Marilynne Robinson on sermons

I have been reading a truly excellent novel, Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson. It is about an old pastor from the mid-west - and so it is a novel imbued with theological thinking and scripture. Anyhow, I found this comment on sermons from an interview with Robinson:

A sermon is a form that yields a certain kind of meaning in the same way that, say, a sonnet is a form that deals with a certain kind of meaning that has to do with putting things in relation to each other, allowing for the fact of complexity reversal, such things. Sermons are, at their best, excursions into difficulty that are addressed to people who come there in order to hear that. The attention of the congregation is a major part of the attention that the pastor gives to his or her utterance. It's very exceptional. I don't know anyone who doesn't enjoy a good sermon. People who are completely nonreligious know a good sermon when they hear one.
One of the reasons that I think that a sermon is a valuable thing now and so impressive when you do hear a good one -- and there is a lot of failure in the attempt; it's a difficult form -- is because it's so seldom true now that you hear people speak under circumstances where they assume they are obliged to speak seriously and in good faith, and the people who hear them are assumed to be listening seriously and in good faith. This is a kind of standard of discourse that is not characteristic of the present moment. I think that it makes a sermon, when it is a good sermon, stand out in anyone's experience.

She also has this to say about 'The Protestant Imagination':

Protestantism, of course, is much more explicitly divided into different traditions -- the Pentecostals, the Anglicans. But there is the main tradition of Protestantism that comes out of the Reformation and that produced people like Kant and Hegel and so on, who are not normally thought of as being people writing in a theological tradition, although Hegel, of course, wrote theology his whole life. I think, frankly, that his PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT is theology, too.When the Reformation became established, one of the things that was a question between Catholicism and the Reformation traditions was whether there was a hierarchy of being. If you look at Thomas Aquinas, for example, you have hierarchies of angels and all the rest of it, and hierarchies even of saints and then subsaints -- people who aren't quite there, that sort of thing. The Reformation rejected all of that and created a new metaphysics, in effect, that is not hierarchical. The idea that the universe itself is physically structured around hierarchy was sort of an integration of earlier science and theology that was made by people like Thomas Aquinas, that was assumed doctrinally in that tradition. The Reformation rejected that model of reality and created a highly individualistic metaphysics in the sense that it located everything normative that can be said about reality in human perception, there being, of course, no other avenue of knowing. There is Scripture, there is conscience, there is perception itself. If you read Calvin, for example, he says, How do we know that we are godlike, in the image of God? Well, look at how brilliant we are. Look how we can solve problems even dreaming, which I think is true, which I've done myself. So instead of having an externalized model of reality with an objective structure, it has a model of reality that is basically continuously renegotiated in human perception. I think that view of things is pretty pervasively influential in Protestant thought.

2 Sermons on love

The God who is Love

Loving the God who is Love

Psalm 133 - The sweet taste...

The idea of unity is guaranteed to produce nausea in the tummies of our secular neighbours. All their lives have been conditioned, like Pavlov’s salivating dogs, to pursue individualism at all costs; to celebrate differences rather than the similarities; to speak as “I” not as “we”. The jewel in the crown of western democratic liberalism is: the freedom of the individual - in ethics, in religion, in economics. And capitalism thrives in this environment, as the consumers individualise their requirements and every person becomes a niche market: left handed, left leaning Lebanese lesbians from Lilyfield; or gardening grand-dads from Gordon. Living in community with other people is a compromise, a necessary evil rather than a joy. Even in families, fragmentation is in evidence: the latest family cars have headphones and separate CD’s for each seat – so you can have the Wiggles in one seat and Wagner in another. How sweet our freedom! How pleasant! As Jean-Paul Sartre said “hell is other people”.

This fear of community arises from a very real fear that the individual may be squashed by the bulldozer of conformity; that social institutions and bureaucracies may process us according to generalisations and expediencies; that power in human hands may be coercive or even abusive; that the bullies may rule the playground. There is something theological about this point – ultimately the oneness of God is held to be at the root of totalitarian or repressive forms of social order.

But cast off God as a source of unity and you will replace it with another. One of the ironies of western culture is that the more we claim to be free the more we are enslaved. This truth was beautifully captured in that moment from Monty Python’s The Life of Brian, when Brian looks out of his window at the masses of his followers and says “ you are all individuals” and they reply as one “Yes- we are all individuals”. If you have ever been to a high school on mufti day, you will know what I mean: released from the shackles of uniform, the students all turn up dressed exactly the same – all bare midriffs (girls) & baggy jeans (boys). How sweet and good our freedom!

