Sermon preached at Evensong on the Third Sunday before Advent 2026

In 1917, the poet Wilfrid Owen wrote in a letter from a hospital on the Somme,

Christ is literally in no-man's-land. There men
often hear His voice: Greater Love hath no man
than this, that a man lay down his life - for a
friend. Is it spoken in English only and French?
I do not believe so.

No-man’s land, the place of greatest danger in-between the trenches, was for Owen, where Christ may be found, alongside the injured and dying. Christ comforts and strengthens those who are cut down by bullet and bayonet, with words recorded in St John’s Gospel which testify to the immensity of a love which places itself at the service of others. Owen, suffering from shellshock, who would go on to win the Military Cross for gallantry before being killed in action just a week before the Armistice in 1918, was one of the greatest poets of the First World War. He is memorialised in Poets’ Corner, alongside fifteen other poets of the Great War. In his words, ‘The poetry’ it says on the stone, ‘is in the pity.’ Owen interrogated some of the knottiest and most profound moral questions of that devastating and shattering conflict. ‘Thus you see how pure Christianity will not fit in with pure patriotism’ he continues in his letter. Owen struggled to reconcile the war and its horrors with his particular kind of Christianity, which was rooted in love and passivity. Later that year, in a poem, he wrote,

They who love the greater love
Lay down their life, they do not hate…

Experiencing the horrors of trench warfare, encountering the maimed and broken, Owen insists the love is the Christian vocation, shown on the fields of battle, and that such love is not the exclusive fruit of one or other nationality. Sacrifice, yes; glory, no.

Greater Love hath no man
than this, that a man lay down his life - for a
friend. Is it spoken in English only and French?
I do not believe so.

Owen’s point is that such a sentence could be spoken in German, Turkish, in fact, in every language, including the languages of our enemies. To honour the supreme act of self-offering – life given for others – is not to prejudge the morality or immorality of a broader conflict as such. Famously, in another poem, he parodies the classical line of the Roman poet Horace, ‘Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori’ (how sweet and fitting it is to die for one’s country), dismissing such sentiment as ‘the old lie’ within the context of the obscene human suffering which he observes on the Western Front.

Once you get underneath the moving rhetoric, something very interesting is going on here. Although Owen is unlikely to have put it quite like this, the Christian tradition robustly insists on relativisation of all other loyalties – to the state, to family, to other markers of identity. That is the central reason why we need to beware of any form of ‘ethnophilitism’ – a love of the state that elevates the state to an inappropriate height. As the Ukrainian theologian Cyril Hovorun has stressed, ‘When a church embraces either civil or political religion, this is a political process. It inevitably alienates the church from its original mission and purpose’, he warns. The ‘greater love’ shown by laying down one’s life for others, for their safety, even for a set of shared values, is not to place a life solely at the service of a political system. Rather, it is to discover that our humanity is best understood as being at the service of one another; my human life, for the flourishing of yours. Yours for mine. Ours for each other. Christ’s for all.

There is a very important point to be made here whenever questions of religious nationalism emerge. It is no accident that brittle forms of religious nationalism are arising today within the wider context of a crisis in our understanding about what the nation state actually is, how to secure its borders, and how we might still celebrate, promote and defend our own cultures without falling into serious trouble. One important role of religious faith communities within a modern nation state is to remind that state what it is not. The state can never be a transcendent reality, and it can never demand ultimate, absolute, uncontested loyalty. The state is not God. That is not to say that there are not appropriate forms of loyalty to one’s country, its history and its culture – and that it may well be appropriate to defend these – but Christians need to warn wider culture when that culture seeks to raise questions of its own ultimacy. Similarly, we should beware of language which assumes that one culture ought to dominate or override another. In today’s second reading, when Jesus uses the language of friendship to refer to his followers, he is expanding a circle of belonging. Until this point in John’s Gospel, this language has only really been applied to Lazarus, Martha and Mary, that intimate family circle in Bethany where Jesus appears to be most at home. ‘I no longer call you servants, but friends’ Jesus tells his listeners. It is one another for whom we might lay down our lives, following the pattern of Christ himself. That is the mutual belonging we celebrate in Christian discipleship.

Today is Remembrance Sunday. And yet, we know warfare is a contemporary phenomenon. A few weeks ago, a new Ipsos poll revealed that 48% of the UK say they would not fight for their country under any circumstances, with only 36 per cent willing to do so, and the remainder saying they do not know. Now, a poll is only a poll. And warfare, as we have heard repeatedly, has developed at a pace hard to follow; until the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it seemed highly unlikely that a conventional land war could erupt in Europe, and certainly not one which would rely on infantry or artillery in large numbers. What we are seeing in Ukraine/Russia war is a new blend of conventional, proxy and new-tech warfare: this is hybrid. Over 75% of Ukrainian casualties are as a result of drones. And yet the number of troops deployed, the sheer volume of manpower, is staggering. Once again, landscapes on the European continent are scarred with trenches.

On Remembrance Sunday, we are humbled by those currently defending their countries and homes from aggression. We stand together with them in solidarity for the values of freedom, democracy, and peace. It is unclear precisely what the future will ask of us, and it is for each human person to discern how they might respond in a situation where our own society were to be under some kind of immediate existential threat. But Owen’s insight can help us here. It is for one another that we might give up something of our own freedom, our own luxuries, our own ambitions, and for the values and virtues which make our living-together – our society – worth defending. ‘No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.’ We are called to live as those who stand resolutely for solidarity; called not to conflict, but to communion, with one another, and with God. We must remember those who taught us that the greater love is intensely costly. That is not an old lie – rather, it is the ancient, and eternal truth. And at its heart, lies the truth which has redeemed the world, in Christ who laid down his life that the world might be saved.