Reflection for Remembrance Sunday

8th November 2026 at St Mary's Church, North Marston

By Rev Petra Elsmore

​

READINGS

Micah 4: 1-5

​

In the last days

the mountain of the Lord’s temple will be established

as the highest of the mountains;

it will be exalted above the hills,

and peoples will stream to it.

2 Many nations will come and say,

‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,

to the temple of the God of Jacob.

He will teach us his ways,

so that we may walk in his paths.’

The law will go out from Zion,

the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.

3

He will judge between many peoples

and will settle disputes for strong nations far and wide.

They will beat their swords into ploughshares

and their spears into pruning hooks.Nation will not take up sword against nation,

nor will they train for war any more.

4

Everyone will sit under their own vine

and under their own fig-tree,

and no one will make them afraid,

for the Lord Almighty has spoken.

5

All the nations may walk

in the name of their gods,

but we will walk in the name of the Lord

our God for ever and ever.

​

John 15.9-17

9 ‘As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. 10 If you

keep my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commands

and remain in his love. 11 I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your

joy may be complete. 12 My command is this: love each other as I have loved you.

13 Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. 14 You are

my friends if you do what I command. 15 I no longer call you servants, because a servant

does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that

I learned from my Father I have made known to you. 16 You did not choose me, but I

chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit – fruit that will last –

and so that whatever you ask in my name the Father will give you. 17 This is my

command: love each other.

​

REFLECTION

The prophet Micah offers us a remarkable vision of peace:

“They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”

It is a vision of war coming to an end, and also of a new, transformed world. A world where the instruments of destruction become instruments of life, where people can live without fear, and where they learn the way of peaceful living. 

​

And in John's Gospel, Jesus speaks of a love that is willing to give itself for others: “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends.”

Today, we remember those whose lives were given or taken by war. We remember their courage, their sacrifice, and we consider the lives they never had the opportunity to live.

​

Every year, we rightly make the effort to honour their memory, as we remember how they died, for what they died. We also honour their memory by continuing to consider, and not only on this Sunday, how we chose to live and how we strive for peace. 

​

What might it mean for us to learn the ways of peace? Perhaps to continue to make room in our hearts for understanding rather than hostility, for compassion rather than indifference, for reconciliation rather than division?

As we listen now to the music, Edward Elgar’s Nimrod, let us hold in our hearts those whom we remember, those who continue to suffer through war, and the hope of a world in which, as the prophet Micah envisioned, we shall one day learn war no more, but instead learn the ways of peace. Amen.

​

POEM​

​

Was it for this?

By Gillian Clarke 

 

Once war was history, a famous place –


Catraeth, Cilmeri, Bosworth, Flodden Field –


where men fell nameless, loved or loveless,


crying for home, mud-suffocated, 

hallowed
by the last rites of rain, 

a shroud of snow,


graves overgrown by centuries of grass.

 

A hundred years. The war to end all wars:


a lamentation of names: 

Ypres, the Somme,


the Sambre-Ouse Canal, the house at Ors


where Owen wrote his brave last letter home.


His voice still sounds through war’s duplicity,


refusing silence: “the poetry is in the pity”.

 

A hundred years. Time to remember them.


On village monuments their deaths are stone.


They bore our names, or names we know,


men born in our towns, a house on the hill,


the farm across the valley – they live there still –


yet they became the earth of somewhere else.

 

Now war is poisoned air, the screaming sky.


No time for glimmering goodbyes. 

No kiss.
The fallen are the old, 

the weak, the young,
the child brought from the sea, 

a city bombed.


Gaza. Helmand. Aleppo. Homs.

‘Was it for this..?’