This is not the vision of Psalm 133. One of that famous series of Psalms called the Songs of Ascents – the songs of '”goings up” – it celebrates the meeting together of the people of God on the Summit of God’s holy hill. This little haiku of a Psalm is an extra ordinary outburst of joy at the presence of others. It is delicious when the family of God lives together as one – it is one of the best things in life!

In fact, it is so good, it is like……..it is like………..

Well, the Psalmist produces two of the more bizarre similes, of the oil and of the dew. They are a pair of strikingly sensual and liquid images, aren’t they? And they invite us to contemplate just exactly HOW they are like the sweet unity of brothers and sisters.

What about the precious oil? Vs 2 unfolds in a away that reflects the slow trickling of oil itself, from the head to the beard on to the collar. The fragrant sweet oil of priestly anointing was poured on the head of Aaron back in Exodus, when Moses lovingly prepared the Tabernacle and the set up of the cult of sacrifice. Commentators argue about whether it is the beard or the oil that flows down over the collar – but that doesn’t matter a great deal, really. The point is that it is a picture of richness & delight.

Vs 3 compares the togetherness of the brothers and sisters to the den of Hermon. Hermon is a mountain in lush Syria that is covered daily in heavy dew. But this dew of Hermon is falling here on the hills of Zion – hundreds of kilometres to the south. How can this occur, the dew of fertile Hermon watering the arid slopes of Zion? Only by the blessing of God could it happen; only by grace flowing down from the Lord could there be an overflow of life together, “life forevermore” in the presence of God himself.

The two images have in common a verbal idea; a motion downwards: the word yrd is repeated – the oil is flowing down, down, down; the dew is flowing down, dropping gently from the sky. The blessing of God – that beautiful delicious unity, that preciousness togetherness – flows down from the Lord himself. It’s fluid, isn’t it? The anointing of he priest symbolises God’s determination to live with his people…who have now a means to live with him. The enriching dew is God’s blessing on the place he meets his people. As Shakespeare said of mercy “it droppeth like the gentle rain from heaven.” The song of going up is really a song of coming down. Sweet life together is only possible because of the coming down of God into the midst of his people – they share an address. It is a miracle of the first order.

This flowing down of God’s blessing of life together we experience not in the cult or the temple or the Aaronic priesthood, but by the coming of the Holy Spirit. This spirit is poured into us in order to unite us, as Christ’s body, as the temple of the Holy Spirit. As Ephesians 4 puts it: “There is one body and one Spirit, just you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all who is above all and through all and in all”.

It is a far cry from the splendid isolation of modern life. The family of God is constituted from on high and brings delight, deeply involved with one another.

But can we say that our experiences of life together is sweet? Do we know the sheer pleasure in life with each other expressed in this psalm?

If not, it could be because we try to impose visions of our making on the community of God’s people. It could be that our ideals are not his, at all. It could be that we want a unity of our ascending and not of God’s descending. It could be that we haven’t understood life together as a great blessing of God himself, a great realisation of his real presence among us by his spirit dropping down on us from above. It could be because we have not entered into common life with other Christians as thankful recipients but as demanders.

In our enthusiasm we may create conformities that we have nothing to do with the fellowship created by the Gospel. We may impose cultural or generational or gendered expectations on the people of God that are entirely our own. We may demand that people be unified to our programme, agree with our views to the minutest degree and conform to our plans for them. This is not the flowing down unity of Psalm 133; or of Ephesians 4. We forget that the whole basis for our unity is not a human category that we all belong to o a human work, some demographic we have in common, but Christ: as I am one with Christ and you are one with Christ so are we one with each other. And the basis for that is of course as forgiven sinners: that is really the thing we have in common.

Let us make our passion to pursue the gentleness and forbearance that enhances unity.

