Worship Leader:  Paul Whiteley, LLWL                                                                          Music Director:  Tim Hallman, B.Mus.,B.Ed.


REMEMBRANCE SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 2025
“We Will Remember Them”

WELCOME / ANNOUNCEMENTS / CELEBRATIONS

LAND ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

LIGHTING OF CHRIST CANDLE

CALL TO WORSHIP:
                                                              One: On this Remembrance Sunday we gather to pray                                                                   
All: for a world where no one will learn war anymore.
One: On this day when the guns once fell silent,
All: we gather to pray for peace to reign in every heart, home and nation.
One: On this day of hope,
All: we come before you, God, to remember all those who gave their lives so we could be free.
One: In this time of story, song, and prayer, help us to catch a vision of how the world could live together.
All: And so, let echo the old prayers—make us channels of your peace.
One: In that spirit, let us join our hearts in song.
-Rev. Tyler Powell, United Church of Canada, 2019

HYMN: VU 684 “Make Me a Channel of Your Peace”

PASSING OF THE PEACE

OPENING PRAYER:
Lord of bounty and blessing, we come to you this day in gratitude for all that we have been given. We are grateful for the blessings and for the opportunities to be of service to others in your holy Name. Bless each of us here, that we may become truly blessings to others. For we ask this in Jesus’ Name. Amen.
-Rev. Nathan Wright, United Church of Canada, 2021

READING: “In Flanders Fields” - John McCrae
            Read by Fred Vickery
 
WORDS OF REMEMBRANCE:
One: They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old.
All: Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
One: At the going down of the sun and in the morning.
All: We will remember them.

HYMN: VU 524 “O Canada”

SCRIPTURE:
Micah 4:1-3: “Swords into Plowshares”
Luke 20:27-38 “After the Resurrection”

ANTHEM: “When Hands Reach Out Beyond Divides”

REFLECTION:
Remembrance and Responsibility (with a digression about saints)

The power, even the magic, of the stories of our faith is that they seem to be addressing one thing and then turn out to say something else, something even more profound. In that spirit I will get back to the gospel passage about resurrected, blended families a bit later on. That’s the story where the priestly faction is trying to make a practical, theological argument against belief in resurrection of the body. But, as often happens, the answer Jesus offers goes well beyond the question.

But I want to start from a different place, a place more related to the passage from Micah: “And they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up a sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.” Micah seems to be expressing our hope for a future of peace, of shalom, and that desire also inspires some of us to read “In Flanders Fields” as a poem about the sacrifices of war – about the costs of war, the responsibilities that flow from that, and therefore also as a call for lasting peace.

Now some of you might know (but others would not), I was born and grew up in Guelph, Ontario. So John McCrae was born in Guelph a century before I was. In fact, when I was growing up in Guelph there were three people I thought of as local heroes – Jean Little, the children’s author who was then in her prime; Edward Johnson, the opera star who died a decade or so before I was born, and John McCrae, the soldier, poet and doctor. Or course this being Ontario all three have had public schools named after them, so you can tell that they are important. But it was John McCrae, because he died in the prime of life under somewhat tragic circumstances, that took on more the place of a civic saint.

And so this is where I make a digression about saints. Within our church tradition, I find late October and early November to be possibly the best time to talk about this topic. Reformation Sunday can connect us to the saints of our tradition, Halloween is that liminal night before All Saints Day – a time to remember departed saints and those we have lost – and it can also be a time to acknowledge the living saints and those who have played that role in our lives.

Continuing into November, the Day of the Dead may not belong to “us”, but it is another time to remember and celebrate the saints and those who went before. And then we come to Remembrance Sunday and Remembrance Day, when we remember people we lost to war, the sacrifices of war, and also the impacts of war on those who remain. I wonder if some day we could have a season – like the Season of Creation from September to October – where we could acknowledge in a more holistic way the responsibilities we carry for those who have gone before, over the weeks between Thanksgiving and Advent.

So I don’t think I’m alone in placing John McCrae among that great cloud of witnesses, the saints of our faith. And he does fit some of that mold. To sketch his life: McCrae was born in Guelph to a Presbyterian family and retained his connection to this community of faith. He graduated from the same high school I did, studied at University of Toronto, did his artillery training in Kingston, and taught Arts briefly at the Ontario Agricultural College. He followed his brother into Medicine, then volunteered and served as an artillery officer in the Boer War. He came back to Canada, served as a pathologist in several Montreal hospitals and taught medicine at McGill. Throughout his life, McCrae wrote poetry, drew sketches and was a great conversationalist – when he accompanied Governor General Grey on a canoe trip to Hudson Bay as the group’s physician, it was said that he told more stories than were in the Arabian Nights collection.

