In the United Kingdom the Sunday closest to November 11th is kept as Remembrance Sunday, like Memorial Day in the United States. We remember those who have served in the Armed Forces, those who died and those who survived. It is my privilege to preach at St. John’s tomorrow on this day. I will put my sermon behind a cut.
Sermon delivered at St. John the Evangelist, 10 am.
Readings: II Sam 1:17-27; Ps 23; Rev 21:1-8; Mt 5:1-12
In the name of God, the one, the Undivided Trinity. AMEN.
November 9th, 1938 as much as December 7th, 1941, is a day that will live ina infamy. For on that day, 70 years ago today, the most evil action of the twentieth century began: the Holocaust of the Jews of Europe.
Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass, turned the persecution of the Jews from a merely legal and social one to a physical persecution that resulted in the deaths of 6 million Jews and, in total, the death of 34 million soldiers and sailors and 16 million civilians during World War Two.
Many of you will vividly remember World War II. My father and my uncles fought in that war. My father volunteered for the United States Navy and served in the South Pacific as an airplane mechanic on the aircraft carrier USS John Hancock. He came under fire at the battle of Guadalcanal. My uncles served in the Army and the Navy in various places, including England, where my great-uncle met and married my great-aunt, who was from Birmingham.
Southwark suffered quite a bit during the war. There is a plaque on the side of the library on the Walworth Road commemmorating those who died in the bombardment of the borough. You, or your parents or grandparents, will have been part of the civilian populace here who had to take shelter in bomb shelters night after night, trying to escape the bombs that rained down from the skies.
War has been part of human history for as long as we are aware of human history. Strong men struggled for control of resources and people removed from their own spheres of influence. In the reading from Second Samuel, we hear David lamenting over King Saul and his son Jonathan, both slain in battle. In the verses just before the reading we have heard, we hear that David