dulce et decorum est... ?
This is my Remembrance Sunday sermon for this year.
Remembrance Sunday is a tricky needle to thread for me. I think Remembrance is a tremendously important part of civic life, given the ways that how and what we remember are formative of us as people and communities, and it’s important to do it well. But, I find it ever-more impossible to disentangle how I think about remembering well from my faith, and I do not find navigating the terrains around national and civic remembrance, and remembrance within a Christian theological framework for a sermon in an established church easy (especially not in under ten minutes). There are too many layers pulling in too many directions, and too many assumptions about what is right / appropriate / respectful and so on. I’ve also spent far too much time thinking about all this in the course of my academic study as a historian and a theologian, in my former job, and just in general as a person who is just fascinated by history and memory to help me make things concise or find a line that cuts through that I feel comfortable with—nuance and bracket everything! But this was my attempt.
The readings were Hebrews 9:24-end and Mark 1:14-20.
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Dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori.
It is sweet and proper to die for one’s country
These lines were first written by the Roman poet Horace around 24 BC—the early years of the rule of the Emperor Augustus. They are part of a book of poems extolling the praises of Roman virtue and of the empire under its young ruler, forming and sustaining the patriotism of his people.
I suspect we know these lines better from Wilfred Owen’s poem, which takes them for its title and its closing lines. It is a poem which may have been, for many of us, a vivid introduction to the realities of the First World War—the mud, the gas, the exhaustion and pain. It certainly was for my generation, reading the war poets in English classes in school.
“Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
…
All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.”
Owen’s use of the Latin is ironic, of course: the poet denouncing public conversation that glorifies war, idealises sacrifice and exploits patriotism and service. As it closes:
“If you too could pace… and watch… and hear…
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.”
Owen doesn’t question the courage of his fellow soldiers, their humanity and the meaning of their lives. There is no sense that it might not be important to remember them or honour them, but the poem in all its vividness demands that we do so with honesty about the realities of their service and their sacrifice. It demands that the public question their belief in this line and the willingness of leaders—in various arenas—to use it.
It is a demand that echoes, for it can be easy to read this poem and—remembering and honouring those it whom it describes—come in some way to believe the line all over again, seeing the meaning of these soldiers’s lives only in their deaths. It can be easy to love our countries and believe in our causes to the extent that we come to believe in this line again.
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In our gospel reading today Jesus announces the coming of the kingdom of God. And he calls his first disciples; Simon, Andrew, James and John; to follow him in inviting people into this kingdom. Throughout the gospels, Jesus’s claim to be the son of God, the messiah, a saviour, stands in tension and conflict with the claim of the Roman emperor to be all of those things for the world. And the kingdom of God, in which the meek and the merciful are blessed, where love, justice and peace grow, is a stark contrast to a Roman empire in which vulnerability was to be resisted, mercy was a tool for maintaining loyalty, and where there was a continual need to keep legions fighting on the borders to secure stability and riches for those at the centre.
Jesus’s call to follow him is a call into a different patria – a different home with very different characteristics. The manner of his life, his death and resurrection, and the understanding of his death as a form of sacrifice enabling our salvation and reconciliation with God, exposed the inability of Rome to truly offer life and freedom. It is a call that questions the truth of claims like those of Horace, that it is sweet and proper to die for a country like Rome.
Owen’s bitter rage is rooted in a deep sense of betrayal. By his leaders, perhaps by his teachers, his instructors in stories of classical glory and heroism, and by a general public that often could not find its way to questioning glorious patriotism in the face of the stories they heard from the front. He began to write this poem in 1917, while in treatment for shellshock. It was published two years after his death at a time of public discourse sabot whether the war and its sacrifices were being forgotten: what was it for, how it should be remembered, how those who served in it were being supported, whether or not it was worth it… and it holds those questions open.
The lie that Owen decries has not gone away: it lives on in calls to nationalism, to nostalgia for great pasts and in heroic narratives of derring-do and military glory. These continue to be a part of the stories that shape our identities as peoples and the arguments about political and international decisions we face and make. We can see it now, in a number of countries—including, in recent years, in Britain.
Remembrance has always been complicated, emotionally and politically, and over the century in which Britain has been commemorating it we have been at war time and again; seeking to secure our wellbeing through the ongoing sacrifices of those who—if not literarily in the trenches like the soldiers in Owen’s poem—experience the brutal reality of conflict—on all sides and not just our own. Dulce et decorum est… is a tempting idea because it allows us to hide a lot behind it—as Owen’s poem points out.
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But at its best, remembrance invites us to stand in the complexity of honouring service and sacrifice and loving our places, while being willing to recognise the complexity of the world and its nations, the conflicts in which we ask people to serve, the realities of war.
Remembering that we are called to God’s kingdom, however, helps us to stand in this complex space—however uncomfortably. It reminds that even though we, our peoples and our nations, are fallible; even though war is a brutal evil that we find ourselves unable to lay to rest in our broken world; and even though we might want to believe the old lie ‘dulce et decorum est pro patria mori’ which allows us to hide so many things behind it—this frailty is not the end of us and our lives. It is not the whole picture.
Our gospel today reminds us that we, like these first disciples, are invited into God’s different kingdom, and that it is secured for us—as Hebrews says—by Jesus’s sacrifice of himself once and for all – all time and all peoples. Even though God has given us families, tribes, countries, these are not our only homes. The kingdom of God is the only kingdom, Jesus the only Lord, who will not betray us (although the leadership of the church itself may be a different matter). He will not lead us anywhere he has not gone before us. And his kingdom continues to stand in contrast with the brokennesses and failures of our own places and nations, calling us to something better. We live in both, which is never easy and often demands its own sacrifices: often of our simple love and faith in our homelands.
To follow Jesus’s invitation into God’s Kingdom is to remember that the promise of our salvation is not in our nations, nor even in those who serve them. The promise of our salvation is in Christ, in the grace of God and the forgiveness of sins—which includes all of the things we might prefer not to talk about on Remembrance Sunday and which he will not allow to define us for all eternity. It is in the promise that he will appear a second time, to save those who are eagerly waiting for him.