There is an awful sense of déjà vu about the world we are living in. The writer of Ecclesiastes observed that there is nothing new under the sun, and the daily news makes it hard to disagree. Every November we stand at our war memorials and promise, “We will remember them.” Yet for all our looking back, we seem remarkably poor at remembering.
The figures are sobering. Researchers at Uppsala University recorded 65 conflicts involving states in 2025, the highest number since their records began in 1946. Wars fought directly between nations, which many of us thought belonged to our grandparents’ generation, doubled to eight. Around 244,600 people were killed in conflict last year, the highest toll since the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. The United Nations refugee agency reports that 117.8 million people are now forcibly displaced from their homes: roughly one in every seventy people on earth. Behind each number is a name, a family, a home that will never be the same.
Those who know war best often speak most plainly against it. Harry Patch, the last surviving British soldier to have fought in the trenches of the First World War, lived to 111. For eighty years he would not speak of Passchendaele, and when at last he did, his verdict was blunt: war, he said, is “organised murder, and nothing else.” We may have heard the same conviction, more quietly expressed, from veterans of the Second World War, Korea, the Falklands, Northern Ireland, Iraq and Afghanistan. They speak of friends who did not come home, of things they saw and cannot unsee, and of a fervent hope that their grandchildren will never have to go.
Their witness echoes something far older. The prophet Isaiah saw a day when nations would beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks, when nation would not lift up sword against nation, neither would they learn war any more. Jesus blessed the peacemakers and called them children of God, and in Gethsemane he told Peter to put away his sword. Scripture is honest about human violence, from Cain onwards, but it never mistakes it for God’s intention. Its vision is of a kingdom where the wolf lies down with the lamb, and where God will wipe away every tear.
We have not heeded that teaching. Generation after generation, we have learned war again. Remembrance is therefore neither nostalgia nor the glorification of conflict. It is an act of repentance and of resolve: honest grief for the cost of our failures, and a renewed commitment to seek the peace that Christ both offers and asks of us. To remember rightly is to let the past change how we live now.
And so, despite our failures, we will gather. We will stand in silence, hear the names, and give thanks for the sacrifice of our nation’s treasure: young lives given so that others might live in freedom. We will pray for those who serve today, for veterans carrying wounds seen and unseen, for the bereaved, and for all caught up in the wars of our own time.
Please join us on Remembrance Sunday, 8th November, at 10.00am at St Mary’s, Kings Worthy, and at 11.15am at St Swithun’s, Headbourne Worthy.
We will remember them.
Revd Paul