The Reverend Dr John Findon, Rector of Bury

Here is the full text of Bury's Service of Remembrance sermon by Reverend Dr John Findon, Rector of Bury:

"We are gathered here for the 88th time, fellow citizens of Bury, to remember those who had died for their country in war. Every year since 1919, the Rector of Bury has climbed up here, six feet and more above contradictions, to try to offer some light and some hope. There have been so many words over the years, many more added in this year of 2007, that I can have no hope of originality. But there are some things, however obvious, that have to be repeated, because the memory of them is too important to be lost.

The most obvious fact to which all of us return every Remembrance Day, is the sheer scale of the things that we are remembering. Remembrance was born in 1918. The Armistice gave it its date and time: the eleventh hour, of the eleventh day, of the eleventh month. People knew then, instinctively, that this War called for some new kind of solemnity. Britain had been no stranger to war, of course, for centuries before, the great Lancashire-born poet, Edmund Spenser, wondered, way back in the reign of Elizabeth I, whether the word world' might not be derived from war old'.

People had remembered the wars against the French that ended at Waterloo, and the Crimean War. Veterans held dinners to commemorate them, even though they knew that the cost had been terrible. It was the Duke of Wellington who famously said that there was only one thing in the world worse than a battle won, and that was a battle lost.

But everybody knew that after 1918 something different was called for: for this had been a war fought not only by professional soldiers, but by volunteers and conscripts in their millions, by whole nations ranged against each other. It had brought with it a total disruption of every kind of normal life, and because of that terrible cost, and concentration of effort, the only end to it could be unconditional surrender. There must be no quiet agreement made by the powerful behind the people's backs, no mealy-mouthed treaties, no half measures. And so it ground on for 50 months.

The numbers defy comprehension. Who can understand the meaning of millions of men killed? So let us instead look at one manageable part of the whole. Jonathan Ali has recently published a little book call Our Boys'. The Great War in a Lancashire Village' , that being the village of Hawkshaw. It had 800 souls, or thereabouts, in 1900. Half of them were women, and more than half of the males would have been too young or too old to serve. Forty died, and 127 survived. Listen to his account of the village foot team; they had won the Bury Amateur League in 1914 - played 22, won 18, drawn 2, lost 2. There is a picture of them with their three reserves, proud with their trophy. And of that little group: Albert Sanderson was wounded three times; Richard Snape lost his brother-in-law at Vimy Ridge; William Howarth lost his brother-in-law at Passchendaele. William Longworth died of gas in 1920; Richard Smith survived a torpedo attack; William H. Longworth was disabled by his service. John Dickon was wounded; Tom Smithie died of wounds; John Horrocks was wounded and disabled, his brother was killed. Phillip McGregor served. Edward Chadwick was wounded and gassed; Charles Sims died of gas in 1925; George Horrocks was wounded; James E Johnson was killed in action; William Smith was wounded.

The same story, except, of course, that every case is a unique story; the same story was replicated across the whole of the United Kingdom, and most of Europe, and much more of the world besides. And, of course, there was the randomness of the losses and the suffering, as there always is - one of the cruellest facts of war.

Able Seaman George Morris, also of Hawkshaw, survived the fighting, and came home on leave at the end of 1918, only to die of peritonitis in the middle of January. Some years ago, I knew a woman whose Godson, a regular soldier, went out with the British forces to the Gulf. He was trained, and brave, and ready to do his duty, but he never had the chance. In the first week he was crushed to death by a huge piece of machinery which rolled off the carrier to which it had not been properly secured. My grandfather used to tell of how he and his two brothers all volunteered, and came home safe in 1918 to marry and father families; and how his mother's sister, from a neighbouring village, lost all three of her boys in six weeks. It was as if the whole nation had been conscripted into a game of Russian roulette. Every parish priest knows that the most terrible of griefs is that of a parent standing at the grave of a child. But here were such cases in their millions, except that these graves were so far away, you could not even leave some flowers.

There is the scale too in other blighted lives, the less obvious casualties. The girls who lost their sweethearts and never married. The comrades who came home, but carried it all for the rest of the lives. Listen to Wilfrid Gibson:

We who are left, how shall we look again
Happily on the sun or feel the rain
Without remembering how they who went
Ungrudgingly, and spent
Their all for us, loved too the sun and rain?
A bird among the rain-wet lilac sings
But we, how shall we turn to little things,
And listen to the birds and winds and streams
Made holy by their dreams
Nor feel the heart-break in the heart of things?

The heartbreak in the heart of things'. Many of you will have seen that wonderful old man Harry Patch, one of the tiny handful of surviving veterans from the Great War, being interviewed last week. He described how he and a comrade had come to a place where a fellow soldier lay wounded, split, as he said, from his shoulder to his stomach. He begged them to shoot him, out of his misery, but before they could move he had died. His last word was Mother!' Harry Patch is a man without the least trace of affection. He simply commented that that scene had haunted him for the rest of his life.

Who can weigh the consequences of such things carried in the hearts of the survivors? And still it goes on. Just weeks ago the Queen opened the new memorial in Staffordshire to those killed since the end of World War II: already there are more than 16,000 names on it. There has been only one year since then when a British serviceman or woman has not been killed on active service.

The natural wisdom, you would think, in the face of such things, would be to seek to forget them, to put them out of mind. No doubt some tried to do just that, but never the majority. When the clocks struck 11 on November 11, 1919, the world seemed to stop - trams, taxis, people hastening to appointments, milkmen, postmen. Still today, remembrance is not only a national duty, but it seems also to fulfil a human need. My impression is that it grows in importance in our national life. Young people from schools visit war cemeteries and battlefields in their thousands. Why is that so? Is it kindness, a sense of the years to which we can look forward, but which were denied to them? Or is it pride in their courage, and in their brave resistance of evil? Perhaps. But I think that there is also a deeper significance, a sense that somehow there must be some meaning and some hope in such terrible events.

Well, to find a meaning is too difficult a task for me, and if I told you that I could explain such things, find sense and reason in them, you would not believe me. And rightly so. But I do know where I find hope of a meaning and that is in the cross of Jesus Christ. In him, God took human flesh and entered decisively into the changes and chances that are part of our life. He was on the receiving end of the randomness of things. He died in the prime of his manhood at the age of 33 or thereabouts, and in the most brutal way. So, whatever else Christians may believe about God, they cannot believe that he is some passive, unmoved spectator of events. Not a sparrow falls to the ground,' Jesus said, but God marks it'. He has entered the despair and the darkness. And on the third day, very early in the morning, while it was still dark, when it seemed that there was nothing left to hope fore, they found the stone rolled away from the tomb, and the Lord speaking to them from the to other side of death. this was not the end of death, the end of the randomness of things; 2000 years on, we know that well enough. But it was the end of hopelessness in the face of them.

At the end of the Christian Bible, in the seventh chapter of Revelation, St John presents us with a vision of a great multitude which no one could number, of every nation and kindred, and people and tongue' - a multitude that incorporated all the loyalties and divisions which have underlain the wars of mankind; a multitude who are united in a shared love and loyalty to the Lord who went to the cross for love of us. I know of no other unifying vision that can offer any hope as we contemplate the waste of our wraths and sorrows.

If Remembrance Sunday does not point us to that hope of meaning, of closure, as people say, then it can be no more than a preface to the next war into which humanity will surely stumble."

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