What issues threaten your oneness in Christ? Perhaps that is something only you can answer. However, some of the issues that are common in churches are:
1 – disagreements about the aesthetics of church, from the music to the colour of the carpet. These matters we have to handle with great care and mutual generosity because they arouse such passions. And yet they are actually relatively unimportant.
2 – disappointment at church not meeting your needs. This may be a genuine feeling of hurt at the way other people or even the minister have behaved; or it might reflect real feelings of spiritual dryness that aren’t being met in the church community. We need to be careful about these feelings: they can be real and powerful, but it is worth asking – are our expectations wrong? Are we expecting to meet more than a group of forgiven sinners?
3 – feelings of spiritual inferiority. Sometimes it feels as if the other people at church are streets ahead of me spiritually: their bible knowledge is amazing, they actually do a quiet time, they are serene and patient. And yet once again we need to remember we are united as forgiven sinners who have been reconciled to the father in Jesus. Even the most apparently spiritual person is only that.

But how delicious is the taste of unity among brothers & sisters!

How great it is to receive prayerful support & encouragement. How sweet it is to be appreciated as a contributing to the community, How beautiful it is to receive a freezer full of meals when your baby is born. How pleasant to be able to kick around issues in an atmosphere of trust. How sweet to know that I can receive help when I need it from a fellow believer without condescension. How great to know that others want me to succeed in serving God. How wonderful to sing like we do, together. How beautiful to share meals together. How great to know that God has rescued other sinners as well. These things come to us flowing down from above: they are unity that is a gift from God.

Things Fall Apart - a sermon on Judges 19-21

I preached this sermon at St Mary's Maidenhead, 16 June, 2008. Apologies for posting it in full like this, but it helps me to have it here. Broughton Knox famously used to begin his sermon classes by saying 'where did this sermon fail?' I think I could make several suggestions! No doubt my friends in the blogosphere will be happy to add to my list.

"I want to start by turning with you to the last verse of the passage:

In those days Israel had no king; everyone did as he saw fit.

Being able to do as you see fit, or to being given the right to determine what is right for yourself sounds great, doesn’t it? One of the most famous graffiti slogans of the May 1968 student revolutions in France – that moment in recent which has proved incredibly influential in Western culture – was it is forbidden to forbid. That could be a motto for today: to find yourself as your own moral yardstick is exactly what we 21st century people think of as maturity and freedom. It is mature because determining what is right in your own eyes is taking responsibility for yourself and your own actions, isn’t it? It is freeing yourself from having moral training wheels and riding the full size adult bike. And it is the freedom to be true to yourself, not beholden to moral standards that are imposed on you from outside – whether that is in the name of God or someone else. Ultimately, what matters is being true to your own vision of what is right and wrong – acting according to your own deeply-held convictions and intuitions, being an authentic and individual person because you answer the call of the voice within you, in your heart, and because you reject the rules and regulations that come from without, imposed on your life by others. What is right for me is right for me, in my perspective – this at least I know, whether or not it is right for you or not. This is what we want our children to learn: an independence rather than a conformity in choosing right and wrong, an ability not to accept everything there are told. It sounds like the height of civilisation.

But what is it like to live in such a world? Can human beings live like this, with every doing as he or she sees fit? In Judges 19-21 we have a ghastly reminder of what life is really like when everyone in a society becomes his or her own judge. Even a society with a claim to be the people of God himself is capable of terrible cruelty. In reality, men and women – and especially men concerning women, it seems – are only too ready to be completely barbaric, given the opportunity. No matter how enlightened are our minds, the heart of humankind is dark.
The chapter we heard read for us is just the beginning of a series of events that are a blot on Israel’s history and show that the high hopes for Israel’s future are completely in tatters. Just as last week you saw that Israel had chosen to worship God not in the way he commanded but according to their own choices, they are now choosing to determine right and wrong for themselves. Noticeably missing from this episode is … a Judge. No redeemer is sent by God to liberate Israel from her captivity to another nation, the Philistines or whoever. And this is mainly because Israel is not invaded in this episode. She doesn’t need saving from the grip of another nation; here, she is in captivity only to her own corruption.

The story unfolds in three stages. First, in chapter 19 we have the strange episode of the Levite with no name and his concubine. It starts, as you heard, with the man pursuing his runaway girl to her father’s place. And no matter what the argument was between the couple, the father-in-law and the husband seem to get on famously, and so it is with some effort that the Levite actually makes to leave to go home. And that is what causes the problem, because they are caught out on the road as night approaches; and they are somewhat afraid of seeking hospitality among foreigners in the city of Jebus. The man says (look at vs 12) "No. We won't go into an alien city, whose people are not Israelites. We will go on to Gibeah." Of course – among fellow Israelites we will be safe.

