In Remberance of You - Lest We Forget

'God of our fathers, known of old,

Lord of our far-flung battle line,

Beneath whose awful hand we hold

Dominion over palm and pine —

Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,

            Lest we forget—lest we forget!'

Someone left some ANZAC biscuits, beautifully wrapped in baking paper with a sprig of rosemary, on our door knob. Many would know the symoblic signifance of red poppy flowers as those who fought for us in the Great War would have died, whose crimson blood would have stained the battlefields with a shade of red in Flanders Field. Rosemary also has a particular significance to Australians and New Zealanders as it's found growing wild on the Gallipoli peninsula where Australians and New Zealanders landed early on the morning of 25 April 1915 with allied forces in Ottoman Turkey that marked the start of the Gallipoli Campaign. Rosemary is for remembrance.

"Remembrance is a personal, therefore a subjective, process. It matters all the more to nuture it collectively" wrote Erik Varden in his book the Shattering of Loneliness. This is in rebembrance of Christ who died for us. The Christian condition unfolds within the certainty that ultimate reality, the source of all that is, is a personal reality of communion, not a metaphysical abstraction. Men and women, made 'in the image and likeness' of God, bear the mark of that original communion stamped on their being. The Scripture repeatedly exhorts us to 'remember'. The remembrance enjoined is partly introspective and existential, partly historical, for the God who took flesh to redeem our sins and shattered our loneliness, leaves traces in history.

At the heart of this is the idea of remembrance whereby we must properly remember that we are created, that we are led and guided by God (since Genesis and Exodus) and that Jesus bids us (through the four gospels' description of the last supper and the passion narrative) to do something in memory of Him. The communion of saints is, importantly, a shared and collective experience in remebrance of Christ. As Varden describes, "My capacity for truth, however blessed it may be by nature, however extendable by grace, is inadequate to fathom truth in its fulness. My remembrance, too, is limited. Even the memory of God, maintained in solitude, can disappoint. Anyone who prays the psalms will have been struck by this honest admission: I remembered my God and I groaned (Psalm 76:4). To be consoling and complete, remembrance in truth has to be shared. The spirit performs his consoling, illuminating work ecclesial. His operation is all of a piece: he consoles by creating concord; he leads us towards truth by drawing us out of our cloistered selves into a shared remembrance that sweetens even bitter memories with gratitude. He enables a gradual passage from what is piecemeal towards what is whole. This process, amazingly, embraces the future as well as the past: [The spirit of truth] will declare to you the things that are to come, says Jesus, before he goes on: 'He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you' (John 16:13-14), even though to pursue truth is to swim upstream from Hades, to choose light over darkness, to refuse disintegration." A constant battle. Yet, only by remembering the past will we move forward in the present and continue in our pursuit of truth into the future. As the old testament reminds us, "Only take heed to thyself, and keep thy soul diligently, lest thou forget the things which thine eyes have seen, and lest they depart from thy heart all the days of thy life" (Deuteronomy 4:7-9), we are reminded that a nation never fogets the true source of its sorrow and success in rembrance of the sacrifice for us to have what we have today on this ANZAC Day.

So we pray on this ANZAC Day that: 

O Lord, our ruler and guide in this life and the life eternal, in whose hands are the destinies of this and every nation, we give you thanks for the freedoms we enjoy in this land and for those who laid down their lives to defend them. We pray that all the people of Australia, who are gratefully remembering the courage and sacrifice of those who died for us, may have the grace to live in a spirit of justice, generosity, and peace through Jesus Christ our Lord. Above all, let us be reminded that Christ has been raised from the dead. In the words of Corinthians, since death came through a human being, the resurrection of the dead has also come through a human being - for as all die in Adam, so all will be made alive in Christ. Let us properly remember that Jesus Christ has bid us in the communion of saints, to do so in remembrance that as often as we eat the bread of your body and drink the cup as the new covenant in your blood, we do so remembering your sacrifice for our sake to proclaim death, redeem us and rise again forevermore. We pray all this in the name of our Lord, Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.