The faithful departed are not lost to death. They are not extinguished. They are not mere memories that will, over the generations, fade. Rather, they "rejoice upon another shore, and in a greater light". [3]
As we shall shortly confess in the Creed: “We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come”.
This is why we prayerfully remember the faithful departed - at their gravesides, in our liturgy, on this Remembrance Sunday: because they, having passed through death, know life everlasting in God.
“He is God not of the dead, but of the living: for to him all of them are alive.”
Why specifically remember the dead of two world wars?
After the body of Private David Henry Beattie was retrieved from the battlefield, a padre would have officiated at his burial.
As David served in a Scottish regiment, the padre would probably have been a minister of the Church of Scotland. Or, perhaps the padre on burial duty that day was from another nearby regiment, a clergyman of the Church of Ireland or the Church of England. Maybe it was one of the many Roman Catholic padres serving in the forces of the Crown.
The ecclesiastical tradition of the padre does not matter: what matters is that David would have been laid to rest with Christian prayer and in the shared Christian hope of the life everlasting.
Amidst the tragedy and the slaughter of both world wars, padres ministered prayer and sacrament; gave counsel and blessing; and ensured that the dead were given Christian burial.
When on this day we prayerfully remember the fallen of two world wars, we acknowledge that they were buried in the Christian hope of the life everlasting - entrusted to the One who “is God not of the dead, but of the living: for to him all of them are alive”.
The final moments of the earthly life of Private David Henry Beattie on 10th April 1917 would have been surrounded by the harsh sounds of violence: the crack of rifle shots, the dull, deadly thud of machine-gun fire, the crashing of artillery rounds, the cries of comrades.
C.S. Lewis, who had served and was wounded in the Great War, described it thus: “the frights, the cold, the smell of high explosive, the horribly smashed men still moving like half-crushed beetles, the sitting or standing corpses, the landscape of sheer earth without a blade of grass”. [4]
But, even in all that horror and death, the Christian hope of the life everlasting was not overcome, was not undone.
As is usual with cemeteries of the First and Second World Wars, a large stone Cross overlooks Nine Elms Military Cemetery. And, as is common in war graves, a cross marks David's gravestone.
It is a sign that despite the horror, the violence, the loss, the death, the redeeming love of God in the Cross and Resurrection of Jesus Christ endures, holding each soul who perished, delivering from the darkness of death, securing everlasting peace in Christ.
Today we remember. We remember the nearly 1 million servicemen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and of the British Empire, who died in the Great War, amongst them 15 sons of this parish, whose names we will soon hear, and Private David Henry Beattie. And the nearly 400,000 personnel of the United Kingdom and Commonwealth who died in the Second World War, amongst them 12 sons and 1 daughter of this parish.
In the sombre stillness of this Remembrance Sunday, we remember them prayerfully before God, in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ [5], for “He is God not of the dead, but of the living: for to him all of them are alive”.
__________
[1] From the Gospel appointed for the Third Sunday before Advent, Luke 20:27-38.
[2] BCP 2004, Holy Communion One, p.184.
[3] From the traditional Bidding Prayer for the Nine Lessons and Carols.
[4] C.S. Lewis in Surprised by Joy.
[5] From the committal prayer in BCP 2004, Funeral Services One, p.473 (as in 1662 and 1926).
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