The cartoonists and picture editors in the papers have been having quite a bit of fun over the last week. It’s all at the expense of Michael Howard, the new Tory Party leader, and it goes back to Anne Widdecombe’s comment a few years ago that there was ‘something of the night’ about him. Suddenly vampire imagery and eerie pictures of his face loom out of the darkness. The joke may wear thin soon, unless of course it sticks like Tony Blair’s Private Eye image as Vicar of St Albion’s has done.

In a year that has seen dodgy dossiers, the illusive weapons of mass destruction - or more to the point has not seen them, the death of a government scientist and accusations of deception flying around, Michael Howard would appear not to be the only politician about whom there is something of the night. But then that should not really surprise us because the truth is there is something of the night about all of us and it is precisely because of this that we have come here to this Remembrance Service this morning.

When I was a child and went to Remembrance Services it all seemed so much simpler. Then the primary remembrance was the cost of those who fought against the Nazi regime and that seemed a clear case of right versus wrong. Things today seem to have got more complicated! For some invading Iraq was right in order to remove an evil regime, though that was not actually the reason given for advancing it at the time. For some it will create problems we can only begin to imagine. For some the absence of international approval removes its moral authority. In this murk we find that troops have died and no one wants to think that they may have died for anything other than a noble cause. There are haunting thoughts around this year’s Remembrance and many of them have been expressed by the families of those who have been killed.

As we get older, of course, we see that things are more complicated than any war being simply the fight being between angels on one side and devils on the other. Motives are mixed, though the world is clearly better off without some regimes. That said, we should not blind ourselves to thinking that there is only something of the night about the enemy. There is something of the night about us all and that is a hard thing to face, especially when people have died.

Wars happen because conflict is part of the way the world is and sometimes these erupt into violence. They are a stark reminder that we live in a world of sin and that is the ‘something of the night’ that is in us all. Sitting neutral on the side lines, keeping ourselves pure, is not always an option, or a luxury, we can afford. Doing nothing can allow aggressors to triumph and there is a time to draw a line - though that does not mean that there aren’t other ways to pursue a conflict, so war is not always inevitable. One of the haunting questions about our most recent conflict is that other policies were stopped prematurely and that some seem to have had their minds set on going to war.

So we find ourselves coming to this year’s Remembrance with a mixture of emotions and thoughts. We remember those who have taken up the struggle and got their hands dirty, and in some cases paid a heavy price. At the same time we count the cost of the whole sorry business and hold that cost with uneasy hearts. As we look more deeply at this counting the cost what we find ourselves looking at is the ‘something of the night’ about the world that makes war possible and about ourselves that we get caught up in it. Remembrance confronts us with some home truths about humanity and therefore about ourselves.

Of course some people really do have a greater darkness about them than others and this is the real shape that evil takes. If we want to we can see Halloween and its dressing up as a way of recognising the reality of evil. But evil isn’t about graveyards and spooks. That kind of fiction can distract us from facing the form it really takes. It really expresses itself in oppression, in violence and torture, in the evil and slaughter of murderous regimes, in countless abuses and corruptions.

This something of the night is a sliding scale and if we are honest we know that we can place ourselves somewhere on that scale. Even if we want to keep our hands clean and avoid contact with the world’s darkness we find it creeps in. There is an old phrase that the only thing evil needs in order to flourish is for good people do nothing. So avoiding getting involved does not keep our hands as clean as we might want to assume.

So where does this leave us as we stand at a distance and think about wars of the past and present. Fortunately the Christian faith has a central theme that can help us hold all of this. It is the theme of the kingdom and it stands over all our remembrance.

At the beginning of the gospels we find that Jesus came to proclaim the kingdom in our midst. It is why he called men and women to follow him, as we heard in our gospel reading (Mark 1:14-20). Every time we say The Lord’s Prayer we pray that the kingdom will come ‘on earth as in heaven’. The kingdom is a way of saying that this is God’s world and ultimately all of this struggling is held by God’s love and purposes. It may not look like it at times, and there are times when the darkness, the something of the night, looks more on top. But the Christian faith holds very profoundly that light does triumph over darkness, that it is God’s world. That is why I find celebrations of Halloween on their own give a distorted picture of how the world is.

Proclaiming the kingdom says that the whole of creation belongs to God and so we should live as though that is the case and not try to work against it. When we allow the something of the night to come to the top, at what ever level, we work against this kingdom; we are involved in actions that are like a rebellion against the creation belonging to God. On the other hand, when we pray that the kingdom will come, we make explicit that we want to work in harmony with what is actually the case: that the world belongs to God and we should live with that in mind.

So we have come here this morning not just to remember those who have died in and through war - though we have certainly come to do that. We have also come to turn that remembrance into a deeper reflection on how the wars come about in the first place and to reaffirm our prayer, our confidence that God’s kingdom will come. We have come to proclaim that this is God’s world and to rededicate ourselves to live in that light and peace.

© Ian Black 2003

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