Preached in St Mary’s, Primrose Hill by The Reverend Robert Atwell

It is rare for a news bulletin these days not to have some reference to the on-going war against terror, and with our newspapers and television screens full of pictures of the war either in Iraq or Afghanistan or Palestine, the words of Jesus in this morning’s gospel are all the more poignant. 'You will hear of wars and rumours of wars,' (Mt 24:6) says Jesus. We do indeed.

The shadows created by violence and war continue to fall across our lives and, thanks to modern technology, we can now sit in the comfort of our living rooms and be armchair critics of every battle and skirmish. It is why our annual act of remembrance today is so important: it discomforts us and challenges complacency.

In the myth of human progress it is easy to indulge the fantasy that things are getting better and better. Here we are (we like to think) set full-square on the escalator of scientific, economic and intellectual progress. In part this is true – at least here in the West. The trouble is twofold. First, not everyone in the world shares equitably in the benefits such progress generates and this is a constant source of grievance. And secondly, our moral and spiritual maturity does not match our scientific achievements.

Remembrance Sunday confronts us with hard and bitter realities about our life on this planet. It reminds us of the human cost of what happens when things go wrong. Today is a day for recollection about past courage and sacrifice, but also about the on-going struggle for justice, freedom and human dignity.

It is a popular cry of atheists that religion has been the cause of more wars and human suffering than anything else in the world. Violence is certainly a fault-line through humanity and historically no religion has been free of it. One of the scandals of the church is that so many persecutions have taken place in the name of Jesus Christ. It’s not many years ago that there were photographs of bishops blessing tanks. This is all true, but to say that religion is the source of all evil in the world, as Richard Dawkins does in his new book, The God Delusion, is not only ludicrous, but it ignores facts.

Over the summer I read Niall Ferguson’s book, The War of the World, who points out that in the last century secular dictators and their atheistic ideologies caused the death of more human beings than in the whole history of humankind. Between them Stalin and Hitler accounted for the death of between 58 and 59 million people. Mao Tse Tung killed over 1 million of his fellow countrymen in the cultural revolution. During the twentieth century Ferguson estimates that wars killed between 167 and 188 million people. It is why he says that the twentieth century will go down in the annals of history not as the era of scientific progress but as the era of wars.

In the teaching of the Bible war and violence are not a part of God's design for his creation, but are products of our dysfunction as human beings, from which he is concerned to redeem us. It is no coincidence that in the Book of Genesis, hard on the heels of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, comes the murder of Abel by his brother Cain. The lesson on page three of the Bible, as it were, is that conflict, jealousy and violence breed in the human heart and can poison even what should be the most nurturing of all human environments: the family. It is why Jesus says that what is important is ‘purity of heart’. It is out of the human heart that thoughts of murder, violence, greed and jealousy flow. Only ‘the pure in heart will see God’, he tells us.

And it is this spiritual commentary on human relationships that colours our act of remembrance today. If our commemoration is merely antiquarian, it will be worthy but of limited value. We need to make connections between the past and our life as individuals and as a nation now. We come to remember with thanksgiving the sacrifice of so many men and women, both known and unknown, in whose debt we will forever stand. But we come also to repent of the way, for example, individually we often nurse grievances or resentment. We come to pray for grace that God will purify our heart.

Above all, we come to pray for the better-ordering of the world so that causes of war may be addressed. As Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi, has said, ‘The virus of hate can lie dormant for a while, but it rarely dies. Instead, it mutates.’ The seeds of violence germinate in the soil of injustice. We pass down to our children, and to our children's children, our unresolved agendas and bitterness. It is what makes conflict the default option between ancient antagonists, however many years of relative peace have intervened.

I don’t know if you have visited the Imperial War Museum in London, but the final exhibit in its Holocaust exhibition is an audio-visual presentation with two television screens. The right hand screen displays a sequence of photographs of the concentration camps as they appear today. In some scenes snow lends a veneer of beauty to the huts and barbed wire. Many have fallen into disrepair, but you can still see the railway line that led into Auschwitz, complete with its watchtowers, gas chambers and crematoria.

The other screen has a number of interviews with Holocaust survivors. The juxtaposition of the screens, one silently showing black and white pictures, the other animated and filmed in colour is striking. The recollections of the survivors do not make easy listening. One survivor recalled a conversation with a friend after the war who said to her, 'How wonderful that you should have forgiven the Nazis after all you've been through.' 'Forgiven!' replied the woman, 'Forgiven! I can never forgive. How can you forgive what is unforgivable?'

There may be some things which are so terrible that they are beyond the capacity of human forgiveness, at least in this life. And who are we to judge? But as a Christian, though I understand the conversation, I cannot leave it there.

Acceptance and toleration are virtues in society and human lives, but they are insufficient to secure the healing of minds and memories, or of individuals and communities. Only forgiveness can do that. Which is why the cross of Christ stands at the heart of Christianity, proclaiming not the tolerance of God, but his compassion and forgiveness. God is not remote from human tragedy. He is here, among us.

After the bombings of 9/11 the previous pope, Pope John Paul II, said that, 'There can be no peace without justice, and no justice without forgiveness.' Forgiveness means that we are not destined to replay the grievances of yesterday. Forgiveness gives us the ability and the will to live with the past, but without being held captive by it. Forgiveness re-shapes the story of human history and the way we tell it. The past cannot be changed, but our attitude to it can.

We come today not merely to remember, but to pray for the grace of God to help us and others the world over to forgive, because only forgiveness will heal our fractured world.