Remembrance Sunday

[A sermon given via Zoom to the Oxford Unitarians congregation on Sunday, 8^th of November 2020]

(Readings: Parable of the Old Man and the Young by Wilfred Owen and Matthew 5:1-12)

Why are we here? No, that question has not leaked into this sermon from one of my philosophy of religion essays – I mean, why have you attended this Remembrance Sunday service. The reasons why members of a congregation attend any service are often numerous. I like to think that if there are 50 regular attenders of a Unitarian congregation then there would, at a minimum, 100 different reasons why they attend any given service.

However, Remembrance Sunday is not just any service. It is relatively unique in that it has both a strong civic and religious presence in this country’s calendar. Because of this aspect, and for many other reasons, Remembrance Sunday is not immune from controversy. It seems that it is only due to a global pandemic and a bitterly contested US Presidential election that the issue of what colour poppy one wares or does not ware is not splashed across the headlines of newspapers this year.

Unitarian congregations are far from immune form getting involved in this almost yearly debate. This congregation and the college it calls home are no exception to this. L. P. Jacks, Unitarian Minister and Principle of Manchester College from 1915-1931 was a keen supporter of the British war effort (of what would become known as the First World War) and, writing for The New Republic magazine in September 1915, he attacked George Bernard Shaw and, in sharp contrast, stated his firm belief, “that twelve months of war have brought to England a peace of mind such as she has not possessed for generations.” However, the college later also benefited from having Sidney Spencer as Principle. Spencer was a Unitarian Minister with strong pacifist convictions. So much so that, during the second world war, he refused to be forced by the state to either serve on the front lines or be forced to do war work at home. As a result, he was handed a jail term of 14 day and, as far as I know, was the only conscientious objector to later become Principle of an Oxford college.

With two influential Unitarian ministers and Principles of the college having completely different views on issues of war and conflict, is it any wonder that the issue of Remembrance Sunday can still cause heated debate in Unitarian circles today?

As a result, being asked to preach on Remembrance Sunday can be a challenging prospect for even the most seasoned Unitarian Ministers. When a typical Unitarian congregation of 15 is capable of having at least 30 contested views on comparatively easy subjects, how should we approach an issue that so many people feel so strongly about for so many reasons?

For me, being on Zoom this year has given us an opportunity. If we are to remember those who served this Remembrance Sunday, surely, we can all agree that a great aid to us doing so are the voices of those who actually experienced the realities of war and conflict first-hand?

Thanks to the considerable online oral history archives at the Imperial War Museum I was able to bring you all a short snippet from of hours of recorded recollections by a veteran named Dr Reginald Saxton.

Why did I Dr Saxton’s voice from the many available? Well, it was a biased choice on my part because I knew him, although, sadly, only for a few years when I was very young. He was friends with my Dad and used to come to our home in rural Sussex regularly for coffee. I remember that it was always my job to push the plunger on the cafetière. It is only, however, after he died that I was able to find out more about this family friend and what he experienced.

Reginald was born in Cape Town, South Africa but spent much of his young life in the Indian hills before being sent off, first Repton School, and then to Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge where he studied medicine. After completing his medical studies at Barts and becoming a GP in Reading is where Dr Saxton did something extortionary. Having learned of the stand that the people of the Spanish Republic were making against General Franco’s fascist forces, he decided to leave the security of General Practice behind by joining the British Medical Unit of the International Brigades. These brigades consisted of volunteers from all over the world who had volunteered to fight on the side of the Spanish Republic.

As Reginald was, by his own admission, not suited to preforming major surgery he was given the task of heading up a mobile blood transfusion unit. The Spanish Civil War was one of the first example of modern urban warfare as opposed to the trench-based wars that preceded it. What the medical teams quickly realised was that quick access to blood transfusions often made the difference between life and death when faced with the truly horrific injuries that such warfare can produce.

In his oral history interview he talks about who “drained” the transfusion team were. He meant that it at least two senses, firstly, as they were such a small team and the casualty rate was so high, that over many weeks regular shift work was almost imposable. Instead it was common practice that they world work on their feat for a period of at least two days at a time before they could grab a few hours of precious sleep. Also, because supplies of blood product where always low, they often donated blood themselves while working.

Despite this Reginald was able to send back regular reports of his activities to the Lancet medical journal. These reports tell their own grizzly tail. Eventually supplies of blood became so thin that Dr Saxton was forced to experiment with the use of cadaver blood – blood from dead bodies – in blood transfusion.

I’ve spared you a lot of the more graphic detail of what Dr. Reginald Saxton must have seen. However not all people have the privilege of being able to be shielded from the stark realities and horrors of war. We do not have to look far too find people who have seen some of that horror. Indeed, my own granddad lost his first girlfriend to bombing in the London blitz and saw the V1 rocket hit a tram that his best friend had got on only moments before.

Even younger generations are not immune to these experiences. I remember reading in a magazine a few years ago about how, I think it was a Baptist organisation, arranged for a child psychologist to go to a refugee camp in Lebanon that housed many of the refugee families that had fled the war in Syria. The psychologist had gathered the children together and gave them each a piece of paper with a line drawn down the middle. On one side the children were to draw what their life looked like before the war, and on the other, what it looked like after the war. On child, who could not have been older than 10, drew a typical drawing of him and his family outside their house with the sun shining in a blue sky to represent his life before the war. The other side of the page, the side that represented his life after the war, the child had painstakingly covered every inch of it in black. I hate to think about what a young child must have witnessed to be forced to change to the abstract in order to communicate something of their emotions.

Wilfred Owen’s poem ‘The Parable of the Old Man and The Young’ also forces us to think about a generation of young people affected by war, a generation who fought in World War 1. Owen’s depiction of Abraham bares some similarities of later Jewish versions of the Abraham and Isaac story, some of these revisions feature an Abraham that is so desperate to please God by sacrificing his son that, even after his knife is melted by the tears of angles, a desperate Abraham tries to cut Isaac’s throat using only his thumbnail. Owen’s argument is clear, the ruling class of Europe, unwilling to sacrifice their national pride, slaughtered millions of people instead.

Jesus in his Sermon on the Mount, tells us “blessed are the peace makers.” Yet, given some of the horrors of war, should we strive for peace at any price? Not according to the great US Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King, who once said,

Regardless of how I conclude this sermon, the debates around what price we should pay to never see the horrors of conflict again is bound to continue. As it should do. However, I will say this. It is vital that we pay attention to the voices of those who have experienced the sharp end of war. Not only do those people often need our support, but their stories allow us to be reminded that, when engaged in such debates, the human lives at stake are all too real.

Amen.