Dear Friends

Welcome to worship for Sunday, November 6, 2022.

You won’t find Remembrance Sunday on a calendar, church, google or otherwise. But it is more than a local custom or creation. I have always been part of churches that reserved the Sunday before Remembrance Day as an opportunity to cast our civic responsibility to remember in the light of Christian worship and the promise of the Gospel. In that sense Remembrance Sunday is clearly related to the civic observance that is held at numerous locations across the country on November 11. And yet, it also has a certain particular quality.

That particularity has long been expressed in the presence of World War II veterans within the congregation. Theirs are the particular stories which accompany the broad narrative of Canada at war in the last century. Their witness, their testimony made personal the varying accounts told in numbers and dates and places of battle. They were the people we knew in their post conflict life. The people who did more, lived more, and loved more than we can remember.

But the inevitable and natural truth of time is that the further we move from the momentous events of the World Wars, the fewer first hand accounts that are available to us. If the last year we mourned the death of two of the last three World War II veterans who were members of our congregation. Gordon Saunders died last December at the age of 100.

He was immensely proud of his service first in the army but latterly in the Royal Canadian Navy rising to the rank of lieutenant. Last month Able Seaman and true gentleman Bud Snarr passed away having made five trips across the Atlantic in a Corvette escort convoy. In their day they were each an integral part of our Remembrance observances and our congregation’s life.

The presence of first-hand memories is diminishing and so it becomes incumbent upon the rest of us to remember and to share the stories of those who served and subsequently shared their lives with us, as part of the body of Christ. Not only what our forebearers did in the war but who they were in the church. To remember Mal Curle, the Charleswood village barber. And Marg Morien of the RCAF and maybe the kindest Sunday School teacher ever. To recall Art Gessner sitting in the last chair of the last row on the east side of the sanctuary. Or Lloyd Macklin and Jim Moffat in the middle of men’s row of the choir. To chuckle about the colourful glasses of Nursing Sister Thyra Reid or the ‘reserved seat’ of Denis Thompson. And so many others.

We are blessed these days by the presence of Len Van Roon. Len was in the 19th Field Regiment of the Royal Canadian Artillery who landed on the beaches of Normandy. He can also be found tending the yard on Charleswood Road in which he grew up or sitting in his favorite pew of Charleswood United Church, in which he was baptized. We thank Len for his service throughout his life.

In Christian worship the past, present, and future are gathered together and united by God’s grace.

We remember.

And give thanks.

Grace and peace,

Michael