THE WORLD IS AT WAR - FOR REMEMBRANCE DAY

THE WORLD IS AT WAR

If we listen to the news on radio or TV or open the paper (especially on a Sunday) – we are confronted with an avalanche of upsetting news, seemingly screaming for our attention – and let’s just look around in our immediate neighbourhood:

• ·         The students are at war with the universities (and visa versa!) 
• ·         The leading political party is at war with itself (and any opposition worth its salt will gladly join!)
• ·         And when we as individuals get behind our steering wheel we seem to be at war with each other ….

Looking beyond what we call home to “Big Brother” – the United States, where over the last few months the two presidential candidates have been in a much publicized mud slinging war ….

If you consult Google, the figures may vary of how many people died in the two Big Wars – reportedly sixteen million in World War I and an estimated sixty million in World War II.  Mind boggling figures and seemingly beyond comprehension what human kind was and still is capable of doing to one another – certainly not very human and definitely not kind.

There can’t be many people around who still remember World War I!  So how do we get to Remembrance Day?  From what I was able to ascertain, it was an Australian journalist who wrote in this regard to the London Evening News where King George V read his letter, and decreed “So that in perfect stillness the thoughts of everyone may be concentrated on reverent remembering of the glorious dead.”

Wow, what a powerful statement, which subsequently lead to the tradition of a two minute silence at the eleventh hour on the eleventh day of the eleventh month – observed by the Commonwealth of Nations.

What do you find in the Bible regarding the above?  In John 16:33 we read:

“I have told you this so that you will have peace by being united to me.  The world will make you suffer but be brave!  I have defeated the world!”

Sjoe, I don’t know about you, but I hardly can imagine how brave those soldiers, especially the young men, must have been in both those wars.  Not only to give up their homes and their loved ones, but their lives?!?   Isn’t that very similar to the calling of Jesus to follow him?  And yet, how powerful that call to enlist, to fight the worldly enemy must have been in those days?  If we look back in history on that time – how shockingly sad:  so no wonder that the commemoration of that day of peace when World War I ended, should serve as a reminder not only of the fallen soldiers, but also for today, to be kind and loving to one another.

Already early in the war in 1914 a certain Lawrence Binyon wrote the words that came to honour many young men who never returned from the war, and the soldiers who still give their lives today:

For the Fallen:

                        They shall grow not old
                        As we  that are left grow old.
                        Age shall not weary them,
                        Nor the years condemn.
                        At the  going down of the sun and in the morning
                        We will remember them.

How comforting then are the words in Revelation 21:7 from today’s reading:

“He will wipe away all tears from their eyes, there will be no more death, no more grief or crying or pain.  The old things have disappeared …”

And yet, over the years, we do not seem to have learned our lesson from the atrocities of any of the wars.  Money, power and greed will possibly always remain the driving force behind yet another war. 

And these wars are about His Creation – the earth – the land and its resources, like oil in the previous century.  For all we know, the next war may be about another, even more precious gift of the earth – water.  In the Old Testament reading in Isaiah 2:4 we have heard

“He will settle disputes among great nations.  They will hammer their swords into ploughs and their spears into pruning knives.”

Music in our ears?  If only.  So many centuries ago, and where is the learning curve humankind has taken?  But we can cultivate that promised everlasting peace:  In our hearts, with the Grace of God, with the help of the Holy Spirit, and more encouragement in today’s Psalm 46:9 and 10: 

“He stops wars all over the world, he breaks bows, destroys spears and says, And know that I am God, supreme among the nations, supreme over the World”.

Between you and me, we won’t be able to stop the next war, but what we can stop is the fighting in our competitive world – for attention, for position, for power;  the fighting to be first, even if that first only means poll position at the next traffic light. 

“God is with us” is the title of our psalm and in 1 John 4:8 we are reassured of what we know:

            “Whoever does not love, does not know God, for God is love.”

So why fight if we can, no must, love and in the Exodus 14:14 we hear loud and clear:

            “The Lord will fight for you, and there is no need for you to do anything!”

So let God do the fighting, let God do the revenging, and let us find the true happiness as declared in the Sermon on the Mount in today’s Gospel.  After all, I am looking forward to the New Heaven and New Earth as in Revelation 21.  Are you?

Michael Nuechtern