Halifax Minster
Jeremiah 8:4-7 and Romans 8:19-26
The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.
May the LORD give us a heart for His word and His word for our heart.
Dear sisters and brothers!
For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now.
This is how St Paul in Romans 8,22 tries to convey a sense of what he and his fellow contemporaries experienced as cruel reality – as they looked into a world that from the very beginning was, and still is, full of pain, violence, injustice, war and agony. The pains of childbirth – it’s a powerful metaphor. A metaphor I would like to explore with you on this very special Remembrance Day 2018.
So let me take you on a journey into the past – and beyond.
I still remember very well the birth of our sons – 2½ years apart.
I was there in the delivery room both 10 and 13 years ago. I remember the labour, the pain, the long wait as a powerless father. And finally that very special moment when they were there.
I looked at them for the very first time. I heard them screeching with their tiny, sweet voices – I picked them up and held them gently, listened to their breath, I felt their little hearts thumping, counted their fingers and toes, looked into their eyes.
And I thought that whoever witnessed a wonder like this, the birth of a child, could not in all seriousness want a war. Never!
On the contrary – I thought that after such an experience, people would instead defend human life to their last breath, would surely sacrifice everything for the sake of peace – wouldn’t they?
But what kind of world have our children been born into? In what kind of world are they growing up? Is it really a world that bears witness to the sanctity of life?
For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now.
I remember a field trip that some ministers from our Aachen Church District went on four years ago. Some of them are here today, which is very moving. It was to Ypres in Flanders, a town that witnessed appalling suffering during the whole of the First World War. Hardly scarred land. Countless cemeteries and war graves. The Last Post at Menin Gate. We’ve been to the site close to the Yser Canal, where John McCrae wrote:
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place: and in the sky
The larks still bravely singing fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
And finally we arrived at Vladslo, a nearby German war cemetery.
Before our visit I’d learned about a young man who lived 100 years ago, – and shared my surname: Bentzin. His first name was Friedrich. He is buried in Vladslo. I didn’t know much about him. Just his name, his rank and date of death. So I had to imagine what happened to him – and in secret I began to call him uncle – ‚Onkel Friedrich’.
100 years ago, I imagined, he had been employed as a farmhand on one of the huge estates east of the River Elbe, close to the Baltic Sea. In fact all my ancestors who bore the name of Bentzin actually came from a hamlet in this area – that is, Pomerania.
I imagined that as a farmhand Onkel Friedrich knew all about horses. So he was drafted into the Mecklenburg Dragoons. During the hot summer days of late July 1914 he was loaded on a train along with his comrades and horses. They were transported southwards for days, right across Germany.
At Aachen – a place he’d probably never heard of before – they disembarked. On August 4th they crossed the border into neutral Belgium, the reason Britain declared war on Germany on the very same day – a war driven above all by Germany’s ambition to pursue world power, at all costs…
A week later, on August 12th, roughly 50 miles northwest of Aachen, near the Belgian town of Halen, the dragoons launched a cavalry charge with sabres and lances – an operation they had trained for intensively back home.
Everyone turns to his own course, like a horse plunging headlong into battle.
There they were met by an elite unit of the Belgian army – state-of-the-art equipped with bicycles and – machine guns. The dragoons fell like flies in a matter of minutes – the horses fled in wild panic. This cavalry attack, one of the last of its kind on the Western Front, ended in carnage, a bloodbath. The two cavalry divisions involved lost by evening 501 men and 848 horses. Onkel Friedrich survived – outwardly probably unharmed, but most certainly shattered and traumatised.
His regiment marched on into France. But after the First battle of the Marne had been lost to the Allied armies – I learned the ‚Dukes‘ took part in this battle too -, the dragoon Friedrich died on September 11th, probably killed during the battle’s aftermath, the so-called ‘Great Retreat‘. Only five weeks into the war, his body was lowered into a grave somewhere between France and Flanders and later transferred to Vladslo. With 25.000 others. Far from home, far from his parents, his family and loved ones.
Four years ago we followed Onkel Friedrich’s footsteps. We gathered around his gravestone. We held a brief prayer service. Remembering.
They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old…
Vladslo – an atmosphere of great sorrow and loss haunts this place.
