Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne
Romans 8. 31-39
“If God is with us, who is against us?”
On 10 May 1940, Hitler finally embarked on the invasion of France and Belgium which had been dreaded all winter. Within days the allied armies, outmanoeuvred and pummelled by Blitzkrieg, found themselves with encircled on the Channel coast. The German High Command was able to boast with confidence that its troops were ‘proceeding to annihilate the British Army’. Winston Churchill found himself preparing to announce to the public an unprecedented military catastrophe involving the capture or death of a third of a million soldiers.
Arguments about why that didn’t happen, and the Miracle of Dunkirk happened instead, still sell books for military historians. Very few of them, however, allow for the possibility that it may, indeed, have been a miracle.
How many of you know that in a radio address on Thursday 23 May, as the sheer desperation of the situation became known, King George VI declared that Sunday, 26 May, should be observed as a National Day of Prayer?
Late on Saturday evening the military decision was taken to evacuate as many as possible of the Allied forces. The very next day, this country devoted itself to prayer in a way rarely seen before and never since. Eyewitnesses and photographs confirm overflowing congregations in places of worship across the land. Long queues formed outside cathedrals. Many millions came out to pray for national deliverance.
One woman wrote about her wartime childhood in Hertfordshire: “It is one of my vividest memories as a child of people streaming along the roads and pavements of the Ware Road. All Saints Church was packed with people sitting and standing. Coming out, the churchyard too was full to bursting”
The same day an urgent request went out for boats of all sizes and shapes to cross the English Channel to rescue the besieged army, a call ultimately answered by around 800 vessels.
Yet even before the praying began curious events were happening. In a decision that infuriated his generals and still baffles historians, Hitler ordered his army to halt before the destruction of the Allied forces became inevitable. Then, on the Tuesday, bad weather grounded the Luftwaffe, allowing Allied soldiers to march unhindered to the beaches. In contrast, on Wednesday the sea was extraordinarily calm, making the first full day of evacuation less hazardous. By the time the German Army was finally ordered to renew its attack, over 198,000 British troops had been rescued from Dunkirk, along with a further 140,000 French, Belgian, Dutch, and Polish allies. Many of them were to return four years later to liberate Europe.
Now you could argue it was all a coincidence, but that’s not what people thought at the time. Sunday 9 June was declared a National Day of Thanksgiving and, encouraged by Churchill himself, the phrase ‘the Miracle of Dunkirk’ began to circulate.
“If God is with us, who is against us?” said today’s Bible reading. Now war is a terrible thing, and it does terrible things to people, even if they’re fighting in a just cause. War can only be justified in the face of an evil so great that it exceeds even the evils of war—and perhaps by the ancient wisdom that if we want peace, we need to prepare for war. So it can be a very dangerous thing to just assume that God stands with us in war. But I don’t think any of us are in much doubt that Hitler and the ideology he promoted represented a particular kind of evil beyond the usual run of ghastliness committed in the name of nations—and Dunkirk was the first tiny step towards his eventual defeat. If ever there was a place for God to grant a miracle in war, it was there.
If God is with us, who is against us? But how can we even know if God is with us if we don’t take the time to know God.
I wonder if it had to, could this country do again what it did in the Second World War? I think we suspect the answer is not positive. It’s not about being divided either… the Britain of the 1920s and ‘30s, of the General Strike and the Jarrow March, was a bitterly divided country, but people were able to transcend that when war broke out. Instead, our problems are that we are so much more individualistic, so much less disciplined, and despite all our advances in technology, so much more poorly governed. Most of all we lack a vision to inspire us.
When most of us abandoned Christianity, nothing really replaced it except a vague idea that if everyone was nice then everything would be nice, and that things could only get better. The last fifteen years or so have surely shattered that little delusion.
Remembrance Sunday is not the place for a certain type of preaching, so let me leave you with just one thought—if the guiding vision for our society can no longer be Christianity then what might replace it that would guide us through a moment like Dunkirk? And if there is nothing else that would guide us through a moment like Dunkirk, isn’t it time we returned to Christianity?
Now glory and honour be to the Holy and Undivided Trinity, the Father who made us, the Son who redeemed us, the Spirit who sustains us, this day and forevermore. Amen.
