Remembrance Sunday Service

Remembrance Sunday

10/11/24

Welcome to our meditation for 10th of November, Remembrance Sunday.

As we look at the wars that are going round the world just now, it bids us to ask if there is another way to deal with our conflict, because what we are doing doesn’t seem to be bringing any more peace and stability into the world.

But we will reflect on that after our prayer and reading for today.

Sermon

Quotations and statements today come from two podcasts.

A bit of optimism Episode 11: Extreme Listening featuring Deeyah Khan.

A bit of optimism Episode 28: Vulnerability featuring Brigadier General Michael Drowley

‘Love your enemy.’

You know even in Jesus’ time people would have reacted to that statement with an air of unbelief.

‘Love the Roman occupiers? You have to be kidding me. They are evil.

What they do is evil. We deserve a land of our own where we are free.’

On October the 7th last year if I had turned round to any Israeli and said, ‘Love your enemy,’ they would have justifiably said, ‘You have to be kidding me. They have brutality murdered innocent people, sexually assaulted women and girls; they have taken hundreds away as hostages. We deserve justice...we demand justice.’ 

Let me show you parts of Gaza just now.

Here is my opinion, and it is just my opinion.

If Israel believes that this is a route to peace then I would suggest that they just carry on bombing until there is no one left in Gaza.

If Israel believes they will have peace only when the last member of Hamas is gone, then they have to kill everyone in Gaza.

Because every bomb that has killed a member of Hamas has probably created three new members of Hamas.

All they have done is recruit the next generation of terrorists.

For every innocent father or mother they have killed, their children will rise up.

For every innocent child that has been killed, parents will have been radicalized.

If the question we are trying to ask is, ‘How do we find peace?’

Then I know for sure that this isn’t the answer.

The trouble is that ‘Love your enemies,’ seems so wishy washy.

‘Love your enemies,’ sounds like you are offering yourself to be a doormat.

Let me tell you about Deeyah Khan.

Deeyah Khan is an award winning journalist that made the mistake of talking about multi-culturism in a positive light on social media and she ended up with death threats. To the extent that the police were warning her not to walk across the windows in her house because that could give shootists a silhouette to target.

So she decided to make a documentary, to find out what made these people tick. What made them the way they were?

And she decided that she wasn’t going to make a documentary about how evil they were, because that would achieve nothing. 

Her documentary was called, ‘White Right: Meeting the enemy.’

Normally these white supremacists don’t talk to journalist; they are just suspicious of them. But they trusted her enough that they invited her to a rally, which ended up becoming the riots of Charlottesville. She was not only the only non white person there, she was a Muslim non white woman filming in the middle of this race based riot in the middle of hundreds of white supremacists....and she was safe.

How did they come to trust her?

It was her attitude.

Paraphrasing her, ‘Here’s the thing...it is easy to say they are evil, easy to say they are despicable, deplorable.

But I went in wanting to see their humanity, to listen to what they wanted to say, I wanted them to know that I thought that what they wanted to say was worth listening to.’

Here is an unspoken truth. Often we see our enemies and feel they have lost the right to be listened to. Look at our own government. During ‘The Troubles’ our government was adamant that they would not talk to terrorists.

Deeyah Khan saw that the alternative to violence was dialogue.

Violence is easy, dialogue is difficult.

Because in dialogue you might hear things about yourself that you don’t want to hear.

She also saw that when you take dialogue off the table, often the only thing you encourage is violence.

To people who feel broken and unheard often violence is a show of strength,

it reassures them that they are worthy, that they are in control of a situation that they feel they have no control in.

People who don’t respect them now fear them, and isn’t fear a type of respect?

So Deeyah went into her conversations with the leader of the white supremacists  presuming that he saw himself as the good guy, that they saw himself as doing the right thing to defend themselves.

She then wanted to know why they felt they needed to defend themselves.

Why did they feel the way they did, and treat others the way they did?

She sat down with Neo-Nazi leader and they talked for five hours.

Then they talked again and again and again.

Here was her discovery.

She thought that behind everything they did was hatred,

hatred and fear,

hatred and fear and prejudice...and she discovered she was wrong.

Behind everything else was love.

She discovered that many of these men were rejected by others, then someone came along and told them they are valuable, not rejected,

they are loved, not despised,

they are seen as having potential, they are not just broken,

and they offered them a place to belong to...and that created such loyalty, such love.

Now here’s the twist.

Deeyah, talked this Neo-Nazi leader for over three years. More importantly, the way she listened to him with respect, changed him.

Because she listened to him, he began to listen to her. And three years later he felt he had to leave the organisation completely.

Here’s the truth I think Jesus was pointing to.

When we see others as the enemy we treat them as different from us...and because they are different from us we believe we can treat them differently.

They are expendable, they deserve no mercy, we cannot trust them.

Whereas Jesus saw that we all basically have the same humanity.

Everyone wants to feel that they matter,

everyone wants to feel that they are heard, and seen and valued.

Treat all others like that, and we end up with a different world.

Not that it is easy.

Because if this is to happen, it has to happen with us first.

Are there people in our lives that are our enemies?

It is easy to dehumanize them, easy to feel superior to them, but then what happens next?

Easy to have imaginary conversations where we put them in their place and show them up to be the little, pathetic people that we think they are.

But what happens next?

I want to give you a solution from the military.

I have never been in the military.

I find bits of the military strange.

For instance their medal system.

You have a system where the important thing is to follow orders, from the moment you join the army it is about training people to follow orders; they tell you when to eat, when to sleep, how far to carry your kit and how long it should take you to carry that kit.

And this all makes sense.

If you put people in random stressful situations they will probably freeze, or maybe they will run away, or maybe they will go into mega fight mode...none of which are predictable, most of which would endanger themselves and others.

In those situations you need people who follow a predictable pattern,

so you train them not to panic,  to follow orders.

And yet most of their gallantry medals, bravery medals, are given out to people who don’t follow orders, who break orders to go back and save others, who put themselves at risk to save another.

As someone who is outside the army, so doesn’t understand the army, I would think that the training is to dehumanise people, so that they do things that humans wouldn’t normally do...like shoot at people.

So I was fascinated by the insights of Brigadier General Michael Drowley

Who talked about it being the exact opposite; that the greatest motivation that they want to install in a soldier is love.

That in the end what soldiers are loyal to is not the nation,

not a political system,

not even the orders...

it’s the person in the left of them and the right of them...that’s who they are loyal to.

If you are going to be in a position of great danger, and soldiers often are,

then you need to trust the people round about you to be on your side,

that no matter what...they are there for you.

So when they go into any threatening or unknown situation what is going on in their mind is. ‘I am going to take care of the person on the right and the person on the left’

Because if those people don’t trust that you are, then the whole unit is in trouble; before it starts.

That is possibly one of the main reasons so many ex-veterans struggle outside the army.

In the army they had that level of love, of trust, that those round about them are looking out for them...and in the outside they don’t know if anyone cares.

Every year we come out for Remembrance and we wonder when we will find true peace in the world.

All the people who died in all these wars, who continue to die in wars round the world, did it to secure the hope of peace.

We only honour them when we strive for peace.

But we only do that when we recognise the humanity in us all,

the need everyone has to feel that they matter,

that everyone wants to feel that they are heard, and seen and valued.

If we can treat all others like that,

if we just continually look at those to our left and right and think...’I have you, I am watching over you, I care for you,’ 

Then I believe we will be closer to peace than any bomb that is dropped.

‘Love your enemies.’