Preacher: Revd Canon Karen Schmidt
Date: 13/11/2022
Malachi 4.1-2a
2 Thessalonians 3.6-13
Luke 21.5-19
We are approaching the end time – perhaps not the end of time, although some of the signs referred to in today’s Gospel may look and sound familiar, but the end of the Church year. Advent Sunday – the Church’s New Year’s Day – is but 2 weeks away and in these preceding weeks we are in what has come to be known as the Kingdom season, a time of reflection on the nature of God’s Kingdom – which makes sense as we approach the Advent season – itself a time of preparation for the coming of our King in the infant of Bethlehem.
The child of Bethlehem came to bring light and hope into a dark world and the world today is for many a dark place with poverty, insecurity, failing institutions, a great divide between those who are prospering and those whose living standards are plummeting and then war in our own continent quite apart from conflicts further away.
The kingdom season reminds us that there is another way of ordering society and that is God’s way of justice and peace. Even as Jesus in today’s Gospel warns of bleak times ahead, he encourages us not to lose hope because that, too, is what the child of Bethlehem brought into the world. As followers of the way of Christ and builders of his Kingdom we are God’s instruments of making known that different way of living together. And God will enable us
for I will give you words and a wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to withstand or contradict.
And on this Remembrance Sunday a story of hope and healing – another hallmark of God’s Kingdom. I have to admit that with the name of Schmidt I don’t find Remembrance Sunday easy. With a German mother I am the product of war. With a German father my husband was also the product of war. Both our English and German families suffered in war, although it was our German families who sustained casualties.
And yet in the story of those families lies hope. Because it’s no good remembering if we don’t do anything with that remembering. Remembering may bring us comfort, it may assuage guilt, it may discharge a sense of duty, it enables us to say “thank you”, it provides an opportunity to recognise brave men and women. All that is good and it is proper. But remembering also has the power to transform and it is in lives transformed, in society transformed, that we truly honour those lives given in conflict.
What helps me on Remembrance Sunday is that hope offered us by God and experienced by my German mother and by my German father-in-law. When my 24 year-old mother arrived in Britain on a sweltering hot June day in 1947 wearing a fur coat my father had bought her for a cold German winter and wellington boots and carrying all she owned in a couple of suitcases, she was not unnaturally apprehensive about what reception would await her in her new home of Tunbridge Wells in Kent. What awaited her was not “disgusted of Tunbridge Wells” but rather a welcome from her parents-in-law to be, a welcome extended also by the community of which she would become a part, which in time enabled her to come to regard this country as her home.
My father-in-law was brought to England as a prisoner of war where he was treated humanely. Having no home to return to – the part of Germany he had left when conscripted had become part of Czechoslovakia and all the Germans expelled – he was helped to make a new life in this country where his professional qualifications were recognised and he was afforded the dignity of being able to support himself and his family and to become a citizen of this country.
It’s that sort of healing which transforms the suffering inflicted by humanity into hope that things can change, that God’s kingdom is here among us and that no darkness can overcome it.
Living as citizens of the kingdom of God here on earth may God give us grace to work with him to reveal amongst those with whom we live and work what God’s kingdom is all about. To live lives that reflect God’s light in human darkness, God’s love in places of conflict, God’s hope in human despair and God’s peace in God’s world. Amen.