John McCrae in the 21st century seems more complicated than it used to be. He was a confirmed bachelor, and I know I wasn’t the only one from Guelph who read “confirmed bachelor” as a flag to question his sexuality long before the question was asked by scholars in the last 20 years. McCrae loved a girl who died of typhoid; he proposed marriage to his sister-in-law; and he was popular among women in his social circle, even flirting with Edward Johnson’s vocal coach – but none of these really weigh one way or another about his sexuality. There is an interesting anecdote in his letters to his mother, about a social event at the Montreal YMCA attended by 10 women and 70 men, and I’m not sure how to read that story, either. If McCrae, the military officer and life-long Presbyterian, had anything we would now call a “relationship”, he didn’t leave anything written about it for posterity.

But what we do know about McCrae is that he wrote “In Flanders Fields” not as an anti-war poem but to process the grief he felt after burying Alexis Helmer at Ypres. We also know that McCrae and Helmer were very close: they enlisted together, and McCrae asked to be reinstated as an artillery officer – along with Helmer – although McCrae was deployed to the unit as a field surgeon. We know that McCrae felt some ambivalence about volunteering, after his experience of the Boer War, and that he weighed the risks of deployment against what he would have felt if he had not accompanied Helmer into the trenches.

We don’t know much about Helmer’s perspective, but we know McRae began his famous poem while preparing to conduct the service at Helmer’s gravesite, in the absence of a chaplain. We also know also that after writing the poem, McCrae was transferred away from the trenches to run a hospital, where he dealt with the thousands of casualties that flowed in from the battles in Belgium. We know that his asthma got worse, that his personality never recovered the charm and warmth he had before the war. And we know that he was overcome with a lung infection, died, and was finally buried not far from Flanders.

So John McCrae’s life was complicated, even sometimes a bit mysterious. Many things can be true at the same time: he was strongly attached to the Empire, he was a staunch Presbyterian, and he wrote his most famous poem to process and make sense of the death of a man he loved. We can acknowledge these complications in the same way that most of our cloud of witnesses are complicated. McCrae doesn’t need to be a perfect pacifist or anti-imperialist, any more than he has to be a respectable Edwardian gentleman or a scientific pioneer. He was who he was, and he left us both a life to learn from and a poem to challenge us from generation to generation.

Now I said I would come back to the gospel, and today’s passage takes us into a vision of what resurrection can mean for us. Jesus answers the “gotcha” question about marriage by painting a picture of the children of the resurrection. They don’t grow old or marry because their life is eternal.

But then comes the true magic of the story. According to the Torah, Moses recognized the God of Abraham, and of Isaac, and of Jacob. But our God is the God of the living – so therefore Abraham and Isaac and Jacob must be alive. And, Jesus implies, because they live, so all the saints of our tradition, the great cloud of witnesses – they are also alive. They don’t grow old; they don’t struggle any more; they are present in eternity with God. This is resurrection: a promise made to us and to all, to be the children of resurrection in life.

But with promise comes responsibility. Experience this connection to the eternal also means living out the covenant, and honoring the stories of those who have gone before. But that can’t mean that we turn real people into Hallmark caricatures of themselves or scripture stories into safe, Disney versions. We must reflect on complexity, and on the sacrifice and suffering of our ancestors. If we feel some of that, right down to our bones, then we can also feel our deep calling into transformation, into shalom, towards the abundance we are promised. And for that promise, to God be the praise and the thanks. Amen.

INVITATION FOR OFFERING

OFFERING HYMN: VU 541 “Praise God from Whom All Blessings Flow”

OFFERING PRAYER

LITANY OF RECONCILIATION
One: All have sinned and come short of the glory of God.
The hatred which divides nation from nation, race from race, class from class,
All: Father, forgive.
One: The covetous desires of people and nations to possess what is not their own,
All: Father, forgive.
One: The greed which exploits the labors of men and women and lays waste the Earth,
All: Father, forgive.
One: Our envy of the welfare and happiness of others,
All: Father, forgive.
One: Our indifference to the plight of the homeless and the refugee,
All: Father, forgive.
One: The lust which dishonors the bodies of men, women, and children,
All: Father, forgive.
One: The pride which leads us to trust in ourselves, and not in God,
All: Father, forgive.
One: Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another as God in Christ forgave you.

-Coventry Cthedral, 1959

PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE / LORD’S PRAYER

Our Father, who art in heaven,
hallowed be thy name;
thy kingdom come;
thy will be done;
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive those who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation;
but deliver us from the evil one.
For thine is the kingdom,
the power and the glory,
for ever and ever. Amen.

HYMN: VU 806 “O God, Our Help in Ages Past”

BENEDICTION

CHORAL BLESSING: “Go Now in Peace”

 

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Christ United Church

12 Perth St., Lyn, ON, K0E 1M0
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