Remembering It All

Welcome to the Knox Talks blog. Here you can find recent and past sermons relating scripture to a wide variety of topics. I would like to thank Shelley Rose for transcribing my notes into text for the blog.

Remembering It All

Scripture: Micah 3:5-12

I was surprised to find our challenging Micah lesson in the lectionary as a reading for today, and it led me to write this sermon:

Our memories are selective; that’s one of the reasons we have Remembrance Day. We like to put bad things away and forget them. Remembering sacrifice and loss is hard.

We also understand the truth of the George Santayana saying: “those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it”. You could argue that our entire culture has forgotten the value of caring for nature and we are going to repeat the hard lessons that remind us that we really aren’t as powerful as we think we are.

One of the things about Remembrance Day that was attractive as I was growing up was the knowledge that we had won. We had defeated Hitler and the world was safe from Fascism and organized antisemitism. I was aware that there had been a WWI before WWII and that we’d won, but I had no idea what the clash of empires meant in that conflict. I also didn’t understand until High School history, the lesson that the way the end of that war was handled (the treaty of Versailles) was directly responsible for the rise of Hitler, because of its harsh repayment schedules and a determination to punish an entire nation.

It took me years to realize that the fascists were still in power in Spain until 1975 and I heard with my own ears active antisemitism from fellow students in the suburbs of Montreal. It has become more open and violent ever since.

In recent Remembrance Days, we’ve had to remember the people we lost in Afghanistan. We don’t have the comfort of knowing that we won that war. We may have been building schools for girls, but now the Taliban is back in charge, the schools are in ruins, girls are facing appalling lives and many are wondering about the meaning of the sacrifice those folks made.

One of the reasons that WWII was a relative success was the effort made after the war to avoid the mistakes of WWI through the rebuilding of Germany and Japan, encouraging democracy and friendship, even during the tension of the cold war and the oppression of communism in East Germany. Our efforts managed to make a huge difference.

It was the lesson of treating our enemies as human beings and trying to transform them into friends – that very biblical lesson of loving our enemies – that made the sacrifices of WWII so successful.

Current events in the middle east are re-drawing, in stark terms, what happens when you try to win by main force and don’t try to humanize your enemies. When you don’t struggle with the questions of justice that arise with the people you have defeated and the lives they have to live, when they feel too oppressed, too hungry, too trapped, the conflict doesn’t end, it just changes form.

Our lesson from Micah reminds us of God’s perspective on this. The Hebrews had been given the Promised Land, but over and over in the prophetic books they are told that their corruption and injustice, their willingness to oppress others (sometimes their own poor, sometimes strangers) would lead to God taking the land away from them, foreign powers marching in and laying waste to this wonderful, prosperous land.

As Christians, as non-Jews, reading this lesson is tricky: we have no place declaring this kind of judgement on Israel either historically or as a modern nation. In terms of historical cause and effect I’d be reluctant to declare what Micah and other prophets did: that the Babylonians would have ceased their westward march if the kingdom of Judah had been a more just place.

Those prophets got to say that because it came from within Israel. They were Jewish voices raising calls for justice as part of an ancient justice tradition within Israel. These scriptures are the Jewish faith opening their collective soul to themselves and the world in public self-examination.

There are fresh voices today within the modern state of Israel warning the government of the need to treat the Palestinians with justice if they ever hope to achieve peace and security. I hope those modern prophetic voices are heard and heeded.

I remember the FLQ terrorism in Montreal in the 1970 October Crisis: living in fear of bombs in mailboxes; the news of kidnappings; the shock of seeing soldiers on the streets. And I am aware that the idea of Quebec Independence today is viewed by young generations of Quebecois as something quaint, old-school and impractical because they have achieved most of what they wanted, plus a fair bit of prosperity and security, without having to have a physical revolution.

Every generation changes the world and then leaves the results to the next generation to deal with. Today’s confirmation class represents that next generation. We are passing to them a complex world where many of the things we thought we had solved are rearing their ugly heads again.

Modern versions of terrorism, of fascism, of antisemitism, of other kinds of prejudice and hatred aimed at women, at people of colour, ethnic and religious groups, openly aimed at LGBTQ+ people are found online and in real life.

If we want Remembrance to matter, we need to remember it all and particularly the ways some solutions worked and others did not.

One of the most important parts of Remembrance Day is to honour the sacrifices made for our freedom. I believe that we can honour those people best if we remember all those bits of history that help us go beyond basic ideas of victory and defeat to a deeper understanding of the need to transform our enemies into friends. We need to find ways to live so that war – that horrible, life destroying means of resolving conflict – can become a last resort we don’t need anymore because we will have found a way to create the freedom, security and hope that all people, even enemies, need to survive.

Amen.