Sermon at the Service of Dedication of the National Armed Forces Memorial

Human beings are specialists in not seeing things. Most of the time, we screen out a vast amount of our world, a vast amount of what comes to us through our senses, especially through our eyes. Part of this is simply practical: no-one can manage to respond to all the promptings and signals that are actually coming at us, and one aspect of ordinary growing-up is simply acquiring the skills to select what is most useful.

But this is always in danger of slipping over into something else. Too easily, we learn to screen out what makes us uncomfortable, what challenges our sense of being in control. It's not just that we select what matters and what is useful to us in finding our way around in the world; we select what reinforces our security and we treat everything else as if it didn't matter.

And among the things we often prefer not to bring to mind is the fact that our 'ordinary' secure and fairly comfortable lives depend on a great deal of invisible work by others. It's true at the most routine level. But today we think specially of those who have chosen to put their own lives at risk for the rest of us. Some of them are asked to exercise the greatest heroism; some are called to that less spectacular but still real heroism which is to hold themselves in readiness of mind and body for whatever may come. When we recognize our debt to them, it is not only to those who have served and struggled heroically but also to those whose daily work and faithful support make it possible for heroism to happen. When we say our thank you's to them, it is to all of them.

And sometimes this feels awkward; we don't always like to be reminded that we are all in need of protection and that we all depend on the generosity and discipline of a relatively small number of our fellow-citizens. Instead of feeling grateful, we feel embarrassed, and we'd rather not look and see the structures that support us. But it's not good for us to train our eyes away from all this; and that is why we need visible memorials. All the service and skill that keeps us secure may be invisible a lot of the time, but, if we are not to be dishonest, shallow and unreal, we need to make the invisible visible once in a while. And that is what today is about - naming all those who have been ready to risk everything for the good of our national community, and indeed the good of our world. Some of them have died in heroic circumstances, some in tragedy and conflict, some in routine duties – but all of them as parts of a single great and generous enterprise.

To acknowledge this is indeed, in a very strong sense, a religious action. A person of faith is not simply someone who has certain abstract ideas in his or her head, but someone who is aware of being the focus of an endless generosity, someone who realises that God's gift is all around, and that without this divine gift we should not exist. And they seek to make this awareness visible in public actions and public images – in the rhythms of daily prayer, in the visible offering of thanks to God. For Christians, the divine gift is seen most clearly in the death of Jesus, who died so that all human beings might have new life; and so we Christians make visible this event in gratitude by our sharing in the Holy Communion and by lifting up wherever we can the sign of the cross, the visible token of an invisible and eternal and unimaginably costly love.

So what we are doing in dedicating this memorial is a sort of echo of such actions of faith. We recognise our needs and our dependence; we open our eyes to see the rich pattern of activity that keeps us alive and at peace; we lift up a visible and tangible reminder, so that we don't get trapped in unthinking, complacent security. We weave together our gratitude and our sorrows – because each name here recorded represents a unique moment of loss and anguish for a family and a group of comrades. There is nothing abstract about this commemoration. In doing this, we rediscover things about our own humanity that we often shy away from – our urgent need of each other, the reality of a common life supported by gift and sacrifice.

One of England's greatest modern poets, Geoffrey Hill, wrote over fifty years ago about how to remember the Jewish victims of the Holocaust: there were, he wrote, so many witnesses, but so few who could really see. Does it help to try and make people here in Britain remember these horrors? 'Is it good to remind them, on a brief screen,/ Of what they have witnessed and not seen?' The answer is a clear yes: just acknowledging the truth involves us in letting go of a bit of our own comfort so that grief and compassion can come in. 'To put up stones ensures some sacrifice. /Sufficient men confer, carry their weight' (Geoffrey Hill, For the Unfallen, p.32).

So here is our reminder of debts we owe, debts to what is so often witnessed but not seen. 'To put up stones ensures some sacrifice'. We have let ourselves be challenged and our comfort interrupted by this memorial. For this brief moment we have seen more than we normally let ourselves see; and we pray the God upon whose risky, sacrificial love we all depend to teach us the honesty, the thanksgiving, and the pity we need to keep us fully human: to teach us, in St Paul's great words, to 'look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen' (II Cor.4.18), because they are the signs of a truth that never passes away.

© Rowan Williams 2007