Ninth Sunday after Trinity, 11.00am Sung Eucharist, 17 August 202
On Monday the sixth of August 1945, Ayano Hirashima was eight years old, but eight decades later she clearly remembers the day. She was taking off her shoes when the atom bomb nicknamed “Little Boy” exploded 580 metres above the centre of Hiroshima, 30 seconds after 8.15am. “I was about to pick up the indoor slippers to go into school when I saw the flash around me,” she says. “Suddenly I was covered in rubble. I managed to crawl out, and I got home somehow.”
Remarkably, given how close they were to the explosion, her parents and siblings had escaped alive and without serious injury. As the extent of the destruction and death became clear, they made their plans to escape their devastated city to the obvious and sensible place — her mother’s home town of Nagasaki. The train was delayed, and they arrived in Nagasaki twenty hours after the city was struck by the second and final (so far) atom bomb ever to be used for military purposes. Unaware of the dangerous radiation, they walked through the city, and so became members of an unwanted and exclusive club containing just 130 members, those exposed to not one, but two atomic bombs. Only two members of that club are still alive, at the ages of 88 and 94.
A week later the Japanese government finally accepted the Allied surrender terms and the 15th August was declared Victory over Japan Day – VJ Day. After almost six years of global conflict, there was relief and joy – as well as deep sadness at the huge human cost – as the second world came to an end. In the midst of all that, and as the years of reconstruction began, the realisation gradually dawned that the manner of the war’s ending had ushered in a new era in human history. Until that point, everyone had to come to terms with their own mortality; the reality of individual death. Now, however, for the first time, there was the reality of ‘species death’; the human race had acquired the never before attained power to wipe itself out.
There are estimated to be around 12,300 nuclear weapons in today’s world, held by nine different countries. Recognising this reality must, surely be part of ‘interpreting the time’ in the way that Jesus challenges us to do in the last line of today’s Gospel, and I will attempt to do in this sermon. In the passage, Jesus speaks about bringing fire to the earth, hinting at the purifying power of God’s judgement. His first hearers could not have imagined that future human beings would have the power to burn up the world themselves, whether through nuclear weapons or indeed through the rather different path of climate change.
On Friday, VJ 80, our King delivered a remarkable message, vividly paying tribute to those who enabled that victory, and those who suffered through that time, from the so-called ‘Forgotten Army’ in Burma, to prisoners of war enduring horrible brutality, to the bravery of Allied pilots; not forgetting to acknowledge, and I quote, the ‘immense price… paid by the citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – a price we pray no nation need ever pay again.’
The theologian Jim Garrison wrote a powerful response to the impact of those atomic bombs, entitled The Darkness of God: Theology after Hiroshima. One of his conclusions he calls the ‘wisdom of Hiroshima’ – describing the ongoing human task in the wake of the new reality nuclear weapons represented. Our priority, he argues, in this brave new world, must be the protection of life itself, the whole of life, and never simply protection for our own ‘group’ or nation.
This ‘wisdom of Hiroshima’ is entirely in accordance with our King’s own conclusion in his VJ 80 address; his own message for our times arising from how that victory was won. Here is what he said:
‘Countries and communities that had never fought together learned to co-ordinate their efforts across vast distances, faiths and cultural divides. Together they proved that, in times of war and in times of peace, the greatest weapons of all are the not the arms your bear, but the arms you link. That remains a vital lesson for our times.’
‘Not the arms you bear, but the arms you link’. That is a brilliant image and metaphor with which to interpret these times of ours, so different to the messages of suspicion and ‘us first’ that are so widely heard. And for a powerful exemplar of what the King – and Jim Garrison – are talking about, we need look no further than the 104 year old veteran who went off script to pay tribute to ‘my brave King’ for being present at the official VJ Commemoration while being treated for cancer.
That veteran was Captain Yavar Abbas, born in Charkhari in India, who as a young man found himself making a decision as to whether to fight against the British for Indian independence, or for the British against the military threat of Japan who had so quickly conquered Malaya, Singapore and Burma – with India in their sights. So it was that he became one of around two and a half million Indians who joined the British Indian army. And, as it happens, he also went to Hiroshima within months of the atomic bomb, as part of the British Commonwealth Occupation Forces. ‘It still haunts me,’ he says, ‘I couldn’t believe that human beings could do this to one another.’
Captain Abbas’s impromptu remarks on Friday, which so moved our King and Queen, show him to be a man of perception and compassion, prepared to work alongside people very different from himself. Eighty years on from Victory over Japan, it is striking that he finds it hard to celebrate such anniversaries – because of the wars currently engulfing the world, particularly Gaza. ‘We seem to have learnt nothing,’ he says.
Is he right? Feel free to share your views with me afterwards! Plainly, the majority of people today, like our King, were born after the end of the second world war. Our lives have been shaped by the institutions formed in the wake of that war – the United Nations, the National Health Service, the World Council of Churches, the modern state of Israel, the partition of India, the European Convention on Human Rights, NATO, the International Monetary Fund.
Most of these were formed on the basis that ‘the greatest weapons of all are the not the arms your bear, but the arms you link.’ Now, for all kinds of reasons, trust in post-war institutions is falling. There are doubts as to whether they adequate for the challenges of our times, from ongoing nuclear proliferation to climate change to current wars to mass migration. And yet to cast them aside is hardly the way to pay tribute to those who gave their lives in the two great wars of the twentieth century.
I wonder what those who died in achieving Victory over Japan would make of today’s world, and whether or not they would agree with the 104 year old Captain Abbas? We cannot be sure, but we can know that when the letter to the Hebrews speaks of us being ‘surrounded by… a great cloud of witnesses’, that great multitude of people of faith who have gone before us and to whom we may now look for encouragement, includes amongst their number those who died in times of war, many of them former colleagues of Captain Abbas.
That same letter to the Hebrews tells of those who suffered in the past, being killed, mocked, chained and flogged, in living out their faith: and now the responsibility falls to us to ‘run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith.’
What kind of race is this? Surely not a hundred metre sprint; more like a marathon, or better perhaps, a ‘cross-country’ – after all, the heavenly country is our destination. Or is it a relay race, in which we are handed on the baton of faith for our leg, so that we can pass it on to another? And indeed there are many races in which team work is crucial, from relays to cycling and rowing. Perhaps the ultimate way to finish the race would be for everyone to cross the line together, arms linked, rejoicing in those who have encouraged and enabled us to complete the course.
Jesus, we are told, persevered because of the joy that was set before him; the joy of God’s kingdom and God’s future. That is our calling now, in following him, sustained and encouraged by one another and that great cloud of witnesses that surround us, to strive in this nuclear age for the protection of life itself, the whole of life, never simply protection for our own ‘group’; co-ordinating our efforts as best we can – arms linked – across distances, faiths and cultural divides. Yes, this is our calling, under God, for these times of ours. AMEN