Bible reading: Isaiah 65:17-25.

Message.

Memories are tricky things. We may think we have a perfect recollection of something that happened five minutes – or fifty years – ago; yet that memory may be inaccurate or completely wrong. To take a trivial example: Moira may say to me, “I asked you to bring me the biscuits” and I may reply, “No, you didn’t”; this leads to an argument. Each of us may be 100% certain of what we said or heard, yet one of us must be mistaken. Much more seriously, there have been cases of parents and carers being taken to court because the children they looked after have powerful memories of being abused by them many years before. Those children, now adults, are convinced that their memories were genuine when, in fact, nothing ever happened. How hard it must be for judge and jury to sift the evidence and come to a verdict.

Psychologists have studied this so-called “false memory” syndrome, which they define as “the distorted or fabricated recollection of an event”. I must emphasise that we’re not talking about people who deliberately twist the truth, whether they be politicians saying, “We never promised that” when they blatantly did, or gold-diggers trying to squeeze a famous person for compensation; this is a phenomenon that affects all of us to a greater or lesser degree. We may think of human memory as something like a video recorder which documents and stores everything that happens with perfect accuracy and clarity. In reality, it is prone to fallacy and errors.

Why is this so? There are a number of reasons. Perhaps the most important is that memories fade over time: we may be clear about something that happened last week but few of us would be able to tell a police officer what we were doing at 11.30am on November 10^th last year (and no, you wouldn’t have been in church, as it was a Friday!,) let alone what we were doing on the same day in 2014. But it’s not just a question of our memories fading; they can also be influenced by outside information, by what we read or see or hear. Little by little those new facts become entwined with our own memories and alter them. And an unconscious element of wishful thinking may also be involved: perhaps, as a child, we were in a crowd waving at the late Queen as she passed by; over decades that has become a cherished (but false) memory of actually having shaken hands with Her Majesty.

Both Remembrance Sunday and our Christian faith are strongly rooted in memory. We remember those who have died in war, not just as a mark of respect, but with the hope that our remembering may help us avoid future wars. And Christians base their faith on the story of Jesus, in particular his death and resurrection: every Communion service is a call to eat and drink “lest we forget” the central fact of his death on the Cross – although we also look forward to his glorious return. I’d like to “unpack” both of these remembrances a little bit more. Let’s start, as is only right today, with the memory of conflict.

Now I’ve done a bit of reading about this and two things have become clear. One is that the way we remember the World Wars has changed over time. Our country was in grief after the First War: not only had so many young soldiers, sailors and airmen been killed (together with a relatively small number of British civilians), but confidence in our human civilisation had been dashed. The pain was real and affected every sector of society: sombre commemorations were the order of the day, together with the resolve that “it must never happen again”. But, of course, barely twenty years later it did happen again, although that war was often considered a noble one in which the forces of freedom were fighting the darkness of Fascism (we only discovered the horrors of the Holocaust later). The 1950s were filled with patriotic stories and films of heroic derring-do by The Few or the Dam Busters. Changes in society in the 1960s saw people thinking about the Great War in a new way: they became angry at the idea of “lions being led by donkeys” and thrown willy-nilly into battle – although officers were in fact far more likely to be killed than private soldiers. And, as personal memories of the world wars faded, the start of the 21^st century saw yet further adjustments in the ways we remember – for example, with poppy cascades down church and castle towers.

I could go into more detail, but I won’t. What I will say is that our memory of those wars has been shaped by the images and sounds that we so often see on TV or hear on the radio: not just pictures of the Blitz and D-Day or quotes from Churchill’s speeches, but also “Oh, what a lovely war” and “Blackadder”; it has become almost impossible to separate fact from legend. Harry Patch, one of the last surviving veterans of WW1, was interviewed in 2004 and ‘remembered’ aiming his machine gun at enemy soldiers’ legs rather than at their bodies. But was that an accurate memory, or was it a way for Patch’s mind to reconcile his duty as a soldier with modern sensitivities about killing? No-one would ever suggest that Patch was lying; but might his memory have been playing tricks? We’ll never know.

I said that two things became apparent as I read about Remembrance. One is that it has changed over time; the other is that what and how we remember depends on where we live. British people typically think of the carnage on the Western Front during the First World War, and the conflict in Europe during the Second, both times against Germany. The other theatres of that war, such as in Africa or the Far East, are less embedded in our consciousness, as are the non-white soldiers, sailors and airmen who fought for Britain. The French (and Channel Islanders) will of course think of their Occupation during WW2 although I think that General de Gaulle’s claim that “virtually everyone” resisted the Germans in some way has now been laid to rest; most folk just had to live their lives as best they could. Germany and Japan will clearly have their own ways of remembering; we must never forget the huge number of civilian deaths not only at Hiroshima and Nagasaki but also in Tokyo, Hamburg, Dresden and Cologne – today we’d have little compunction in calling these war crimes. But the most interesting memories are in the United States, which largely seems to think of WW2 as a war in the Pacific; and in Russia, which of course lost far more people than any other nation.

