11th May 2025
VE Day 80
This edition of News & Notices will go out on the 80th anniversary of VE Day, possibly around the time Churchill spoke to the nation at 3pm. I enjoyed this week listening to someone explain on the radio that the announcement had to be delayed until he had checked that there was enough beer in London for the celebrations!
We've been celebrating too, at Open Doors this week, but I was involved in a commemoration of a different kind on Monday morning. A group of people, including the Beckenham Fire Service and Cadets, gathered at Empire Square to remember the firefighters who gave their lives during the war and who have given their lives since in the protection of civilians and of our homes.
During the height of the Blitz, in the autumn of 1940, London was bombed for 57 consecutive nights (although this area suffered the worst damage from the flying bombs in summer 1944). Over the first 22 of these 57 nights, firefighters fought nearly 10,000 fires and, over the war as a whole, the London firefighters attended nearly 50,000 calls. At the beginning, they were derided as cowards for not going away to fight; by the end, they were known as "angels with grimy faces".
At the commemoration on Monday, a roll of honour was read out, including names and the streets the people came from. It was a poignant moment, emphasising that these were ordinary, often local, people, people with homes, parents, wives, children, lives. They died defending the homes of other ordinary people.
The word "home" carries powerful emotional resonances. How many soldiers must have spent long, wakeful nights on the battlefield dreaming of home? 327 firefighters died defending our homes. During the service on Monday, we heard words from Micah chapter 4, which speak of the prophet's vision of home, at a time when wars will cease and people will be free to get on with their lives in peace and safety.
Micah's is a vision of homes standing in a land based on justice, where God's ways will be recognised, even by "strong nations" (v2). It's a vision of peaceful homes, where the weapons of war have been turned into tools for producing food (v3). It's a vision of a safe home, where each person can sit "under their own vine or their own fig-tree" (v4).
80 years on from the sacrifices and suffering of World War 2, we are still, globally, very far from the fulfilment of this vision for most of the world's population. As we remember the celebrations of 80 years ago, we continue to pray for those whose homes are threatened by "strong nations far and wide", and for those who seek, in courage and self-sacrifice, to keep them safe.