It is a horrible error of judgement – though an understandable one. The old man takes them home from the city square in Gibeah; but the mob still gathers, and demands the visitor so they can rape him. Of course it reminds us very strongly of another incident in the Old Testament – the story of Lot entertaining the angelic visitors in the city of Sodom, whose citizens also demanded that he send out the men so that they could have sex with then. Now, make no mistake: in the old story, these were pagans, non-Israelites, and this was a story that showed how disgusting and barbaric they were. And this episode is the reason that God destroys the city utterly.

What is different now? The mob in question are from Israel, and so are their would-be victims. Israel has become as bad as ever Sodom was… that is the extent of their distance from the God who had redeemed them.

And just as Lot offered his virgin daughters to the mob instead of his visitors, here too, a misguided sense of hospitality reigns: the old man offers his own daughter and the concubine as substitute victims for the Levite (vs 24). In the end it is the Levite who pushes out his concubine to mob, so that they can gang-rape her.

In the morning, there she is on the step. Is she dead at this point? We don’t know: but her humanity has been taken – utterly betrayed and unprotected by her husband, she has been treated like a piece of meat by the mob. As if to underscore that she has been destroyed as a person by this terrible night, her husband – who clearly had a talent for grand public statements – hacks her into pieces and sends her in twelve grisly packages to the tribes of Israel. And, after they got over the surprise and the smell no doubt, verse 30 explains that Everyone who saw it said, "Such a thing has never been seen or done, not since the day the Israelites came up out of Egypt. Think about it! Consider it! Tell us what to do!"

Well this then is the beginning of the second phase of the terrible tale; for the Israelites gather in response to the Levite’s call to work out what they ought to do about this terrible mob in Gibeah. Notice that Levite’s story tends to gloss over his own role in the death of his girl. It is self-justifying stuff – and our sympathy for him ought to drain away at this point. And so begins a terrible and destructive campaign of civil war, in which Israel, like the concubine, ends up being dismembered. There is death and destruction on a massive scale, even by today’s standards.
In this episode there is some inquiring after the Lord’s decision: but only as to which tribe is to go up first against the Benjamites (see vs 18). At the very opening of the book of Judges (1:2) is was the tribe of Judah who was to be in the vanguard against the Canaanites in winning the land. Once again, Judah is go ahead of the others: but this time, it is to their defeat.

Now this is an unexpected twist; why do they get defeated in this? Isn’t their cause right? Aren’t the Benjamites an awful crew of gang-rapists who need swift and sever justice? Isn’t the Lord behind that kind of thing? But this story isn’t as simple and straightforward as that. That Judah gets defeated here shows that in some way all Israel compromised, and that God won’t be manipulated by groups of human beings for their own purposes – especially in war.

We have to pass over the details of the civil war: it is enough to say that, like all civil wars, the consequences were devastating, the violence horrendous and the destruction enormous. The flower of Israel – all the best warriors and fighting men - are killed. By the end of the chapter, not only Gibeah but the whole tribe of Benjamin has been ruined. Only 600 men are left, even the women and children having been slaughtered in the struggle.

And now we reach the third part of the story: because the other tribes in Israel get caught in a bind here. See verse 1 - they make some rash promises – there are a few of those in Judges, aren’t there? – and then realise that they are dooming Benjamin to death. That they are hacking off one of their own limbs, because they are guaranteeing that Israel will never be whole again. And this, they realise effects them, because they will not truly be able to be Israel without Benjamin, yet they have promised not to provide them with wives. Here’s the dilemma, from vs 15ff:

15 The people grieved for Benjamin, because the LORD had made a gap in the tribes of Israel. 16 And the elders of the assembly said, "With the women of Benjamin destroyed, how shall we provide wives for the men who are left? 17 The Benjamite survivors must have heirs," they said, "so that a tribe of Israel will not be wiped out. 18 We can't give them our daughters as wives, since we Israelites have taken this oath: 'Cursed be anyone who gives a wife to a Benjamite.'

So, wives have to be found, and in large numbers… This leads to two mass abductions of women – firstly, of 400 virgins from Jabesh Gilead; and then 200 women of Shiloh are seized. This all because the Israelites are sticklers for their vows. Once again, their moral compass seems to be off: they are justifying the rape, en masse, of 600 women, because of their dutiful observance of their own promises. They have got things out of proportion... it is fair to say that here Israel is trying to do the right thing, trying to calculate the way forward through some very difficult problems. But in doing so it is coming up with some very tenuous and problematic solutions. In one sense, the behaviour of the mob in Gibeah – who are not trying to do good – is compounded by people who are trying to do good – to bring about restitution and righteousness. They only make it worse.

