Sermon at Sunday Service from S.Étiènne de Caen (Abbaye aux Hommes), broadcast on Radio 4, Sunday 6th June 2004
Reading: Romans 8: 31-end
I was not around when the Allied Forces crossed the Channel on that memorable day on the 6th June, sixty years ago. But I can appropriately ask the question – what were my parents doing? My father was serving as a Military Intelligence Officer, based in Stockholm, in neutral Sweden. One of his duties was to liaise with the Danish Resistance, as they worked for their country’s liberation. That involved him keeping them informed about allied bombing raids in places like Copenhagen. My mother was living in Århus, Jutland, where her father was the local Bishop. On D-Day, she was together with her parents and her sister, listening to the news on an illegal radio set: she once told me that everyone believed it would all happen – it was just a question of when. My parents were, therefore, yet to meet. But in their small way, one in Sweden, the other in Denmark, they rejoiced, along with so many others, to hear the news as it slowly came in of the successful arrival on the Normandy coast of all those troops. It is hard for those of us who weren’t there to imagine the stormy journey from all over the South of England, with Portsmouth at the centre, a city with a proud sea-faring tradition going back many centuries.
All this may well send a chill of excitement up the spine, as we tap the collective memory of the twentieth century’s second tragic European conflict. Here on that day in Caen, the Church of S. Étiènne, St. Stephen, the first Christian martyr, became the refuge-place for fifteen hundred people from the area, and the dead were buried in the courtyard. Moreover, the memories of the war veterans which we have just heard cannot fail to move us, as they recall events in their lives which were so formative that they may seem more vivid to them now than the events of the day before yesterday. Today’s reading speaks of the ultimate human suffering, namely death, in terms of ‘sheep being slaughtered’. All those lives then were surrendered in the name of freedom. Whatever careful planning went into the whole operation, there was still a considerable element of risk, so that every survivor may well ask, ‘could it not have been me that was killed, and not the person next to me?’
Times have indeed changed. In the years since, people from nations that fought so hard to blow each other out of existence now meet as friends. From the ashes of destruction, a new Germany quickly arose – which has made, and continues to make, its own vital contribution to the new Europe, and that includes the life and thoughtful vitality of the Churches. The new Europe has seen the Church of England reaching official agreements with the German Evangelical Churches, to say nothing of our increasing friendship with the Roman Catholic communities elsewhere, France included. For example, two years ago, the Abbot of S. Wandrille, a monastery situated between Le Havre and Rouen, not all that far from here, became an Ecumenical Canon of Honour of our Cathedral in Portsmouth: which means that he, a Roman Catholic Benedictine monk, has his own special seat in an Anglican Cathedral.
There is so much to be thankful for in all these friendships. But we live in a world with new dangers, or perhaps they are just old ones dressed up in new forms. In any case, one may well ask, what is the point of the various European Churches getting together when many European nations are increasingly sceptical about Christianity? Perhaps the scars of the wars of the last century are so deep that we Europeans have been left with an innate suspicion of any kind of authority, political or ecclesiastical; a suspicion of the way events are sometimes reported; a suspicion of the way public debate is conducted; a suspicion even of what it is to have a common way of life at all. Europe’s history makes many peoples’ search for God an increasingly private, anonymous experience, which occasionally bursts out into the public arena, as on an occasion like today. But however private and anonymous we may want our lives to be, we cannot avoid facing, especially at a time like this, big questions about the meaning of life, the challenge to use freedom responsibly, especially when it is hard-won, and the sheer fact that belief is not only a human need, but may even be true.
All of which makes this service even more important. Many are the reasons which have brought us here. But there is one thing that we have in common: it is a conviction that life is about more than what it seems to be on the surface, that greed and violence are far from being the answer to why we human beings are on this planet, and that they can be conquered by the victory of mercy, of reconciliation, and of peace. Mercy, reconciliation, peace: these are just a few of the ways we sometimes describe God, who is the source of our life, and the road to every search for meaning in a harsh, violent and unforgiving world.
But at the end of today’s reading we ourselves are described as ‘more than conquerors’ – which means not just winning, but winning resoundingly, without any further contest. For anyone who has been tested to the limits by life, whether in warfare, or indeed anything else, the moment of greatest fear is the moment when we have no idea of what’s happening next. And yet we can and do come through, not only because of what we discover about ourselves and our comrades and companions, but because there is someone else who has gone before us, who has himself come through the very worst that human beings can do to each other, in a public, shameful, lingering death – and from whom nothing on earth, nothing in all creation, will be able to separate us.
+ KENNETH PORTSMOUTH
