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Up-to-the-minute jumping-off points for sermons, linking the reading to the latest news and global issues
What sort of life?
Summary
VE Day commemorations reminisce about war, but also about reconciliation, and life renewed (Acts 9:36-43).
Context
It’s arguably a difficult time to commemorate a Great Peace after a costly victory with patriotic rejoicing and national religious celebrations. Many continuing conflicts are raging - some factional and allegedly genocidal. How difficult is it to align an appeal to patriotic pride in our country with our calling to a new life in which all humanity are our brothers and sisters, when our country seems increasingly divided and national cohesion is threatened by action beyond domestic control?
Reflection
Recently a survey enthusiastically suggesting a revival in English church-going provoked controversy. We may feel nostalgic for the shared assumptions of 1945 but is institutional religion essential? Even helpful? Does it sometimes fire hostility to those of differing beliefs or none?
Some think religion causes wars:
- Israel, to further protect the Jewish homeland, plans devastating operations in Gaza.
- Putin’s invasion of Ukraine chimes with the Russian Orthodox Church’s embedded beliefs about national destiny.
- In response, counter-narratives arise - in Ukraine, in Palestine, in Sudan - equally passionate and consequential.
Do shared beliefs, important aspects of national identity, offer equivalent positive impacts as well? Are we better citizens for being patriotic? Can we be patriotic and still seek to ‘love our enemies’? Nationalism, religion-backed or not, is far from the whole story. National emergency brought unity and conformity but also, as these reminiscences show, heroism, compassion, generosity and faith.
Can the secular world provide equivalent virtues – without the links to defending sacred turf - in peacetime? Humanity is ingenious, determined, and imaginative. To the religious we are made in God’s image. Do we need religion to find compassion? Do we need to be self-identifying church-goers to exemplify the release offered by giving up hatred?
The situation is complex. We may all be capable of the right feelings in particular situations but a little support from stable religious externals may induce a wider perspective, and some humility in the face of those wider horizons. And that’s a good place from which to start a move from home-grown bravery via broader compassion and a fuller sense of justice to hope fulfilled in effective real-world political action! Something to reflect on if we’re tempted to think that the election of a new Pope matters little to non-Catholics.
Sermon ideas
Life at any price?
- Do you worry that, whether in religion or politics, opposition to another belief, or set of beliefs, is seen as the most effective recruitment strategy?
- How far should we as church communities go in pursuing expansion/survival?
Life individual, or life communal?
- How important and/or desirable are clearly defined and policed beliefs?
- How far should individual conscience be respected if it might threaten community cohesion?
Questions
- Are you patriotic? What do you mean by it?
- How important to your faith is your church commitment? Did you find faith, and then a church, or find faith through e.g. your church upbringing?
- What are the pros and cons of multiculturalism?
Brenda Vance is a URC Elder and a retired university teacher.
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Connecting faith with everyday, real-life issues for young people
Living in peace
What an amazing event Monday’s celebration of the eightieth anniversary of VE Day was and it was wonderful that the sun shone for it. The military procession through London was a great spectacle and the flypast culminating in the Red Arrows display filling the sky over Buckingham Palace with Red, White and Blue was a sight to behold. This week's events celebrate that we live in peace. They are not a show of strength.
It was great to see the awe and wonder on the faces of Prince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis as they watched the flypast as it linked what was achieved 80 years ago with the present age. There was also a link across the generations in the tea party for veterans at Buckingham Palace which gave them a chance to share their stories.
Once again, the moat of the Tower of London has been filled with ceramic poppies. The combination of this memorial to the dead with the celebrations that are taking place all week is a clear and poignant reminder of the Easter message. The poppies are for us a traditional reminder of the fallen, those who gave their lives that their country might live in peace. The celebrations enable us to acknowledge that peace.
The story of Dorcas shows that in Christ we can go through death to life. The true joy of the Easter season recognises the pain of death which brought forth new life, a fuller life, a life of eternal peace.
Stuart Wild is a Methodist Minister serving in Lytham St Annes on the Lancashire Coast.
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