Embrace the good – Bishop of Ely’s Remembrance Day Message
The Bishop of Ely, Rt Revd Stephen Conway, said in his Remembrance Sunday sermon in Downham Market that it is important to “embrace the good which God brings out of suffering and sacrifice”.
In a very personal address, Bishop Conway talked of the effects war had had on his own family and of his time as Bishop of Ramsbury in Wiltshire where “I was very conscious of men going off on operations in Iraq and Afghanistan from our many army bases.”
The Bishop reminded his congregation that “The courage and heroism and struggle for justice we celebrate today does not disguise the pity and waste of war – the waste of young lives, the waste of devastated families and bombed cities. I have visited war cemeteries in different parts of Europe and have seen forests of crosses which should have been the rich harvest of lives lived in peace.”
But he said that the only justification for acts of war was rooted in embracing any good which resulted: “As Christians, we are never more alive than when we live thankfully to God. As we thank God for those who have given their lives for this country and for world peace during the last hundred years or so, we can only justify the wars in which our young people are still fighting if we are prepared to embrace the good which God brings out of their suffering and sacrifice.”
In a timely visit on Friday to Marshalls in Cambridge Bishop Conway “saw some of the wonderful engineering which delivers sophisticated mobile units to operational areas to be hospitals, kitchens and a whole range of services not only to troops but to local people.”
He added: “Having ridden in one, it was great to see the enduring Hercules transport, beloved of many air forces, and I gave thanks to God for all the wonderful medical personnel of the RAF using the Hercules to bring seriously wounded soldiers back to the UK for life-saving treatment. Here is a paradox of war: we fight ultimately to save life and witness in time of strife both the worst and the best of humanity. Let us commit ourselves to revealing the best in our own lives.”
And the Bishop offered another paradox in the very act of Remembrance: “ There is another paradox, too. We tend to think that Remembrance Day services are for older people and their memories. But I have usually calculated that through the turnout of uniformed organisations and grieving families living with the loss of brothers and sisters and parents right now, most of whom are themselves under thirty, makes Remembrance-tide more about the young than about anybody, even if the young we remember were nineteen or twenty when they died ninety-seven years ago at the beginning of the First World War.”
14th November 2011