Sunday 11 November 2018

Centenary Armistice Sunday

I celebrated and preached at St Luke's this morning. Getting the eleventh hour timing right on any Remembrance Sunday is a matter of choosing lengthy hymns and if available longer readings. Today's lectionary set were all short, as were the hymns. Even at a leisurely pace we reached the end of the Gospel at ten to the hour. So, I started to preach, knowing it would take me longer than ten to reach my conclusion, hoping to find a right place to pause. Thankfully, but more by luck than design, I'd reached a place in my sermon text where a pause would work, so we went into the Act of Remembrance bang on time. Honour was satisfied, and that matters to me. 

We've been treated to several excellent documentaries featuring interviews with World War One veterans on TV lately. It's so good to hear their personal stories of first hand loss, plus those of people on the home front, not just the tales of top generals, politicians and industrialists, whose collective decisions inflicted such tragic scars on people in Britain, Europe and across the world. When will we ever learn?

After a post lunch siesta, a walk around the park again as the sun was setting. The third part of Le Carre's 'Little Drummer Girl' novel dramatized was on in the Sunday evening prime time slot on BBC 1. The plot is rather convoluted and not presented in a way that's easy to follow. Even so, it captures the seventies ethos very nicely - a trip down memory lane for europhiles at least.
 

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