A Service of Reconciliation to commemorate the centenary of the Armistice 11 November 1918 1
Service of Reconciliation: commemoration of the Armistice on 11 November 1918 Please join in the responses in bold. Welcome to this service of Reconciliation, in which we commemorate the centenary of the Armistice at the end of the Great War, on 11 November 1918, and thank God for the gift of peace after so much suffering. At the same time, we remember the conflicts of our own day, and pray for those who know the same pain, loss and bereavement now as men, women and children did a hundred years ago. We ask God to grant us peace and reconciliation in our world today. Let us first ask his forgiveness for the violence and cruelty of war then and now. [We sit or kneel for the prayers] Let us pray: Lord, we have taken the land you gave us and we have laid it waste. Your woods and trees have been destroyed and only their skeletons show where they flourished. The green and sunlit farmland is a desolation of mud and the machinery of war. Lord, you gave us a beautiful world in which to live, and repeatedly we have destroyed it. Lord, have mercy. Lord, have mercy Lord, we have taken the youth, the vitality and the vision of young men and women, and we have swept them away. You gave them strong bodies and lively minds, the hope of a future generation, and we have broken the bodies and confused the minds, and in place of vision there is grief and despair. Lord, you gave us the love of families and the bonds of friendship, and repeatedly we have burdened them with a sorrow that will not be healed. Christ, have mercy. Christ, have mercy Lord, we have learnt very little from our past. Today also there is land laid waste, young men and women whose lives are destroyed, parents whose tears will never dry. 2
Forgive us, Lord, and help us so to live our lives that your world may find the peace that is possible only in you. Lord, have mercy. Lord, have mercy O God, make speed to save us. O Lord, make haste to help us. Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost; as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end, Amen. [We stand to join in the hymn] Hymn [We sit for the words of those who fought in the Great War] It would be wrong to think of reconciliation as possible only when the conflict ends. There are moments, even in the midst of war, when men and women can look beyond hatred and bitterness and see that by the mercy of God there is always the possibility of compassion and peace. During the terrible Battle of the Somme in 1916, a young British artillery officer suddenly saw two men climb out of his front-line trench. They were not carrying a white flag or giving any sign that they were looking for an injured comrade, but, as he recorded: 'A stretcher was passed up to them and they proceeded to carry it ploddingly into No Man's Land. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of eyes must have been upon them, and all firing of any sort ceased. Complete, uncanny silence descended like a pall as the two men trudged steadily on and stopped beside a body lying on the ground. They lifted it onto the stretcher and plodded slowly back the way they had come. The silence remained unbroken until they were safe.' It is in the nature of war that enmity continues in spite of acts of such generosity on both sides, and sometimes reconciliation comes only in the immediacy of death. A soldier on the Western Front recorded seeing in a large shell hole two 3
decomposing bodies lying side by side, hand in hand; one was a British soldier, the other German. [We sit or kneel for the prayers] Let us pray: Lord, Father of all, we pray for those who are killed in conflicts today, and ask that they may rest in Your love and mercy in all eternity. Lord God, who gave your only Son to die in agony for us, asking for forgiveness for those who killed him, forgive us for the enmity and hatred that still divide nations, for the false barriers that we construct around ourselves and those like us, and grant that we may see you in all people and learn to love one another as you love us. In your Holy Name we ask it, Amen. Let us say together the prayer that Our Lord himself taught us: Our Father, who art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, for ever and ever, Amen [We sit for the readings] Old Testament reading 4
New Testament reading [An anthem may be sung by the choir] At the end of the war, the victorious armies marched into Germany, and confronted those who had been their enemies for so long. One young British soldier decided to make peace himself in his own way. 'I had been given a two-ounce packet of tobacco with a gold label on the front. So I thought I'd give old Jerry a present. Well, it was Christmas Eve. So off I trudged through the snow and knocked on the door. An old man opened it and just looked at me. I didn't know any German so I took out this packet of baccy and offered it to him and held out my hand. So we shook hands and he motioned me to go inside. His wife and his two sons were there. They didn't have much food but they had a good fire and we all sat round it. The two sons gave me to understand that they'd been machine gunners in the German army. I said I'd been a machine gunner too. It was a pity I had no German as we could have had a nice professional chat. I'd spotted a little accordion and the old farmer gave it to me. I played 'Silent Night' and they sang it in German and I sang it in English. We enjoyed it so much that we sang it twice.' In a moment of silence, let us remember the need for reconciliation in the conflicts of our own day and in our own society, and give thanks for those who work for peace. [A moment of silence follows] Lord, hear us. Lord, hear us and help us. Soldiers often respected one another across national divides, but for families at home, the barriers seemed if anything more impenetrable. Yet in 1918, a British family was able to repay an act of kindness by a German soldier. In 1915, Mr and Mrs Brewster had been told that their son Jack was missing, and they tried desperately to get news of him. Then they received a letter, not from the British authorities, but from a German, Egbert Wagner. He had found Jack badly wounded, in a shell hole. He wrote: 5
