A REMEMBRANCE DAY SERMON

Render unto God the things that are God’s

There is a place in a country almost half way around the world from here. It is a hilly place, cut with numerous horizontal and vertical ravines. The land rises steeply from a beautiful beach lapped by the waves of a warm, blue, almost impossibly clean ocean. Nobody swims from that beach. To attempt to do so would bring a soldier out of nowhere with a stern warning in a foreign language.

Standing on the beach and looking towards the high ground, the eye takes in the rugged beauty of the natural terrain, but it is soon drawn to something unnatural. To the left and to the right, extending almost halfway up the hillside are clusters of white crosses, Christian symbols in an alien landscape. St. Paul, on his second missionary journey, sailed past this place on his way from Troas to Neapolis.

The place is Gallipoli, where in 1915 some 55,000 Allied troops, mostly from Australia and New Zealand, died trying to dislodge the Turks who were dug in on the high ground. The Turks, commanded by the man who was to become their greatest national leader, Kemal Attaturk, gained so much respect for the courage of those Allied troops that they insist on the whole area being treated with the utmost respect as a shrine. Not only can you not swim from the beach, you cannot sunbathe on it, play ball or eat your lunch on it. Most visitors soon realize why this is so.

When one ventures from the beach, climbs a little way up the hillside, and enters a field of white crosses, it is impossible to retain complete composure. The crosses bear ordinary names, places of birth and dates of birth. Reading the last is where the composure suffers – they were all so young, some never reaching their eighteenth birthday. A participant in this war wrote, We’re not making this sacrifice. Jesus, you’ve seen this war. We are the sacrifice.

Not so far away in distance, but a long time before, is another hillside where another young man died. He was 33 at the time and He was nailed to a cross and left hanging from it in the hot sun. He it was who said, Render unto God the things that are God’s. Jesus Christ, who on His Cross was the sacrifice, perfect and complete for those young men of Gallipoli and more than that, for all mankind.

From that Cross His eternally encompassing gaze did indeed see that war and those dead heroes, watched them die 1900 years later and it must have broken His gentle heart. As the agony tore through His own body, each senseless death in wars like that Great War added to His pain. So very many of those deaths were caused by men and women who never stopped to think about that first Christian Cross and the Gospel of Him who died there.

As he passed Gallipoli, St. Paul’s landfall was Neapolis, but it was the next town of Philipi that was the more important destination. In his later letter to the Philippians, he expressed what His Lord saw, For many walk, of whom I have told you often, and now tell you even weeping, that they are the enemies of the Cross of Christ; whose end is destruction, whose god is their belly, and whose glory is in their shame, who mind earthly things.

Kemal Attaturk said that the worst thing about Gallipoli was the stench of rotting bodies which neither side could reach to recover and bury. That is what the enemies of the Cross of Christ bring – the stench of corruption.

What did Jesus mean when he said, Render unto God the things that are God’s? First and foremost he meant obedience to the commandments of God, for in them lies safety and freedom. No command of God was ever issued for His benefit, but for ours. If all men had the Law of God written on their hearts and remained obedient to it, there would not have been a war since Jesus Christ made His painful ascent up the slopes of Calvary and accepted death upon that Cross. If all men were to cleave to the commandment, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy mind and with all thy strength; and thy neighbour as thyself, it would not be possible to commit any act of violence against another human being for whom Jesus Christ died.

Unfortunately the real tragedy of the human race is that many walk as the enemies of the Cross of Christ, and though their own end is their own destruction they all too often take innocent lives along the way.

In that war, the Great War of 1914-1918, over 8.5 million soldiers died, 5,170,115 of them in the Allied ranks. It was supposed to end wars, but instead it unleashed a century in which the total death toll was staggering. Zbigniew Brzezinski, one time Secretary of State in the US, has calculated the toll in military or political conflicts alone during that century as 167 – 185 million. Others place it even higher.

All because so many cannot render unto God the things that are God’s and so many walk as the enemies of the Cross of Christ. Today is not only Remembrance Sunday, it is also, coincidentally, the International Day of Prayer for the Persecuted Church. Included in that number I just quoted is a horrifying figure. In that same century, 100 short years only, those enemies of the Cross of Christ slew a staggering forty-five and a half million Christians. That amounts to one fifth to one quarter of the total of the violent deaths of the twentieth century.

On this Remembrance Sunday, as we now pray the Litany for the Persecuted Church, let us resolve that in our own lives we will render unto God the things that are God’s. We will strive even harder to Love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength. And we will be obedient to His command to Love our neighbour as ourselves, praying often for those who walk as enemies of the Cross of Christ.

Peter Jardine+

Trinity 23, 2007