And so, by the end of the chapter the gap that the Lord in Israel made seems to be filled; but if you are a sensitive reader you won’t be feeling as if balance has been restored and all is right with the world and everything is tied up with a bow once again at this point. Something deeply troubling has occurred. The writer doesn’t shove it down our throats, mind you: he doesn’t have to. We can see that Israel looks as if it has completely unravelled. And so, we get to that strange ending of this blood-sodden book:

In those days Israel had no king; everyone did as he saw fit.

The results of Israel’s lack of attention to the word of God and their stubborn insistence in deciding what was right for themselves are plain to see. At this point, Israel is not different to the nations around. And we ought to pause here to remember just how contemporary this story is. It would be easy to see this story, and the other stories of the book of Judges as being part of another world. We don’t recognise the place names, and the customs. It can feel more like Mordor than here. But we can only think that with a wilful blindness to what we 21st century people are like. We think because of our technology that we are more civilised and less prone to this kind of outrageous behaviour, less willing to condone the mistreatment and rape of women, less liable to go to war for trivial or misplaced reasons. Only someone without access to a newspaper could think that this is so. The story of the concubine could have happened today. If there is anything the history of the 20th century has taught us, it is that the animal brutality of human beings is not far from the surface. As the scholar George Steiner once said:

We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning.

Being cultured or sophisticated or educated doesn’t protect us from ourselves.

And not even being Christian does: the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, in which people hacked each other to death with machetes, involved professing Christians. In fact, before the genocide, Rwanda was called the ‘most Christian country in Africa’, with a strong evangelical church. And yet this did not prevent an orgy of murder and rape. The book of Judges serves as warning to us that being inattentive to the word of God can only lead to moral and social chaos. That moral independence we so desire, that we think is a sign of our maturity and freedom, that we think can be attained by superior education and advanced knowledge of science or even by correct and true religion, is in fact a dangerous temptation. Christians like us are just as capable of becoming blind to our faults as anyone else. Being told to look inside our hearts to discover there what is right and wrong is a frightening idea, if you know the true nature of the human heart.

So what are we to do? Let’s look again at that last verse:

In those days Israel had no king; everyone did as he saw fit.

Is this a suggestion that in fact Israel had its political system all wrong? That the answer to this chaos is to institute a centralised and powerful system of government capable of bring about some order, or exercising some decent authority? Is that what is needed?

It should only take you a minute to think through the later history of Israel to realise what a crock that suggestion is. You couldn’t have sat down in the dust, with the nation collapsed around you in the period of the exile and thought, well, yes, having a king was what we needed all along. Obeying the king who was intent on accumulating his own wealth and on providing shrines for all the other gods was not really any better than everyone doing as he saw fit, according to his own heart. What Israel really needed was not a systematic change of the style of government, but a king after God’s own heart – a ruler who would rule as God would rule, not in the interests of his own power, but for the good of all; and the people of Israel themselves needed a change of their own hearts.

This is where the book of Judges shows that it raises more questions than it answers. We can’t read it well without remembering that it is part of a bigger story – a story that tells of God’s faithfulness to his own promises as much as it tells of Israel’s repeated faithlessness. God alone fulfils his promises in this case despite of not because of his people. In fact, the two tribes that survived until the time of Jesus were… guess which? This is a huge encouragement at this point, of course: you might have thought at the end of the book of Judges that the whole Israel idea was dead and buried – or at best badly tainted. But God, the Lord of Israel, is not finished. And, he has provided for us in Jesus a king after his own heart: a true leader and Lord; and he has sent his Holy Spirit into our hearts so that we might respond to him in faith and obedience, as Israel failed to do.

We may well look around today and see that God’s people are in disarray. We can see deep uncertainty, even amongst avowed followers of Jesus Christ, as to what is right and what is wrong. We hear even Christians appealing to what their hearts are telling them over and against what the Bible plainly teaches. We are under tremendous pressure to conform to the culture around us, and in many ways we do just that. We are divided by multiple disagreements over things that are great and small. We are tempted to engineer our own solutions, or to trust in our own techniques and stratagems for building the church. And yet we need not be dismayed; because if Israel got this low and this corrupt and yet still God remained true, then we need not doubt him today.

