I was invited to take an ANZAC day service at a local
retirement village care facility.
It is hard to know how to speak at ANZAC day. I have always
been drawn to stories of daring, courage and bravery. War stories of men and
women who have put them selves in harms way and made the ultimate sacrifice for
what they believe in, for the sake of country out of duty, and for an over-arching
hope and vision of peace when conflict and tyranny has been opposed and
defeated.
But at the same time I am aware of the great cost and
tragedy. Death and the pain and sorrow and suffering that those who serve in
war and armed conflict and experience war suffer. There are not many of us who
it has not touched. I was born in 1963 which makes me the last of the baby bom
generation, those whose parents served in world war two, both my father and
mother served during that war. My father in the Airforce and my mother as a
WAAF, neither saw action. I have a
grandfather, whom I never met who was wounded at Passchendaele, on that darkest
of day for New Zealand troops. I have an
uncle who both received a field promotion and was injured and invalided home at
the battle of El Alamein in 1942. In a parish I served in in Tauranga one of
the men who came back from world war two always told his wife he had been
overseas during the war and had seen enough and simply wanted to stay home. It
was only towards the end of his life he talked of being in the artillery and
knowing that every time he pulled the rope and fired his weapon that it meant
death and destruction and it still hurt and haunted him. Another acquaintance
was a child during the blitz in London and is instantly transported back to
that time when she hears the thunder and lightning on a stormy night. For many of you the people and the scares are
closer. Our returned service men and
women from modern battlefields speak of wounds that don’t bled and the deep
scares within them.
The passage from Isaiah speaks of the hope of peace and
prosperity and justice and righteousness that the reign of God would bring to
our hurting and suffering world. A hope for the end of war and its practise
fading from memory. Our Gospel reading speaks of the great sacrificial
love that Jesus showed by laying down
his life for his sheep. A gospel hope
for peace with God and the reconciliation of human beings together in the
Kingdom of God. Today we remember a similar sacrifice and hold a similar hope.
We remember the sacrifice of those who died in war and in the process peace
keeping and we say that we will not forget them. Maybe the best way to do that
is the work of peace. Peace at a personal level as we forgive one another and
look to love one another as Christ loved us. On a community level as we seek to
resolve conflict, injustice and oppression with compassion and commitment to
justice. On a societal scale as we are
willing to speak and act to resolve and to mend, to reconcile and come
together. So our children will not know the pain and sorrow that our parents
and grandparents have known.
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