A remembrance Sermon
Remembrance 2009
Missing the point
Two things have struck me in this past week or which relate to this Remembrance Sunday observance which we have all come to be a part of today. Firstly I was musing on a time when, on a day with colleagues we spent some time discussing what we would be doing this Sunday and how we would approach Remembrance day (sometimes we need a bit of prompting or we can end up saying the same thing again and again).
Anyway, in the course of conversation with these colleagues one of them talked about how when he was a curate the Vicar who was training him would have the press come and attend his Sunday services on remembrance day because this Vicar wouldn’t do anything special for the Sunday and would always spend his sermon railing against what he called ‘a glorification of war and violence’ and the papers came to report year on year how this Vicar responded to Remembrance Sunday. This prompted one clergyperson in the group to become quite agitated about how Remembrance Sunday does glorify war, and how the Church of England makes too much of it. I was just about to chime in with some kind of, probably less than measured response to this, when another person in the discussion just said ‘nonsense’ and the conversation stopped there. [more]
Missing the point
Two things have struck me in this past week or which relate to this Remembrance Sunday observance which we have all come to be a part of today. Firstly I was musing on a time when, on a day with colleagues we spent some time discussing what we would be doing this Sunday and how we would approach Remembrance day (sometimes we need a bit of prompting or we can end up saying the same thing again and again).
Anyway, in the course of conversation with these colleagues one of them talked about how when he was a curate the Vicar who was training him would have the press come and attend his Sunday services on remembrance day because this Vicar wouldn’t do anything special for the Sunday and would always spend his sermon railing against what he called ‘a glorification of war and violence’ and the papers came to report year on year how this Vicar responded to Remembrance Sunday. This prompted one clergyperson in the group to become quite agitated about how Remembrance Sunday does glorify war, and how the Church of England makes too much of it. I was just about to chime in with some kind of, probably less than measured response to this, when another person in the discussion just said ‘nonsense’ and the conversation stopped there. [more]
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