Sermon preached at the Sung Eucharist on the Ninth Sunday after Trinity 2025

Hebrews 11: 29—12: 2

On a bridge as you enter Ypres, in Belgium, there is a war memorial. Some of you will know it – the Menin Gate. It is imposing, muscular; an arch spans the road as you enter the town. A little bit like Marble Arch, but much, much bigger. The Menin Gate was completed in 1927 as a memorial to soldiers killed on the Ypres Salient, in the First World War. To qualify to have their name carved on the Menin Gate these dead must be lost to us, they can have no known grave anywhere else. They are the disappeared, the never found, nearly fifty-five thousand of them. Even so, this huge memorial, these towering lists of names, are not big enough to list all those who died with no named grave. Arranged regiment by regiment and then by rank, the names are an effort to remember: Marks G W, Marp R, Marsh F W, Marsh W T. My grandfather fought at Ypres and survived, just. If my grandfather had died, his story would be lost and so of course would my story and my mother’s story – untold, nameless. That is what the Menin Gate tells us.

When it was unveiled, it had its admirers, but the war poet Siegfried Sassoon was not one of them. Sassoon could write bitter verse his poem, ‘On Passing the New Menin Gate’, is savage. He railed against ‘these intolerably nameless names’

Well might the Dead who struggled in the slime
Rise and deride this sepulchre of crime.

Names matter, and Sassoon knew it. Those ‘intolerably nameless names’, those unknown warriors, are pages ripped from a book. They are lives that have lost their moorings. 

Names summon us and dismiss us; they mark us down as absent or present. Naming confers status, we give a name to a cat, but not a caterpillar. When the Normans arrived in this country they gave us new names for things – like justice, prison, fine, and debt. Of course, it was their justice, their prison, our fine, and our debt. To name something, or someone, is an act of power. In the playground, you might claim that sticks and stones break bones ‘names will never hurt me’, but it is not true. We weaponize names, there is slur and slander in the names that identify one of them who will never be one of us. In the camps and the ghettoes, they used numbers and tattoos, not names. Using a name can be comfort, the mother we cry out for, or it can conjure up fear, the ‘he who must not be named’. My mother in old age, gripped by dementia, lost all her nouns slowly, inexorably. She lost the power to name and we lost her and the conversation. 

Names locate us and connect us; they hold us in relationship: ‘Mum’, ‘Dad’, ‘darling, ‘mate. And names come with a story. We can call up a name and with it a character, a quality, a narrative – Achilles, Einstein, Leonardo, or darker names – Hitler, ‘the Ripper’. We use names when we want to get a hold on a character, a quality – ‘rich as Croesus’, ‘wise as Solomon’. When we think of vice, or virtue, we need a name so that we can see it and describe it. I know what good theology looks like because I know about Herbert, Rowan, and Nicholas. We all need these names. A name can help us describe what kindness looks like, or the way deep learning comes across. We name it. 

And that is exactly what the Epistle to the Hebrews does. We heard it in our second reading. In fact, Hebrews told us that there are so many names we will run out steam,

…time would fail me to tell of Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, of David and Samuel and the prophets – who through faith conquered kingdoms, administered justice, obtained promises, shut the mouths of lions, (Hebrews 11:32-33) 

Hebrews knows the power of names. We call it the ‘Epistle to the Hebrews’, but it is not really the kind of letter you might expect in the post. Hebrews is as much sermon as it is letter. And it is preaching to drooping spirits and weary believers. It is encouragement, it is strength to your arm. We do not know who wrote it, we probably never will. The audience though, is a group of Christians who are losing hope and wondering why they bother, what it is all for. Hebrews is not about believing in particular doctrines. It does not fuss over the difference between law and grace, instead it is all about resilience, staying the course, being of good courage. And that is just what we heard,

let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us (Hebrews 12:1)

Hebrews wants us to have faith and to keep faith. And to explain faith, Hebrews names faith, lists the names. If you were in the Abbey last week, you heard them,

By faith Abel offered to God a more acceptable sacrifice than Cain's… 
By faith Enoch was taken so that he did not experience death…
By faith Noah built an ark…
By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called Hebrews 11:4-8 

These are the lives in which we can see what faith looks like. This is how we name our faith. Here are witnesses to the fact that belief is not a concept, not a project, not an ambition. Faith is something you live and in order to see the faith that lives, or understand it, we must give it a name. That is what Hebrews tells us and this Abbey answers with a loud ‘Amen’. Look round you our walls and our floor are a catalogue of names. This Abbey wants to tells us what fame and distinction look like Good poetry, engineering, architecture, science and even majesty. We want the names because then we know what it looks like. It really helps us to acknowledge Chaucer, Tennyson, Elizabeth Barret Browning. It helps us to name the saints and get a sense of what holiness might look like – Peter, Edward the Confessor, Oscar Romero. Martin Luther King…

But, of course there is a problem. There are names here and lives that we admire less or not at all. The images we have here are, some of them, tarnished or even treacherous. Men - they are mainly men - of violence and imperial ambition, people with an eye to profit not propriety, those who grew rich on the slave trade or made their money out of misery. The names help us and the names let us down.

Now, our reading tells us that people with faith can do remarkable things,

By faith the people passed through the Red Sea as if it were dry land…
By faith the walls of Jericho fell after they had been encircled. Hebrews 11:29-30

Here say Hebrews is the encouragement for a faith that is failing. Here is where to look when you wonder what to do. And my, how Hebrews ramps up the drama 

They were stoned to death, they were sawn in two, they were killed by the sword… Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us Hebrews 11:37

It is terrific, it is inspiring and notice it is a story, it is people in a place, living lives and working out faith in their time. But, and this is the critical bit, Hebrews says, even this extraordinary tale was not insufficient, even this was not the whole story. There was a punch to a flabby theological gut in today’s reading

Yet all these, though they were commended for their faith, did not receive what was promised Hebrews 11:39

Even Abel, Noah and Abraham did not inherit the promise, even the prophets and the heroes of faith and indeed time would fail me to include, Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, and David… All of them, all the great names, are less than the full story. Because, says Hebrews, God has provided better. The names, the people in their generations who were, perhaps, a little like us in our generations, those names are helpful. Those names show us something of what it might be like. But God has provided better. God has provided not a name, but a Son and the Son is not another glimpse of what it might be like. The Son is exactly what it really is. In Christ, we see God’s glory and our lives and we see them whole and we see them perfect - Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith.

You see, we need the names, we do need to know what faith looks life. We need to be shown how it is done, how it was done, how she did it differently from him, how it could be like this, or like that. The names give us understanding, encouragement and guidance. But the names are not enough. This faith, this race that is set before us, for all the bounce and bravura of Hebrews is not an effort for you to make and me to make. This life of faith and the salvation that awaits is a gift of God and it is lived in Christ so that we can know it and receive it. The names matter but there is one only in whom we see the life of God and our lives complete and perfect.

It is both the scandal and the power of that black Belgian marble slab just inside the door of Westminster Abbey that it is a grave. It is not a cenotaph; it is not a memorial and a list of names. The Grave of the Unknown Warrior is a burial. For our conversation about life and death to have real meaning, for it to have bone and bite, we must make our memory grapple with the people, the lives, the experience. And we will come then to the limit of what we know and what we can do. It is there that Christ meets us. Not another name, but the living God. The names matter, but all our hope, all our future and all salvation is in Christ.