Should we still remember?

Here is my sermon from this year's Remembrance Sunday service at Broughton:

It's now over one hundred years since the first Remembrance Sunday took place at the end of the First World War; this year we commemorated the 80th anniversary of D-Day; next year we'll celebrate the 80th anniversary of VE Day – and very few of those who remember those events are still alive today. So it might be reasonable to ask the question, do we still need to carry on remembering? After all we don't still remember the battle of Waterloo in the same way, and that too was a war to stop a dictator taking over Europe.

It seems to me that Remembrance Sunday is important especially for those who don't believe in God but still want to hold on to the idea that there are moral absolutes – that some actions are right and others wrong; that some actions are good and others are evil. Without God to define what is right and what is wrong it is necessary to come up with another standard for morality and so the moral and ethical code for many in our society is summed up in the golden rule: “Don't be like Hitler!” And so Remembrance events are annual reminders of that secular basis for morality.

This, however, makes our sense of good and bad a matter of comparison: “I may not be perfect but I'm not as bad as Hitler”! As the old joke says, if you're in a place with bears you don't have to be able to run faster than the bear, you only have to be able to run faster than your companions! As long as you're not the slowest, you'll survive. And that's the way morality is seen too: as long as I'm not the worst I'm OK. We compare ourselves with others, even those around us, and as long as we are better than they are, we satisfy ourselves that we are good. And even if we've got no-one around us who is worse than us, we are still good because we're not Hitler.

In our second Bible reading (Mark 10:17-27), a man comes up to Jesus to ask a question and calls him “Good Teacher.” “Why do you call me good?” Jesus answered. “No one is good—except God alone.” In doing so, Jesus was making a point about himself – in calling him 'good' the man recognises that Jesus is divine; but Jesus is also making a point about us – we are not good. Even if we obey a lot of the Ten Commandments like the man had, we are still not good. The man was relying on his good deeds for his salvation, for his reputation of being good, but Jesus reminds him and us that it is impossible for us to be saved, to be good by our own actions.

The problem is our perspective. When we compare ourselves with others we will always find people worse than ourselves: even Hitler thought he was morally better than others – which is why he put so many into death camps. Unlike the Mitchell and Webb comedy sketch, the Nazis didn't look at themselves and ask “Are we the baddies?” - they thought they were the goodies. We may think that morally we are as far away from the Nazis as we are in distance from Australia, but we are looking at it from ground level. Jesus reminds us that the moral standard is God himself – only he is good. And when we compare ourselves with him, we are as far away from him morally as we are in distance from the edge of the universe. And from the edge of the universe, the distance between us and Australia is ultra-microscopically small. Compared with God we are as bad as Hitler.

A film came out last year called “The Zone of Interest” about Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his wife Hedwig who strive to build a dream life for their family in a house and garden beside the camp. But what makes this film different to other Holocaust movies is that instead of getting us to identify with the victims, it wants to show us our similarities with the perpetrators.

So while Remembrance events are good for reminding ourselves to not be like Hitler, it is Remembrance Sunday that teaches us the most important lesson: peace will never come through human effort. Because all of us share that inner sinfulness that is only a step away from committing the horrors we see in war. We need to be reminded not to be like Hitler because we are like Hitler. The Commandments Jesus doesn't mention in his list are Commandments about putting God first in our lives, and by failing to do that our inhumanity towards humanity will continue. But the good news that introduces the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:2) is that that God saves us not on the basis of our good deeds but on his love for us – which is shown supremely in Jesus' death which takes the punishment for our sins and attributes to us a goodness that we could never achieve ourselves.

Our first reading (Isaiah 2:2-5) tells us that one day those who are willing will learn God's ways and walk in his paths, and that is a good thing to start doing now. But it is only through Jesus that peace will come because he is the good one who will judge between the nations and settle the disputes for many peoples. That is why he is called the Prince of Peace; that is why the peace doves we have here today come out from the cross.

"I'm not as bad as Hitler"

Here's my article for the November magazine:

This year marks the 80^th anniversary of the start of World War Two and also, perhaps, the start of a new way to personify pure evil. During WWII, the person of Adolf Hitler was unsurprisingly used by the Allied nations in their propaganda to illustrate the immorality of the Nazi regime. However, this association of Hilter with evil continues to the present day in a way that isn't true of Kaiser Wilhelm who was used in similar propaganda in WWI. Hitler continues to be used to personify evil; perhaps because in our secular world that cannot acknowledge a supernatural realm, there needs to be something to replace the devil.

Hitler has also indirectly contributed to the field of logic. A reductio ad Hitlerum is an attempt to invalidate someone else's position on the basis that the same view was held by Adolf Hitler, e.g. he was a vegetarian and against smoking. In the world of the Internet, Godwin's rule asserts that “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1”. This has the unfortunate side-effect that making any reference to Hitler or the Nazis, however justified, is now seen as a reason not to listen to that argument. This is particularly dangerous when it comes to issues of censorship and restrictions on freedoms of speech and belief, which were used by the Nazis to quash any opposition or disagreement and are also increasingly used today to stop any questioning of the cultural zeitgeist.

There is another way that Hitler is used in arguments. Again he is used as the embodiment of evil, but this time people use him to compare themselves with: they say “I may not be perfect, but I'm not as bad as Hitler.” This has particularly dire consequences when it comes to the subject of sin and judgement. The Bible teaches us that one day Jesus will return to judge the living and the dead (1 Peter 4:5). It reminds us that we have all sinned and fallen short of God's standard (Romans3:23) and that we all therefore need to repent in order to be forgiven (Acts 3:19) and enjoy eternal life with God (Revelation 21:27).

Now I doubt whether anyone considers themselves to be perfect, but the problem is that when we compare our sins to other peoples' sins we will always be able to think of people who do worse or more sins than us, and if we can't, we can always rely on the argument that “I'm not as bad as Hitler”! When we do this we minimise and trivialise our sins to such an extent that we don't feel the need to repent. But if we look at this from God's point of view rather than our own we see that “the person who keeps every law of God but makes one little slip is just as guilty as the person who has broken every law there is” (James2:10 The Living Bible), because Jesus tells us that the standard is to be as perfect as God himself (Matthew 5:48).

To have a right view of ourselves is to say that we are just as bad a Hitler and that we don't deserve eternal life any more than he does, no matter how many good things we do in our lives. But the glorious good news is that even though we are that bad, Jesus died to take our punishment so that through belief in him we can enjoy eternal life with God and with no more pain, suffering or war.