'Acting on the command of our Lord Jesus, 'Love your enemies', I bandaged him and provided him with bread and wine. I had a lot of conversation with your dear son, whose condition visibly improved by evening. I arranged...to get him conveyed to the collecting centre for wounded. I now carry out my promise to your son that I would communicate his deliverance to his dear father...' A bond of friendship was established between the Brewster family and the German soldier. Jack was invalided back home, and in 1918 his parents received another letter from Sergeant Wagner. His brother had been wounded and was now a prisoner of war in British hands. Could they help? The Brewsters had feelings only of friendship to the Wagner family, and managed to get money and extra clothing to the young German prisoner. These families had long been reconciled. In a moment of silence, let us remember those who today are rejected by the society in which they live because of their race or nationality or background, and who feel isolated and unwanted. [A moment of silence follows] Lord, hear us. Lord, hear us and help us. [We stand to join in the hymn] Hymn [We sit for the words of the soldiers and their families] At the end of the war, there was another difficult area of reconciliation: that between the living and the dead. For very many families, the pain continued long after peace was declared, as men and women tried to continue life without those they had loved and lost. A boy whose father had been killed remembered: 'The buttons of my father's regiment were black with a bugle, and Mum used to write to the regimental headquarters and get stacks of these buttons because all her dresses were covered in the black buttons of my father's regiment, on the cuffs, down the front. She never forgot my father.' For former soldiers, those who had survived the war, there could be a sense of guilt that they had survived when so many others had not. They felt separated 6
from their comrades, isolated by their very existence. One such veteran described only towards the end of his long life the vision that had haunted him since the day of the Armistice: 'I could not put my head up because I was under fire but above me, at eye level, walking past, were hundreds and hundreds of boots and puttees...they went on and on for hours, and I realised that it was the dead all walking away and leaving me behind. I felt worried and frightened that they were leaving me by myself, that I had been left behind. They were marching away into the distance where I would never follow.' In a moment of silence, let us remember the victims of war in our own world, those who die, those who survive but are damaged by what they have experienced, those who love and care for them. [A moment of silence follows] Lord, hear us. Lord, hear us and help us. [We sit or kneel for the prayers] Let us pray: Lord God, whose will it is that we live in peace with one another, we pray for those who today have been wounded in mind or body or spirit by war and the oppression of unjust regimes. Watch over them with your infinite compassion, and heal them so that they may feel the richness of the life you intend for all your children. Lord, in your mercy Hear our prayer We remember the families of the armed forces of our own and all other countries, those who suffer the loss of those they love, or who have to help them through years of trauma. We think too of the husbands and wives of those who serve far away from their own country, those who wait anxiously each day and pray for the safe return of those for whom they care. Lord, in your mercy 7
Hear our prayer Loving Lord, we ask your blessing on those who give aid to the victims of war, the men and women who at great risk to themselves take food and water and medical care to those whose homes and communities are destroyed and who live in the constant fear of further attack and apparently endless destruction. Lord, in your mercy Hear our prayer Lord, Prince of Peace and Saviour of all, on this day we remember an end to war and the hope of a lasting peace, a hope so endlessly shattered in so many parts of the world. Help us in the power of your Holy Spirit to overcome the evil of war with the message of your love, to find reconciliation between those whose weapons are oppression and violence, and those who are their victims, between all races and all peoples, so that we may truly be one in you. This and all our prayers we ask in the name of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ, Amen [We remain sitting or kneeling while the choir sings the Nunc Dimittis, and then stand to join in the hymn.] Hymn [We remain standing until the service ends.] In gratitude for the ending of one terrible conflict and in the hope of God's world united in his peace, we dedicate ourselves to his work of reconciliation. We say together: Lord God, our Father, today we offer you ourselves, body, mind and soul, and ask that you will use us in your service. Lord, open our eyes to see that when we create barriers between ourselves and other people, you are there on the side of the rejected. Open our hearts so that we may reflect your love and your compassion in our own words and actions. Open our lives to you so that we may share in your work of bringing reconciliation and peace to our homes, our Church, our society and our 8
world. We offer these prayers in the name of Jesus, the Prince of Peace, our Lord and our Saviour, Amen. The blessing: May the God of peace enfold us and grant that our darkness may be transformed by his glorious light, and may the blessing of Almighty God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, be with us and all people everywhere, this night and always. Amen [Words by Joan van Emden, Great War quotations from: The Quick and the Dead and Meeting the Enemy (both published by Bloomsbury, 2011 and 2013 respectively) and 1918 (published by Pen & Sword, 2018), all by Richard van Emden.] JvE/RvE 2018 9
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