Sermon preached at Evensong on the Ninth Sunday after Trinity 2025

Isaiah 11: 9

On 9th August 1945, Tomei Ozaki survived the blast of the atomic bomb on Nagasaki because he was working in a torpedo factory deep in the nearby mountains. Ozaki heard a roar, and was knocked to the ground by the sheer force of the explosion. Several hours later, he emerged from the tunnels of the factory to find all he had known and loved changed due to unprecedented destruction unleashed by the bomb. He began to write a diary. His recollections are devastating, encountering the injured and dying whilst discovering that whole districts he had once loved were now no more. Ozaki’s inability to help the suffering, and his own fear, was something which would haunt him for many years. Two months later, sitting on a beach he watched the tide of the waves, imagining himself swept away by them. He wrote in his diary on 2nd October, ‘I wish I could go somewhere. To live a lonely life by myself. But without my mother, how shall I live? Where are you wandering, dear Mother?’[1] Six days later, he left the house belonging to his Uncle where he had been living and climbed a steep hill to a Franciscan friary, which he had occasionally visited before the war. Somehow, the friary had also been protected from the atomic blast by the mountains. Its most famous friar had returned to Poland, where he died a martyr’s death in Auschwitz, though the brothers did not know this at that time. St Maximilian Kolbe had founded this small religious house in the early 1930s, but now it was St Maximilian’s close friend Brother Zeno who held the sobbing Tomei Ozaki in his arms, and offered him loving protection and sanctuary.

Slowly, Ozaki settled into a rhythm of prayer, study and work, and knew instinctively that he would spend the rest of his life there. He decided that he would become a friar and a priest. Ozaki’s sickness, nausea and fatigue would continue for a long while, and his newly found vocation was by no means a panacea for the devastation and depression he carried as he began to deal with the overwhelming trauma of such total loss and the horrors that he had witnessed. A year after Ozaki’s arrival at the friary, a letter arrived from Poland, which was read out in the dining room after lunch. It contained details of how Maximilian Kolbe had died a martyrs’ death, offering himself in place of another man in Auschwitz. Ozaki was traumatised, and yet began to feel a robust bond with Kolbe. Slowly, he felt life emerging within him once more, as he tentatively explored how Kolbe’s death revealed that light and love could emerge from the very darkest of human situations. Two and half decades later, in 1971, Ozaki stood on the threshold of Block 13 of Auschwitz with a basket of white chrysanthemums, en route to Kolbe’s beatification in Rome. There, in the cell where Kolbe had died, he had a spiritual experience of the saintly friar he had come to love. ‘You must live’, he felt a voice saying to him, ‘God is always with you.’ Later, Ozaki recounted to the writer Naoko Abe, ‘ In that starvation cell, I finally grasped the true meaning of Father Kolbe’s actions. He left hope that humans are still worth believing in, and that life is still worth living no matter how dire the circumstances.’

Over the next decades, Tomei Ozaki attempted to be searingly honest about the complexities and many violences of the second world war, and the regional conflicts which preceded it. He spoke honestly and publicly about how, in those early hours after the bombing, he had abandoned a young woman on a stretcher and had shown no sympathy for a man who had once bullied him. Incredibly, the woman survived and they were later able to meet. He would tell these stories to groups of schoolchildren, and reflected on his desire to emphasise three points he had learned throughout decades of suffering: ‘the joy of living, the importance of unconditional love, and the courage to fight against evil.’ Towards the end of his life, Ozaki set up a blog, and grew new friendships on the phone. One of these was with the writer Naoko Abe. In the month before he died, they spoke much about St Maximilian, the human propensity for violence, and the need for repentance. In one conversation with Naoko Abe, during his final weeks in March 2021, he reflected, ‘You don’t normally see God, but when you start showing deep love towards other people, you begin to see him.’

The first reading we heard in this afternoon’s service was taken from the Prophet Isaiah, and describes a confident vision of hope first written down towards the end of the sixth century BC. The wolf shall live with the lamb, the cow and the bear shall graze together. There will be no destruction or pain on the Lord’s Holy Mountain. This is a picture of God’s ultimate victory, where enmity, rivalry and violence are no more. In the Christian tradition it is often read during Advent because it voices so much longing for a different kind of existence. What seems so often to be an established, permanent order of human rivalry and violence, is unveiled as temporary. The destruction we wreak upon each other does not have the final word. Now, if we were people of optimism, over two millennia since the initial setting down of these texts, we would surely be disappointed. But Christians are not people of optimism, but people of hope. And hope can characterise even the darkest and most demanding of situations. One of the characteristics that great generation of those who lived through the Second World War teach us is endurance. The endurance of a prisoner of war, or of a victim of torture, the endurance of a mother at home desperately awaiting news of a child, or of a civilian trying to comprehend situations of loss and destruction, the endurance of a soldier, sailor or airman in a long and demanding campaign, in which friends and comrades were lost each day; that kind of endurance demands an intense amount of a soul. In addition to those who died, we should remember before God those who could simply never find peace in the subsequent years and decades of their lives.

How to offer the kind of hope which Isaiah’s vision sets before us is as demanding in situations of warfare and brutality today in Gaza and in Ukraine, as it was in those theatres of war eight decades ago. Such hope is very difficult to discern in the abstract. Tomei Ozaki discovered that he could really only encounter this hope in the detail of individual relationships, and small acts. We glimpse Isaiah’s holy mountain, we share his vision, every time we turn towards others with care, forgiveness, loving attention, or reconciliation. The violence of the world can so easily overwhelm us. So, Christ summons us to pay attention to our own habits, our own contexts, and to become agents of peace, ambassadors for Isaiah’s holy mountain, in our own cultures.

80 years on, we remember. We repent. We give thanks. We celebrate those who were witnesses of hope, and we pray that our noisy and still-bloodthirsty world might learn to commit to that vision afresh. It starts in our own hearts, and in our own communities.  

Tomei Ozaki reminds us, ‘You don’t normally see God, but when you start showing deep love towards other people, you begin to see him.’