God is working His purpose out as year succeeds year,
God is working His purpose out and the time is drawing near;
Nearer and nearer draws the time, the time that shall surely be,
When the earth shall be fill'd with the glory of God as the waters cover the sea.

Sermon for Anzac at St Helen's Bishopsgate, London

It is said of Alan Bond, the famous 80s business tycoon, that, with his yacht Australia II trailing by three races to one in the final of the America’s Cup, he reminded his team of Gallipoli and then said: ‘We had our backs to the wall there and we won that one...’

Bond’s mistake is forgiveable: it is certainly strange that Australians and New Zealanders choose to celebrate a military disaster. But I think it is a happy oddity. Anzac Day is a great day for a war remembrance because we are reminded by it of the moral ambiguity and futility of war. We not tempted by the memory of April 25th 1915 to indulge in a sickening triumphalism; neither is it a day that brings old resentments bubbling to the surface. This day tells us that it is hard to make sense of war, because war itself is a grim absurdity.

The generation that lost its young men in the trenches recognised this. As the task of memorialising the dead began, the sheer horror of what had occurred evidently sank in. There were heroes, but not many. How do you honour the deaths of those who were evaporated by heavy explosives, or who drowned in the mud? What honour was there in dying that way, or of lying falling on a piece of ground that would be lost to the enemy in a few months?

And so, the one Bible verse that is most frequently found on war memorials and graves is the one from John’s gospel – a saying of Jesus himself: ‘Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends’. This almost makes sense: it speaks of sacrifice for others in a way that isn’t saying something about dying for love of my country, or the empire, nor for love of some great principle or cause, whatever that might be. We modern people in our ignorance and inexperience of the real world are now more hesitant to accept that these things are worth dying for in the first place. But, to die for your friends? – It’s a thought that resonates with antipodeans, because we know what counts is your friends – your mates. But can those whose intent it was to kill others really be given credit for the greatest of all loves? That was their calling as soldiers, after all. Can applying this verse to the fallen give their deaths meaning, or redeem something for us from the absurdity of war? I confess that I feel more than a little disquiet when I read these words on a memorial of war.

Whether it can or no, the memorial makers at least knew where the template for loving sacrifice of a life was to be found. They knew, in a way that we have perhaps forgotten, that Jesus’ death on the cross was the sacrifice of love par excellence. Jesus dies ‘for his friends’ – in their place and for their benefit. He dies for his friends because they are threatened by great enemies – evil, sin and death – and helpless to battle them alone. These enemies are more fierce and more insidious than Turks, or Germans, or Viet Cong or the Taliban. They have us in their grasp and won’t release us.

He was not a conscript, but a willing volunteer. He left the safety and comfort of his Father’s throneroom and faced down the things that threaten us with with utter disintegration, seeking the reconciliation of human beings with their God. He himself suffered the indignity and apparent futility of a cruel and violent death, offering his own body as a sacrifice for the sins of humankind. Yet this was not meaningless suffering. This was the greatest of loves: it was selfless, painful and costly. But it was not pointless: it was a death that defeated death. Death and sin were outflanked by this divine man’s death.

War continues: and it stands as evidence of the spiritual darkness that still besets all of us despite our potential for noble and valorous action. We should remember on Anzac Day that the most glorious things human beings do are found next to the most obscene. Courage and inventiveness lie side by side with incompetence and bloodthirstiness. Remembrance of war should never be a comfortable thing, if we are to be honest. It should never be romanticised. As the generations of those who actually witnessed the two world wars passes on, we may be tempted to forget how awful war was for them; and to remember not the real Gallipoli, but the Gallipoli that Mel Gibson was at. It’s a temptation we would do well to resist.

When we pause at a war memorial, however, and read the text ‘Greater love has no-one than this’ we have reason to feel something else, too: gratitude. Gratitude to those who served and died to protect others certainly, whatever we feel about war itself. But, moreso, we be can thankful to Jesus Christ who died to set us free from sin, evil and death: all the components that go to make up a war. The death of the soldier may or may not have been in vain; it certainly did not bring an end to hostility between human beings. But by using this verse, even wrongly, the survivors are bearing testimony both to the inescapable power of the evil which brings us down and also to a death which did make a real difference. The death of Jesus Christ signals the end of enmity – between God and humankind, and between human beings themselves. There is the possibility for us now, in accepting his offer of friendship, of experiencing for ourselves the greatest of loves – an offer we have only to receive.