8th November 2026 6.30pm – Eucharist for Peace with Taize Music

The Sermon
Prepared by The Revd Canon Dr Alan Billings.

Some years ago I was sitting in an outdoor cafe on the Champs-Elysee in
Paris, sipping coffee and looking towards that great monument, the Arc de
Triomphe. And I realised the difference between the way we remember
conflicts and the way many other nations do,

The Arc de Triomphe was built to commemorate the French revolutionary and
Napoleonic wars. On every side it lists all the great battles. It's a triumphal
arch celebrating victory and honour and glory in war.

Contrast that with our monument in Whitehall. Not a triumphal arch but a
cenotaph. What we remember are the Fallen. What we recall is not victory but
its human cost. Which is why, whatever our individual views about the
morality of war in general, or any war in particular, we can join in services
today because they are not about glorifying war but about remembering those
who died. This is what we remember and it dates from the First World War.
But there’s also the matter of how we remember. What meaning do we give
these deaths?

Many want us to focus on war’s horrors, as the First World War war poets did.
They wrote about the trenches, the mud, the rats, the dysentery. Men going
over the top and dying like slaughtered beasts. Men made crazy through
constant bombardment. And it is important not to forget that, not least
because in Ukraine that sort of horror has returned to Europe..

One man who expressed this in poetry was an Anglican army chaplain,
Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy - nicknamed Woodbine Willie because he always
carried a packet of Woodbines, cigarettes, to give to wounded soldiers. He
became disillusioned and wrote this about war:

Waste of Muscle, waste of Brain,
Waste of Patience, waste of Pain,
Waste of Manhood, waste of Health,
Waste of Beauty, waste of Wealth,
Waste of Blood, waste of Tears,
Waste of Youth's most precious years,
Waste of ways the Saints have trod,
Waste of Glory, waste of God, - War!

That is one way of looking at war – it wastes lives. But it’s not the only way.
It’s not how those who put those memorials in our church thought about it.

For many the prism through which we give meaning to the death of men and
women in conflicts is Christ's death on calvary. His death was no waste, no
tragedy, but a sacrifice, a life freely given up for the sake of others. We see
the death of our soldiers as a calvary as well.

That idea has a down-side, of course. It makes it difficult to question wars
once embarked upon, because that might seem like being disrespectful
towards the dead.

But I think Christians have come to see, after many mistaken judgements in
the past, that we must never again speak of any war as holy – as a jihad or a
crusade. War remains an evil, even if there are times in a fallen world when it
is a necessary evil or the lesser of evils - and even then only as a last resort.
But when we do find ourselves saying – as we have in the past and may do in
the future – that this is a justifiable war, what will sustain the partners, the
children, the families and the friends of those killed in action is that same idea
of sacrifice.

In their grief and loss, what enables the bereaved to face the future is the
thought that the lives of their loved ones were not wasted and were not taken
away; but, for our sake, they were lives laid down. And greater love has no
one than that.

St Marys Walkley

The Church on the Road: inclusive, eucharistic, a safe place to be with God

8th November 2026 6.30pm – Eucharist for Peace with Taize Music