Sermon: Address

We have heard General Brims’ tribute to a man who was in every sense of the word, extraordinary. Dick would not have wanted us to speak too much of heroism today; nevertheless, we know it when we see it, and we honour it because it is right to do so, and because stories such as his will always inspire those whose sights are lifted above the level of the ordinary, the mundane, the workaday. We give thanks to God today for the privilege of having known such a man, having, so to speak, touched the hem of greatness. I do not use that word lightly.

The poet said that ‘great things are done when men and mountains meet’. Greatness is, no doubt, an alchemy of giftedness, experience, circumstance and opportunity – base metals ready to be transmuted into gold. Yet, to change the metaphor, this seed can only flower when the soil of a person’s life is ready for it. Supreme courage in the face of death, readiness for self-sacrifice, do not, I suspect, just happen. They are formed by a person’s basic attitudes, have already begun to be written into his or her character long before the time comes to be put to the test. And I believe we can say, in Dick’s case, that it was his Christian faith that led him, like Mr Valiant for Truth in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, to disregard his battle marks and scars for the sake of the Lord he served.

I am sure Dick loved the hymn we shall shortly sing, ‘I vow to thee my country’. But I venture to say that you can only love your country, you can only contemplate laying down your life for your fellow human being, you can only give yourself to your family and friends if you have learned to put the second verse of that hymn first. It speaks of that other country ‘most dear to them that love her, most great to them that know’, whose fortress ‘is a faithful heart’, whose ways ‘are ways of gentleness and all her paths are peace’. Jesus called it the kingdom of God and invited us to find in it our aspiration, our destiny, our goal. To be familiar with its landscape and to walk its paths, Jesus said, is to find pure happiness.

Dick was a lifelong citizen of that country. Christianity informed his view of the world, his understanding of his duty, his commitment to serve his fellow human beings in an astounding variety of ways, as we have heard. It also, I think, gave him that rather rare gift in today’s envious, acquisitive society, what the New Testament calls ‘contentment’. This requires an outlook on life that is humble, grateful and generous. I do not need to tell you how much these qualities were abundantly embodied in him, indeed, in Dick and Shirley as a couple. Christianity is much more than church attendance, but they were committed members both of St Cuthbert’s parish and of this Cathedral community. Who is to say what untold influence such a way of being Christian and being human may have had, will have had, on the lives of very many people?

When an old soldier hangs up his sword at the great age of 90, no-one is going to say that death is wrong or cruel. We give thanks for a long, fulfilled life, and for an ending that brought it to a close with dignity. Our reading from the Letter to the Romans is a passage Dick will have heard countless times at services, probably knew it by heart. But its great, transfiguring, truth never fails to move me, as perhaps it did him. In it, St Paul rises to one of the Bible’s most memorable climaxes. Faced with suffering or pain or death itself, he says, we are ‘more than conquerors through him who loved us’. It is a soldier’s image: victory over the last enemy won through the power of the resurrection of Jesus. In hoc signo vinces: ‘in this sign you will conquer’, the motto said to have been adopted by Constantine after he saw a cross in the heavens just before a decisive battle. When Mr Valiant for Truth passed over, all the trumpets sounded for him on the other side. ‘For I am persuaded that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.’ The words are those of St Paul, but they are equally the words of Dick Annand.

We are here today to remember Dick, to commend him to the mercy and love of God, and to pray with and for Shirley and the members of their family. We do this in this great cathedral, this holy place that is full of the memories of Durham men, not least the DLI, and that Dick loved as only Durham people can. It is the right place in which to gather up and offer our thoughts and recollections, our sense of loss but also our deep affection and our pride. And, not because it is Durham but because it is Christ’s place, here is where we understand and recognise that other country we’ve heard of long ago, most dear to them that love her, most great to them that know. And if in this life it is true that ‘we may not count her armies, we may not see her King’, then faith dares to hope that one day, this vision of God will be granted us, and we are reunited with those we love, and death is swallowed up in victory.