Sermon: VE Day 80th Anniversary Commemoration Service

Preacher:

Andrew Watson

Date:

Sunday 11th May 2025

Venue:

Guildford Cathedral

Service:

VE Day 80 County Service Commemoration

VE Day: 80^th Anniversary County Service

Micah 4:1-4, 2 Corinthians 5:16-21, Guildford Cathedral, 11.5.25

Mayor’s Parlour,

Municipal Offices,

Guildford

 

In consonance with the expressed wish of His Majesty the King that the Sunday following VE Day should be observed as a day of Thanksgiving and Prayer with special services throughout the country, I have accepted an invitation from the Provost of Guildford Cathedral to The Mayor and Corporation to attend the service at 11am at the Cathedral Church of Holy Trinity on that Sunday.

Accommodation can be reserved in the Church for one lady from the household of each member of the Corporation Procession, but as there will be a great demand for seats from the general public, I hope that

1. You will advise Mr. Futter immediately as to how many seats you will require, and
2. You will see to it that seats applied for are actually occupied.

I hope to advise you later as to the possibility of organising a Victory Parade of all who are connected with the national effort, on the afternoon of the same Sunday.

Yours very truly,

Wykeham Price, Mayor. 

For those in my generation, and the generations since, it’s hard to imagine the gamut of emotions that lay behind the Mayor of Guildford’s rather mundane letter to his Corporation, or that swirled around the congregation of Holy Trinity Church as they gathered on the following Sunday morning. A mighty sense of relief, of course, must have been foremost among them. Both grief and gratitude, realism and joy will have been there in equal measure.

Contemporary records record some of the countless stories of soldiers and chaplains returning home, including the Revd E. W. Gedge, Vicar of Christchurch, Guildford, who was given ‘an enthusiastic welcome by his parishioners’, we’re told following five long years in a German prisoner-of-war camp. Meanwhile under the striking headline in the Surrey Advertiser on May 12^th 1945 - ‘Leatherhead goes Gay’ – there was an account of church bells crashing out victory peals, of processions and parades, all culminating in a grand open-air service led by Revd. Page, the local Vicar.

One further document that sits in the county archives was a letter written to the Advertiser by my predecessor, John MacMillan, the 2^nd Bishop of Guildford. In it, he urged his readers to demonstrate their gratitude to their fellow human beings – to political leaders and war heroes, yes, but also, he wrote, to ordinary people – for example, ‘some simple woman who has never lost her courage and faith’.  Next, he warned his readers against superficiality and light-heartedness, reminding them that the war in the Far East was still not over, and that the immense business of reconstruction only just begun. And finally, he wrote of the need for a ‘constant remembrance of [God’s] presence’.

‘If we think that the children who come after us can do without [God’s] help’, as he put it, ‘let us think once more of the chasm of suffering and disaster and moral degradation which has yawned before us during these years – years during which man has claimed to have a greater scientific control over material things than in any previous age...’ And then he concluded:

‘It is the knowledge and love of God, [when] made a constant part of our lives, which alone can make good the day of victory when it comes’.

*

And so to today’s celebrations – and in many ways Bishop John’s threefold call to gratitude, seriousness and faith still holds true eight decades – and eight Bishops of Guildford - later.

For all of us, of course, we are grateful – deeply grateful – to those who served in the armed forces during the war, from such a wide range of cultures, creeds and social backgrounds. Some may have been our family members or otherwise known to us. A handful are still with us today. And our debt to them all is simply immeasurable.

But what of more ordinary people, Bishop John would ask us – those who served the nation in other ways with selfless courage and faith? That’s where today’s commemorations affect me more personally, if I’m honest, as I give thanks among others for my father’s father – Dr. Alec Watson, who led the Mildmay Mission Hospital in the East End of London through the Blitz and beyond; and my mother’s mother – Lady Evelyn Maude, who opened up an impromptu children’s home in Oxted for Jewish children as part of the Kindertransport scheme. They also served who didn’t simply stand and wait but gave of their best energies on the home front, and did so, in the Bishop’s words, with courage and faith.

Alongside gratitude, though, today is a call to seriousness: both to recognising the full horror of war in the past and the present; and to acknowledging that new political realities are currently facing us that make the prospect of an escalating war in Europe far more likely than at any time in the past eight decades.

It is neither my role nor area of expertise to comment on the current shifts in global politics – but the ongoing war in Ukraine, and the new stance adopted by the Trump administration, together raise the spectre of a Ukrainian defeat and of further Russian incursions into sovereign territories between here and there. Meanwhile America clearly regards China as a much more real and present danger to her own security and has made semi-belligerent noises of her own towards Greenland and Canada. And of course there is plenty of ongoing conflict in other parts of the world too: in Israel-Palestine, Syria, Sudan, Somalia, the Niger Delta, Myanmar, Yemen, the India-Pakistan border, and other places too numerous to mention.

And what of our own nation eighty years on? There’s much to celebrate about our national life, of course, and I’m certainly not someone who subscribes to the philosophy that ‘it’s all going to the dogs’. But there is still the most yawning gap between rich and poor, along with huge challenges surrounding mental health, low aspirations, affordable housing, global warming, the economic outlook and a host of other problems. Let’s not pretend that the business of government is easy in these circumstances; and neither let us shift our personal responsibility for making the world a better, fairer place onto the shoulders of politicians or anyone else. ‘What kind of society did our forebears fight for?’ is the right question to ask on a day like this. And how might I better contribute to that society, eighty years on?

Gratitude; Seriousness; and Bishop John’s third theme was Faith: the knowledge and love of God that brings hope and calls me to a vision way beyond my own little world and even my own little lifetime.

Think of the readings chosen for today: the prophet Micah foreseeing a day when all nations would metaphorically stream up the mountain of the Lord and there learn the paths of justice and peace, with swords beaten into ploughshares and spears into pruning hooks; or the apostle Paul urging us to be reconciled to God in order that we in turn might exercise a ministry of reconciliation. These are rich resources, especially when accompanied by the presence of God’s Holy Spirit, who makes them real and living in the experience of all who access them.

And whilst we’d have to say that we’ve not always succeeded in Bishop John’s challenge to pass on the faith to the children who come after us, the recent substantial increase in the number of young adults attending our churches, together with the 87% rise in the sale of Bibles over the past 5 years, suggests that something is going on here: that whilst what the Bishop described as our ‘greater scientific control over material things than in any previous age’ is something we should broadly welcome, scientific materialism in itself does not, and will never, address the deepest longings of the human heart.

So back to Wykeham Price, the Mayor of Guildford in 1945, and to his letter to the Corporation encouraging them to attend the VE Day service at the Cathedral Church of Holy Trinity. Dozens of mayors have come and gone since then, of course, and we are delighted to welcome a number of mayors to our service this afternoon, including Councillor Howard Smith, Mr Price’s successor in the role, with four days’ experience as Mayor of Guildford already behind him! We also have a new Cathedral, in case you’d not noticed; eight bishops have come and gone; and the great demand for seats has somewhat lessened, given this much larger space.

But gratitude, seriousness and faith should still be at the heart of our commemorations eighty years on, as together we pray and work for that world of which the prophet Micah dreamt: a world where:

‘All shall sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees, and no-one shall make them afraid’.