This is made even more plain when we look at the pair of sculptures in the cemetery, entitled “Grieving Parents” by Käthe Kollwitz, a notable German artist of the time. It took her 18 years to complete the sculptures as a tribute to her youngest son, Peter, who was killed a few weeks after Onkel Friedrich – in October 1914. Peter, just like Friedrich, is buried there in Vladslo.
The figure on the left of the sculpture is of Peter’s father, Karl. He gazes stoically at the ninth stone before him, on which Peter’s name is written. His arms are folded, his hands grip his arms as if he is shoring himself up against the sheer weight of his grief.
In contrast, the self-portrait of Peter’s mother Käthe stoops in pain, retreating into herself and clutching her cloak to her chin as if protecting herself from an icy wind. Like her husband, her hands convey almost as much emotion as her face.
Käthe Kollwitz once wrote about her work:“It is my duty to voice the sufferings of people, the sufferings that never end and are as big as mountains.”
The groaning in the pains of childbirth – and the stultifying grief and agony and pain when your child dies, your sibling, a parent – the anguish of knowing your loved one will never return.
In St Paul’s metaphor these pains are intertwined.
And I feel Jeremiah’s question emerging: Why then has this people turned away in perpetual backsliding? Why is it that my people know not the rules of the Lord?
Is it because the world as it is – then and today – is all too often frightening? Fear is of course a natural feeling. Fear is a signal that something alien and potentially dangerous is creeping up on us.
But fear alone is not a good counsellor.
In our time we are yet again witnessing the unexpected rise of fear.
And today’s answers to those fears seem all too familiar.
We see all over Europe and beyond the rise of exclusion, increasing social polarisation, the enticing offer of black and white solutions to complex issues.
Real and imaginary walls are being erected in an attempt to urge people to distinguish themselves from others, to think in sweeping terms of ‘us’ (good) and ‘them’ (bad), to underline differences rather than ask what we have in common.
People are turning to just such a ruptured vision of the world, despite our tragic and not so distant history, especially in Europe. And this discourse is no longer the exclusive rhetoric of fringe and extreme sections of our society.
And I would argue that the predominant source of this cancer is indeed fear. When we are afraid, we often switch off rational thought processes and take refuge in our instincts, even the darker ones. It leads to all kinds of bedevilment and dangerous delusions.
Fear can make us vulnerable to those who exploit it for their own advantage. It leaves us groaning in pain about how the world seems to evolve again and again. And it leaves us speechless, and agonising in despair. It’s part of our weakness. Germany’s history is indeed full of examples of these weaknesses.
St Paul writes: Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words.
Dear brothers and sisters, as we four years ago gazed at the sculptures in Vladslo and experienced the unspoken misery carved in dark stone – a misery indeed too deep for words – we felt the Holy Spirit had done its part.
Such intercessions open up a chance for healing. And peace. And hope.
For in this hope we were saved, St Paul writes.
And yes, dear brothers and sisters, there is hope – there is hope in the midst of a sea of darkness and uncertainty. Each childbirth bears witness to God’s hope for our world.
And on occasions such as this today a ray of hope flares upwards.
We from Aachen are here today with you on the centenary of Armistice and Remembrance Day to admit the blame that we have inherited, and the burden of human error. We must face the distressing truth that our forefathers inflicted immeasurable pain and caused immeasurable grief. In such circumstances, we may not know how to start to pray as we should.
So we sink our heads in shame and humility. We remember the victims and bow before them.
We shoulder both the blame and the responsibility, and mourn together the tragic loss of young and hopeful lives on both sides of the trenches, whether Friedrich or John, Giles or Peter, Joshua or Kareem.
Deeply moved, we perceive that today – just like you did already four years ago – you are stretching out hands in reconciliation, friendship and joint lamentation – and we humbly embrace this gift…
…in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God.
So let us build on this hope and – with God’s aid – continue to build a common, peaceful and just future for the children of God. In Halifax, Calderdale and Aachen, in Britain, Germany, Europe and the world. Amen.
And the peace of God, which passes all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus. Amen.
11.11.2018
Halifax Minster
Jens-Peter Bentzin, Pfarrer
pastorinthehighfens 