Sermon: Remembrance Sunday

Sermon: Durham Cathedral, Remembrance Sunday Service, Sunday 11 November 2007

            May the words of my lips and the meditations of our hearts be now and always

            acceptable in your sight, O Lord our strength and our redeemer.

On the late afternoon of Sunday 7^th December, 1941, the Merchant Navy steamship SS Sauternes was lost off the Faroe Islands in the North Atlantic and all 25 crew and passengers died.  Its accompanying Royal Navy armed trawler HMT Kerrara survived.

SS Sauternes has an interesting history. Built in 1922, it was never designed for the often severe weather conditions of the North Altantic. However, these were war years and so needs must.  Its task was to supply the large British Army Garrison on the Faroes.  The Faroes are a protectorate of Denmark, but Denmark was occupied.  The British Garrison was strategic for the defence of the North Atlantic, to keep trade routes open as far as possible and as a first line of defence against the German fleet.  The December visit of the ship was eagerly anticipated.  It was called by the locals Jolaskipid , or ‘the Christmas Ship', because as well as carrying 3,000 gallons of petrol, garrison supplies, 22,000 Danish Kroner, minted in Scotland because it was impossible to get coinage from Copenhagen, it was also on this December trip carrying Christmas puddings, Scotch Whisky, and Christmas gifts.

The ships arrived at the Faroes on the evening of 6 December.  They could not reach the capital Torshaven, because of a westerly Force 10 gale.  Both ships were driven off course to the north east.  The storm was worsening.  The Master of the Sauternes telegraphed the Naval Headquarters in Torshaven, giving their position.  Now there were two bays with very similar names, one was a relatively safe haven, the second in these conditions was treacherous.  Tragically, through a misunderstanding, the Naval HQ Officer thought they were in the safe haven, whereas in reality they were in the treacherous passage near the open sea.  Therefore the command to drop anchor was catastrophic.   The gale increased to hurricane force.  The Sauternes was being driven towards the open sea; it was taking a severe pounding, and 24 hours after arriving in the Faroes, it was overwhelmed as locals looked on helplessly from the shore.

Most of the crew were young men in their 20s and 30s. The Master of that ship, Captain William Smith was 69; the Master Chief Engineer, James Carruthers was 44.  Both of them were retired from active seafaring.  In those days in the Merchant Navy, once you reached 40 you were assigned a land job.  Both volunteered to go back to sea to help the war effort.  James Carruthers left a wife and two daughters, aged 11 and 9.

On the 15 July 2006, a small group of people stood on a grassy bank on the island of Videro, overlooking Fuglo-Sund, the place where the Sauternes was lost.  There were two sisters, Irene and Margaret, now in their 70s, an Anglican priest, his cousin Gillian, Keith, a nephew of one of the ship's crew, and a wonderful Faroese Policeman called Heri Andreassen, an expert diver,  who in 2000 had found and excavated the wreck.  Such was the esteem in which this ship was held by the Faroese people that a book about it had recently been published; they had never forgotten ‘The Christmas Ship'.  It was a bright and sunny day; the cliffs and the sea had a compelling beauty.  The group had earlier visited and laid wreathes at the 6 graves, the only bodies of the 24 lost that were recovered.  Over-looking the sea, readings and prayers were said, including the ‘Sailors' Psalm', 107, and the reading from Revelation 21, both of which we have listened to this morning.  Back in 1941, there was no funeral; the families of the crew were informed by telegram, there was little information. But now 60 years on, that was made good; all 24 names were read and remembered. A wreath was committed to the sea.  The family had only discovered some 5 months before the true circumstances of the loss of Sauternes, through the internet on a web-site created by Keith, whose uncle also had perished.

The reason I know so much about this is that I was the Anglican priest, standing with my mother and aunt and cousin; James Carruthers was my grandfather.  For his late wife, Peggy, my grandmother, Remembrance Sunday was a sombre and tearful day, and while, as with so many of her remarkable generation, she had learned to live life as a  widow with young children to bring up, hopefully and without quenching her amazing spirit, I learned at an early age the cost of war.  You see, at the end of the day, all the thousands upon thousands of people we remember today, from those who served in the World Wars, to the most recent fatalities in Iraq and Afghanistan, are real people, connected people, who loved and are loved. It compels me to offer my life to seek and serve those things in life that  we most cherish: freedom, peace, reconciliation, tolerance, because it those who gave their lives, often their young lives, who remind us so powerfully just how precious, how precious,  this gift of life is.

I can't imagine what living hell the crew of the Sauternes experienced in that fateful twenty-hours of fear, exhaustion, and despair in their so unequal struggle. And of course they died through human error and the ferocious power of nature, but they would not have been there in the first place had we not been at war. And what magnificence to come voluntarily out of retirement, as so many did.  How proud we should be at such an example of selflessness.

For that crew in 1941, the words of Psalm 107 did not come true.  While I am certain that, at their wits' end, they will have cried out to the Lord in their trouble, he did not make the storm to cease, nor brought them to the haven where they would be.  And yet, for those of us standing on that grassy bank, it is the hope of a haven that we cannot as yet see, a conviction in the goodness of God, and his eternal purposes, that made Fuglo-Sund seem to us to become, not a place of terror, but a holy place.   And it was in the clam and beauty and brightness of that scene, that we dared to embrace and believe the promise, ‘And I saw a new heaven and a new earth', ‘and ‘death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain, for the former things have passed away', that the sea as well as the land will give up her dead, and all will be transformed by joy.

Without a hope like this, I might well be driven to despair in this roulette wheel of a life.  But thank God, thank God, that we have this hope, both for ourselves and for every wasted life in air, land or sea.  May God bring them and us to that haven, and to the brightness of that eternal morning.

 Rest eternal grant unto them, O Lord, and let light perpetual shine upon them.