WAS asked by one of our Royal British Legion branches in the Forest to deliver the sermon at their remembrance service last Sunday. Here is what I said: “What we remember tells us something about ourselves.

What would it say about us and our values, if we chose not to honour the remembrance of those who died fighting for our country and our liberty?”

We have heard from the reading in Chapter 3 of Ecclesiastes about the cycles of life; that for everything there is a season: a time to be born and a time to die, a time for peace and a time for war,a time to cry and a time for laughter. This text is popular at remembrance services and at funerals. I confess that I have never really understood why. It has always left me asking: “Is that it?”.

Ecclesiastes, written by King Solomon himself, is part of the wisdom literature of the Old Testament – and there is plenty of wisdom in it. Take for example, Chapter 10, verse 2: “The heart of the wise man inclines to the right, but the heart of the fool inclines to the left”.

In my mind Ecclesiastes is twinned with another wisdom book in the Old Testament, Job : the story of a very good man to whom terrible things happen – he loses his wealth, his whole family is killed in a series of freak accidents and he catches a horrible disease. No wonder that he cries out in his agony: “Why me?”. How many of the men and women we honour today will have died with that question on their lips?

Job is about the extremes of life, where Ecclesiastes is about the ordinary life, the cycles of life, the mundane in life, but it is as bitter a complaint as the book of Job. The author begins by saying that he has tried everything but nothing satisfies. That there is nothing new under the sun, and it is all utterly pointless. His principal complaint is that whatever we do or are will be forgotten.

Worse still, he says, the brave, the wise and the good will all end up forgotten and in the same graveyard as the fool, the coward and the wicked.

It isn’t till the end of the book, having stirred up our anger and despair at the pointlessness of it all, that the author offers us any comfort. In the same way in the book of Job, it isn’t until the very end that God answers Job’s question: “Why me?”.

He asks Job if he was present when God created the universe, and – as he wasn’t – how can he expect to have any inkling of God’s eternal purpose. So in Ecclesiastes, we are told that from our perception everything might be pointless, and will be forgotten, but that God will remember and that under his judgement everything will have a purpose and a place.

Our comfort therefore, is to trust that there is a divine plan of which we are ignorant. Is that enough comfort for us?

We have the advantage over King Solomon. We worship, not in the magnificent temple that he built, but in the Church of Christ. We know what he didn’t know: we know about redemption, resurrection, salvation. What is more, we do know our purpose in his plan: to glorify God and enjoy him forever.

This gives our remembrance service a completely different character: We aren’t here struggling to keep alive a memory, we are here to celebrate the sacrifice of men and women who we will meet and with whom we will share eternity.