And these different remembrances still shape society: the historian Anthony Seldon believes that Germany and Japan’s defeat in WW2 made them rethink their identity and their past and so create a new future for themselves, while victorious Britain (or dare I say England?) was always harking back to dreams of its lost empire and colonies. Was the anti-Europe rhetoric around Brexit and “taking back control” a late consequence of the world wars? Perhaps it was. We should also note how Vladimir Putin invoked memories of the Soviet Union’s “Great Patriotic War” against the Nazis to justify his invasion of Ukraine.

Let’s now – more briefly! – turn to Christian remembrance. As I’ve said, this is focussed on the life, ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus, and finds its fullest expression in the Communion service or Eucharist. Indeed I have a view that Jesus deliberately instituted this commemoration in order to keep our thoughts centred on his passion; it’s such an ugly, painful and horrible event that we would naturally drift away from it. Communion draws us back to the Cross and we must beware of any tendency to prettify it. As Stuart Townend’s hymn says, we must always remember that “it was our sin that held him there”, that “his dying breath has brought us life”.

However remembrance goes back far further than Christianity, as it is central to the Jewish faith from which ours sprang. As the Hebrews were about to enter the Promised Land, Moses said, “Remember that you were slaves in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm”. This command comes at least half-a-dozen times in the book of Deuteronomy alone, and it echoes throughout the Old Testament into the Psalms and the prophets. Nehemiah restates it over 1000 years later as the Jews return from exile in Babylon and start rebuilding Jerusalem; it is repeated today as Jews celebrate Passover every year. It’s easy to see how this remembering, together with the record of centuries of persecution (all too often by Christians), has led to Zionism and the conflicts we see today.

So remembrance is powerful. It can offer consolation for people who are grieving. And it has sometimes been fostered, even manipulated, by both political and spiritual leaders in order to create a sense of civic or national pride; its rituals offer people a kind of secular religion. But, to me, it often fails in one important respect: it concentrates on the past while ignoring both the present and the future. I hope that this weekend’s ceremonies will not only hark back to the two world wars (and the too-often-forgotten other conflicts in Korea, Suez, Malaya, the Balkan states, the Falklands, Iraq and Afghanistan, among so many others which did not involve Britain) but will also look outwards to the Middle East, Yemen, the Ukraine and other places where people – not necessarily British – are still dying, often as innocent victims. As I’ve said, remembrance of the Great War a century ago was often linked to the fervent hope that such wars could never happen again. But conflict seems never-ending and that hope seems more and more impossible to sustain.

However there is another side to this. Inspired, we believe, by God, the prophet Isaiah wrote some words which seem to fly in the face of Jewish (and Christian) tradition: “Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. See, I am doing a new thing; now it springs up, do you not perceive it?”

Now Isaiah was well-acquainted with his people’s history and did, in fact, ask his readers to remember what God had done for them in the past. So I don’t think he’s telling them to ignore that history: they couldn’t, as it had given them their identity and shaped them into the people they were. But I do think that he was saying that they mustn’t become imprisoned by the past or get trapped by the memory of past glories – and failures.

A pastor in Singapore comments on this verse: “Don’t keep looking in your rear-view mirror. Although there is a time and place to recollect past events to glean its wisdom, we don’t stay there. Don’t expect past victories to sustain us. The past is a great place to learn from but it’s a terrible place to live in. Some of us hang on to our baggage for too long. Learn from them and let them go! If we live in the past, we will never embrace the future God has in store for us”.

Christians are people who remember: I’ve said that. But we are also people who look forward, who have hope – after all, our Communion serves not only looks back to Christ’s Passion but also ahead “until he comes” to inaugurate a new creation. It’s hard to hope in a world that’s so full of death, hate, sorrow and destruction; warfare seems to be a constant in our experience, and we may well despair at the shocking news coming from Gaza, Lebanon or the Ukraine. Yet we somehow must still use our remembering as a springboard for hope, we must still yearn for our leaders to show sense and work for the common good rather than narrow national aims, we must still say our prayers for peace and harmony although God never seems to answer them. Our remembrance cannot be rose-tinted, nostalgic, partisan or merely regretful, but must jolt us into a fresh recognition of the horrors of war and a desire to do anything we can to bring about shalom peace for everyone. If it doesn’t do that, it will have been an utter waste of time.