D-Day 77 and the ‘true glory’ | First Sunday after Trinity

Sermon by the Dean | 11am Sung Eucharist, Portsmouth Cathedral

Today is my father’s 90th birthday. He tells me that seventy-seven years ago, on his thirteenth birthday, he remembers hearing on the radio that Allied forces had landed on the beaches of Normandy. ‘D-Day’ had arrived, and as my father entered his teenage years, there were soldiers not much older than him fighting to end tyranny across the Channel. Private Robert E Johns from Portsmouth was one of the youngest, being less than four years older than my father, dying just days short of his seventeenth birthday. His story was one of a number highlighted across the City two years ago, when fourteen heads of state descended on Portsmouth for a 75th anniversary event.

Those of you who remember that occasion will recall that none of the heads of state, bar one, spoke in their own words. President Trump, for example, read part of President Franklin D Roosevelt’s D-Day prayer, which ends with words of peace and unity: ‘a peace invulnerable to the schemings of unworthy men.’ The exception was our own Queen, who addressed the assembled gathering and huge international audience, saying that ‘the heroism, courage and sacrifice of those who lost their lives will never be forgotten.’

It is in moments like that almost everyone can see the advantage of a monarchy: of a head of state who is not a political appointment. In moments such as these, the Queen symbolises something eternal: the sacred authority that stands above money, politics and sectional interest. As is abundantly clear in the Coronation service, the monarchy has a spiritual heart and a spiritual foundation. The Queen, therefore, is a pointer to something beyond her own personal qualities, and at times such as D-Day 75, this ‘something more’ gives her words a rare power and resonance.

In today’s epistle, Paul contrasts the temporary reality we see, with what cannot be seen, but is nonetheless permanent and eternal. In and through the substance of our ordinary lives, sometimes we glimpse ‘something more’, something that Paul describes as ‘an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure’. Most of us have had experiences of music, or the natural world, or friendship and camaraderie of the kind that sustained those on the way to the Normandy beaches, that have touched us deeply. I invite you to think of such experiences as glimpses of what Paul is writing about, what he calls the building we have from God, ‘a house not made by human hands, eternal in the heavens’. Where for a moment, everyday reality is peeled back, and becomes a window into the ‘weight of glory’ for which we are being prepared.

C.S. Lewis was eloquent on the longing of human beings for the divine, and of the dangers of making idols of things that are temporary, however magnificent they may be: ‘For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.’ These words come from a famous sermon which has as its title the Pauline phrase I’ve already mentioned more than once, ‘The Weight of Glory’. It was

preached in Oxford in June 1942, almost exactly two years before D-Day. Speaking to a vast congregation in the University Church, Lewis spoke of the human desire for ‘something more’ and connected it with the scriptural promises of reward, and the hope of heaven.

Then and now, the notion of a heavenly reward was a neglected theme in sermons, partly because it’s so easily caricatured: as wish-fulfilment, for example, or a sop to those who are going to war; or as consolation to the suffering - ‘pie-in-the-sky when you die’. You may remember the Christian Aid slogan, ‘We believe in life before death’, a deliberate counter to this caricature. And yes of course human life matters right now, and suffering matters right now. But if that were the sum total of the Christian faith, what are we to make of Paul’ assertion that God is ‘preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure’?

Lewis told his hearers not to worry about those saying the promise of reward made the Christian life ‘a mercenary affair’. You could call someone who marries for money ‘mercenary’, he said, but not someone who marries for love. You could view everlasting life as a ‘bribe’ encouraging us to be religious, but that is to miss the point: life with God is in fact the natural consummation of earthly discipleship, the natural endpoint or reward of being drawn into relationship with Christ.

If you think this sounds a little cosy, consider the implications as played out in today’s gospel. There Jesus’ mother and brothers find the claims of kinship and family, important as they are, have been trumped by something even more important: ‘Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother’. The family ties of blood relatives find their proper place within the new family-like community of those gathered, as we are this morning, around the person of Christ. Our sharing in the body of Christ in this Eucharist is not an end in itself, but a foretaste: as a prayer puts it, a ‘foretaste of the heavenly banquet prepared for all humankind.’

One of the impressive things about the D-Day landings is that loyalty to immediate family was placed in the larger context of an international set of alliances. It would be easy to forget the sheer difficulty of welding a disparate fighting force from the twelve nations commemorated in this Cathedral’s own D-Day window in a properly co-ordinated way. General Eisenhower, supreme commander, found that his senior colleagues could be challenging. He told one, Air Marshal Arthur Tedder, as follows: ‘I am tired with dealing with a lot of prima donnas. By God, you tell that bunch that if they can’t get together and stop quarrelling like children, I will tell the Prime Minister to get someone else to run this damn war.’

C.S. Lewis’s sermon ends with a challenge to those infuriated by the behaviour of other people, and challenge for all of us. The prima donnas of whom Eisenhower spoke, and the people near to you right now, whether you know them or not, whether you like them or not, are potential citizens of heaven. Lewis argues that if those around us were to be revealed to us now as they one day might be, perfected and glorious, we would be tempted to bow down before them and worship. For in

heaven what is royal in every human being is revealed and shown forth in its true glory.

The D-Day veterans that commissioned the Portsmouth memorial window chose a famous prayer of Sir Francis Drake to express the determination of spirit that sustained them: ‘O Lord God, when thou givest to thy servants to endeavour any great matter, grant us also to know that it is not the beginning, but the continuing of the same until it be thoroughly finished, which yieldeth the true glory.’

On this seventy seventh anniversary of D-Day, we give thanks for those who saw the ‘great matter’ of the liberation of Europe through to its conclusion. And as we take inspiration from their example, we are mindful of the great matters of our own day: from the coronavirus to climate change to ongoing large and smaller scale conflicts, to poverty and inequality. Drake’s prayer says our endeavour in tackling such issues, and never giving up, is what yields the ‘true glory’. This is the same ‘weight of glory’ of which Paul wrote and C.S. Lewis preached, where we glimpse what is lasting and eternal not only in the sublimity of music, worship and the natural world, but also in the grittiness and determination required to strive that – in the words of the Lord’s Prayer – God’s will may be done, on earth as it is heaven. AMEN