If you walk into almost any town or village in the country, you will find a war memorial. Often it is a stone block that stands as a testimony to the young men of the area who died in war. Every year at Remembrance we hear numbers and names. We might think on the stories behind those names – men with families, friends, hopes, dreams and all of them with lives cut short.

I’d like to tell you one such story. It is the story of a Seargent, who served in a border guard at a military checkpoint. A family man who was popular with his men. In the middle of the night on a cold and snowy February, on duty with five others, he looked across the checkpoint to see soldiers. An army advancing towards them.

Six men against an entire army. The Seargent ordered the five men with him to retreat as quickly and as quietly as they could, whilst he alone went to their only defensive position. A machine gun placed inside an old railway carriage. In the next few moments, seeing him moving towards the gun, the advancing army opened fire, killing the Seargent. His order to retreat, and his movement towards the gun caused the advancing army to slow down. His actions enabled his comrades to reach safety. His body was found riddled with bullet holes.The Seargent left behind his wife, an eight-year-old son, and a one-year-old daughter.

He was only thirty-six.

This story sounds like that of so many others that we might hear at Remembrance Sunday, but this story is far more recent. The Seargent’s name was Denys, and he was most likely the first soldier in Ukraine to be killed when Vladimir Putin ordered his invasion. The first casualty in a war that has killed so many already. A war that will kill more people today and more people tomorrow.War is sadly all too common in the world today.

When the First World War was fought it was called ‘The war to end all wars.’ The hope people had was that this war, which was so costly, so horrific and so hard to understand the causes of would lead to a change in humanity. Something good had to be destined to come from something as unimaginably awful as the trenches, the mud, the shells and the slaughter.

Perhaps like me you wonder how the lessons from it were forgotten so soon.Yet in so many of the years since, war has been far away. We have grown accustomed to war and conflict as being something that happens over there. Korea, the Falklands, Afghanistan, and Iraq were all taking place a long way from home. It was easy to forget about them. It was easy to forget about the impact of war on our armed forces personnel and civilians from another land.It is too easy to switch off our televisions. Too easy to hide things that we don’t want to see on our social media. Too easy to give in to our fatigue of war and of bad news and turn the page.

But for the people of Ukraine, indeed for the people of Israel and Palestine, for the people of Yemen and Syria and so many other countries war is a daily horror. The Christian population of Gaza, often sheltering together in the rubble of their churches have spoken movingly about their sense of Christ’s love for them being their only source of hope amidst the devastation.

When Jesus gave His commandment to us to “love one another” he didn’t leave a restriction. He didn’t tell us to love this group over here but not those people over there. Christ’s love is God’s love for all people. God’s love is for all of those men who died in Flanders fields. God’s love is for the men and women who died all over the world in the 1940s.

God’s love is love for the people of Gaza sheltering and starving as bombs fall around them.
God’s love is for the Israeli families longing for the return of stolen loved ones.
God’s love is for the Ukrainian refugees in foreign lands.
God’s love is for the people of Russia enduring oppression and fear.
God’s love is for them and for you.

It is through God’s love for us that we can hope for the future. Whilst now may be the time to mourn, the time to weep and the time to keep silence in remembrance. Tomorrow may yet be the time to heal, the time to build up and the time to speak out.

Tomorrow may yet be the time for peace.Amen.
Rev. Iain Grant
Assistant Curate, Sheringham St Peter