Tomorrow's Remembrance Sunday service is finally ready to go now that I have managed to sneak some sound files of Last Post and the Rouse (evidently it's not Reveille) from the good old www having discovered that the church laptop and the CD I bought last year (from some entrepreneurial chap on Ebay who was selling recordings of his own bugle playing for 99p) won't speak to each other. Running through the slide show to check the auto-timings work, the two-minute silence during which I will be projecting the names copied from our Great War memorial plaque (an which spends most of its time on the floor of my office), it was quite powerful just to read names against a plain background with a narrow border of a poppy field at its base. Having done my homework, I know that not one of these men was a church member, though one evidently played the church organ, and two are buried in our graveyard because they died having been sent home sick. I haven't managed to find out anything about them, yet they were somebody's sons, somebody's brothers, who had hopes and dreams that lie buried with them somewhere overseas.
We will also be remembering our own loved ones, and I now have 10 personalised candles. We will remember with gratitude a Regional Minister and a former minister of this fellowship, two of our members who died this summer, some parents, spouses and siblings. Some of these people I never met, others I knew well and some I still miss - such is the nature of what we are doing.
Some one will bring a stainless steel sundae dish in which are located some rather elderly poppies, her annual contribution to the event, a tradition precious to her, if the cause of sniggering by others. Someone will tut at the lighting of candles, this is not (evidently) what Baptists do, but some Baptists will light a candle and find hope renewed as the flickering light blurs with tears. Someone will remember the cousin who never came home from WWII and someone her children in Iraq or Afghanistan. Someone will question the purpose of such a service, someone will find war abhorrent while someone delight in battle imagery in relation to Christian faith.
Remembering is an important Biblical theme, and I pray that our remembering might be meaningful rather than mere tradition.
Comments
We too have some elderly silk poppies at KMFC - and display them in the vases dented by the shrapnel when the building was flattened by a bomb. The vases cannot be used for real flowers as they leak now - so I think it is highly appropriate they come out on Remembrance Sunday.
Of course candles are Baptist - Smyth, Helwys and all the others must have worked by candlelight in the early days!!
Hope these services go well tomorrow - there has been so much prayer and preparation gone into planning them.
I am sure your service was appreciated by everyone. Candles not what Baptists do? We love 'em! Not at every service but we lit one today and we often have services where people light a tea-light and offer up a prayer. I'm off now to order a big box of candles for our candle lit Carol Service. (But don't tell the BU!)
Thanks both, the service went really well - even though someone managed to kick and dislodge the plug on the extension lead powering the monitors just before we got to the bit that needed them! Thankfully it took a whole 10 seconds to fix.
It was, in parts, quite a tearful service, in a healthy way. The juxtaposition of shoe boxes bringing hope to children in war-torn lands on one table, with candles of remembrance on another seemed to work well.
The only overt criticism I had was for the red voile I'd placed over the white cloth under the cross and container of poppies - apparently plain white is how it should be. As for the violet under the candles, and the sunshine yellow under the shoeboxes... Ah well, you can't please all the people, and I'm not going to try. Surprisingly, I had several comments appreciating sitting in the round, but this may be because those who hate it were absent!!
What I do know is those who had recently lost loved ones found the service helpful, which was, after all, the intent.
PS, don't tell anyone but I got away with the candles!!
PPS Richard, I don't think that BUGB will mind ;o)
As always your wonderful pastoral bones have served you and your congregation well