Remembrance Sunday, 14th November 2021 Leatherhead War Memorial

Address given by John Swanson (Churchwarden, Leatherhead Parish Church) reflecting on the RBL's Centenary A hundred years is a long time to have been remembering.  But I fell to wondering, will our successors still be remembering in the same way in another hundred years? Later in this ceremony, we will read out the names of sons and daughters of Leatherhead who died in the armed forces of this country in the two world wars. They died because we failed: we, the collective people of this country and of other countries, failed to find a better way, and had to send young men to attempt to kill other young men and sometimes to be killed themselves. And, in the one-hundred years’ life of the Royal British Legion, we have not managed to stop doing that. We still find ourselves needing armed forces, however much reduced. Those who serve in those armed forces still sometimes die. The work of the Legion is still needed at the end of that hundred years as it has been at each point during it. So will that always be the case, for the next hundred years too?   Each of those names we will read out is a life unfulfilled, mothers and fathers and partners and children left grieving, and each death is but the tip of a pyramid of damage to bodies and minds and souls. Is that destined to be the pattern for the next hundred years, or can we find a better way?   From within our Christian faith, we offer a hope.  It was there in the words of Christ we read just now, words about a better way, a way of peace-making and humility, and hungering and thirsting after righteousness, and a complete changing of our understanding of this world so that the meek inherit the earth. Words spoken by someone who himself gave his life for us. So there is hope; there is always hope that the next hundred years does not have to be just more of the same, and we owe it to those we send to hell and back never to lose that hope. For now, though, as we stand at the end of that first hundred years of the Legion, let us remember with shame that we have failed to find a better way to order the affairs of nations. Let us pledge ourselves to seeking the way of peacemaking, the way of mercy, the way of humility, that in another hundred years’ time we will not be standing in the same place saying the same things. But let us be grateful that, when the affairs of nations reach the appalling point where we can find no better way forward than to send our army to fight another country’s army, there are still those prepared to serve us in that way, still prepared, as a novelist put it, to place their mortal body between their loved home and the desolation of war. And let us remember with profound gratitude those who, for our sake, did not come back.