Sermon Remembrance Sunday, 8 November 2026
Readings: Amos 5. 18-24; 1 Thessalonians 4. 13-end; Matthew 25. 1-13
Theme: True Worship
Injustice and idolatry often go hand in hand. As worshipping creatures, if we do not worship God, we will worship mortal gods. Whether that be money, power, land or whatever or whomever, we will end by adoring those false gods. The name for this in the Bible is idolatry, and despite what one may think, idolatry has not gone out of fashion. In fact, it seems to be having somewhat of a resurgence in our days. War and oppression thus emerge out of the same reservoir of misplaced desires. Godly desires, when properly oriented, lead to true worship of God and to care for others.
The readings for Remembrance Sunday speak of what true worship of God entails. It means living in expectant hope of the coming of the sovereign Lord both now and finally at ‘the end of days.’ The prophet Amos expresses this final coming of the Lord in a phrase often used in the Bible to convey this idea: ‘The Day of the Lord.’
What will that day look like? To Amos, and to his near-contemporary, the prophet Hosea, it looked pretty grim! It did so, because they are writing at a time of corruption and idolatry in the northern kingdom of Israel, when rather than a time of national rejoicing, ‘The Day of the Lord’ meant comeuppance. When punishment arrives it results in exile for the Israelites living in Samaria as the Assyrians conquer their land and take them into foreign captivity.
This is why Amos is so dismissive of the religious festivals at the ancient northern shrines in Bethel, Gilgal and Dan. At the time, these rituals were mixed forms of idolatrous worship. They formed part of an elaborate system of insincere and idolatrous worship which failed to realize that worship without concern for justice is just lip service.
Such practices of idolatry and exploitation of the poor fused together into a societal amalgam which failed to worship the one true God and to treat the poor with justice. God´s exilic punishment is intended to teach Israel what true worship really means and entails.
As in the Amos reading, a prophetic sense of ‘righteous anger’ also lies at the heart of Remembrance Day, which reminds us of the need to struggle against evil in all its different forms. The righteous expression of this struggle condemns and confronts idolatry and exploitation. It exposes them for what these really are: merely distortions of the true goals of our God-given human desires to worship.
This is the reason for why war and injustice are typically fused together. When we stop worshipping God, we start worshipping idols. Such idols come in many different forms, but they always lead to death, egotism, and to the dehumanization of others.
The reason we fall into these patterns of behaviour is that humans beings are fundamentally homo adorans: worshipping creatures. It is in our nature to worship; the real question is whom and what we worship. When we worship lesser gods we diminish the life we share in and typically the life of others as well.
Yet God wants us to live and to live fully in eternal life and that is why Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians speaks of the Lord returning to bring heaven home to earth. This restores the fullness of life that is the gift of God’s final homecoming.
So, we might understand human history, following the time of the resurrection of Jesus, as the period when God lives in exile from the world, being present only in the power of the Holy Spirit animating the lives of those who have been sealed with the blood of the Lamb.
This notion of God’s exile from the world is one which runs throughout the Old Testament. It occurs when enemies captured the Ark of the Covenant, destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem, and placed the Israelites under captivity in exile. However, the promise of God is always to return to his people and to redeem them. This is no truer than in our days as we await the Lord’s return and the final consummation of the Kingdom of God that has been inaugurated in the death and resurrection of Jesus and in the power of the Holy Spirit now working in the church.
On the final return of heaven to earth those who have lived as the wise virgins in the gospel take part in the rejoicing of this wedding banquet on God’s homecoming. They are the ones who have worshipped God and lived justly and therefore recognize the bridegroom when he arrives. Such is the role and mission of the church in history. This mission is to remind all peoples of God’s final homecoming, which will consummately restore justice and peace in the new creation.
At that time, there will be no more war. Justice will replace oppression and peace will flow like cool water on a hot and sultry day. Such were the prophetic hopes of Amos, Hosea, Isaiah and the other prophets in the Old Testament, because prior to the first coming of the Messiah, Jesus, these hopes were awaited with the advent of the longed-for Messiah.
We stand on the other side of these first messianic hopes now. We stand on the other bank of the river which has already been visited by our God from on high and whose return we await. As we do so, let us not lose hope in the final transformation of the creation into the new creation of the Kingdom of God.
So, on this Remembrance Sunday, let us remember the ones who have given their lives in the hope of God’s new world. They have given their lives that we might live and worship freely. Giving one’s life for others in the service of God is true worship. The kind of worship which the prophets proclaimed for Israel and which we still need to hear in our idolatrous and unjust world of today.
