Growing up in the late 1950s at a time when people in Britain – we were told – had “never had it so good”, I used to look forward to Remembrance Sunday. Instead of meeting for Sunday School in the rather dreary church hall with its own peculiar smell, we joined the crowd that gathered around the War Memorial across the road. Prayers were said, wreaths were laid, we observed the Two Minutes’ Silence, the Last Post was sounded, we wore our poppies with pride, and we all had a cup of tea afterwards. Strangely enough I don’t remember singing any hymns: perhaps that was left for the indoor service in church; nor can I remember it ever raining!

What’s interesting is that I, at least, thought of Remembrance Sunday as something which looked back to the distant past. Yes, I was a child; but that was still a rather strange of thinking, as the Second World War had finished less than two decades before. (I wonder now what my parents, who’d fled from Hitler’s regime in Germany, thought of it all). You see, I was blissfully unaware of the Korean war, of the Malaya ‘emergency’, or even of the atom bomb tests being carried out by Britain, America and the Soviet Union; that was partly due to my age but also because world news travelled much more slowly than today and only entered our house through newspapers and the wireless. The world, at least to me, seemed to be a safe and peaceful place. My illusions, as for so many of my generation, were to be rudely shattered by the Cuba crisis and the horrors of Vietnam.

You’ll know by now that I’m no longer a fan of Remembrance Sunday (in fact I dread leading worship on it) for a host of reasons which I’ll gladly tell you about if you ask me! And one of the reasons is this: every year we say “never again” and pray for peace, yet every year  those words sound empty and our prayers seem to go unheeded. That of course is particularly true this year because of the war in Ukraine which in so many ways – heavy shelling, scorched earth, ravaged cities, the flow of fleeing civilians, even trench warfare – seems to be a terrible throwback to earlier conflicts. Although (as far as we know) the British military isn’t involved directly, countries such as ours are still “up to their necks” in supplying arms, offering advice and receiving refugees; there is also the economic pain which we’re all feeling and we’re also very aware that this war could escalate into all-out nuclear conflict. As the prophet Jeremiah wrote many years ago, people may say, “Peace, peace”, but there is none to be had.

That to me is a very depressing thought which leads to us asking all sorts of unanswerable questions such as: “Doesn’t God care about the pain and the death and the destruction?” or: “Why does God allow evil leaders to stay in power?”. Wars such as the one in Ukraine severely test or undermine our faith in a loving and almighty God, I’d be foolish to say that they don’t. Yet warfare seems to be an issue which the Bible takes as a normal feature of human life. For instance the Old Testament is packed full of skirmishes, disputes and battles, often (it seems) carried out with God’s explicit approval. Things are a bit different in the New Testament – we recall that Jesus told his disciples not to take up arms against the men coming to arrest him – but we mustn’t forget that the backdrop to the whole book, including the blood-curdling scenes in Revelation, is the ruthless might of Rome.

And Jesus himself seems to think that wars are unremarkable and only to be expected. Whether that’s because, as a human Jew, he’s well aware of the many battles his people have had to fight merely to survive; or whether it’s because, as the Son of God, he has witnessed the selfish ambition of rulers and nations since the start of history, I cannot say. But the fact is that the passage set by the Lectionary this Sunday is a graphic description of conflicts that have occurred many times during human history and are still in the the news today. In a prophecy which related more specifically to the Jewish revolt against Rome which took place 40 or so years after Jesus’ death, we read of great buildings such as the Temple being destroyed, wars with fears of more to come, disease, famines, arrests and persecution; the part of the chapter we didn’t read speaks of fleeing refugees, siege, looting, genocide and prisoners being led away to an uncertain future. Total war is a terrible thing and Jesus did not spare his listeners’ feelings.

Yet this whole outburst, which seems to have been provoked by a disciple’s innocent comment about the beauty and solidity of the Temple in Jerusalem, is bracketed by an amazing sentence: “Do not be terrified … when you see these things happening”. These alarming events are to be expected, God knows about them, they are in fact the necessary preludes to the Christ’s return in glory and the ultimate redemption of our planet. That thought leads us to ask more questions: did Jesus expect all these things to take place within a few decades of his life on earth; did he really intend us to live through two millennia filled with bloodshed, pain and anguish; has the eternal God forgotten how short human lifespans really are? Once again we have no sensible answers; it’s almost as if the apocalyptic events which Jesus saw as marking the end of history have become stuck or normalised, fated to keep going round and round in an endless cycle of hope and despair.

Fortunately, Jesus tells us that this cycle will eventually be broken by his return to earth “in a cloud with power and great glory”. He exhorts his disciples to not despair when they see these frightening events taking place, but to “stand up and lift up their heads, because their redemption is drawing near”. And perhaps those disciples who were still alive 40 years later when Jerusalem was ransacked and the last Jewish stronghold of Masada fell into Roman hands did keep their hopes alive by remembering what Jesus had prophesied – although we know from Peter’s letter that, even then, Christians were starting to wonder if Christ really would return to earth as he had promised. We, in a fortnight’s time, will be celebrating Advent Sunday when churches traditionally look forward to Jesus’ Second Coming; yet, year after year filled with tragedy and violence, our hope becomes increasingly forlorn. The added worries about the effects of climate change which we’ve heard much about this week only increase our sense of despondency.

I appreciate that today’s message isn’t a bundle of laughs; in fact I’m in real danger of sending you home feeling gloomier than when you arrived! Yet a day like today, and the momentous events of this year, hardly inspire hope, at least in the short term: we cannot imagine the terror and destruction in the Ukrainian cities, we wonder at the aims and tactics of the Russians, we can’t see how climate change can be reversed given that the biggest polluters of our planet did not attend COP 27, we have been frightened by some of the mood music coming from America during the mid-term elections as we know the world’s economy and security are so dependent on it. Yes, such things may be normal (or so says Jesus) and the world has in fact lived through many of them before. That doesn’t make it any easier for us to believe that the future can be better, or to pray for peace and prosperity.

Yet we have to keep on trusting God. We have to keep on believe that our trials and tribulations are indeed the birth-pains of a new creation or, to quote Paul, that creation is groaning as it expectantly waits for its final redemption and renewal. Does that mean, as some Christians think, that we simply sit back and say, “Let matters take their course, there’s nothing we can do to make this world a better place”? That’s perhaps an attractive prospect: but surely God wants his people to actively work for peace and reconciliation, to do what we can to obtain climate justice for all people, to see every person happily flourishing as he intended them to, to proclaim the Good News of Christ and his salvation. Remembrance Sunday won’t help us do that if we only look back, to the past: we need to catch a vision of God’s future as well.