Remembrance Sunday

It was wonderful to see so many Marketors at the Remembrance Day service at St Brides last Sunday. Something Archdeacon David Meara specifically commented upon to me after the service. At the beginning of the service I laid the Marketors wreath on the steps before the altar, as did representatives of other organisations.
It was a beautifully constructed service and in his sermon, commenting on sacrifice, David Meara opened by referring to the war memorial on Platform 1 of St Pancras station. I stare at it every time I am in St Pancras and go past it. It is a quite superb sculpture of a 'Tommy'' in full kit reading a letter from home. It's probably the finest war memorial I know and worth a detour if you're in the area. It doesn't have the magnificence of Charles Sargeant Jagger's Royal Artillery Memorial at Hyde Park corner but it generates a more immediate emotional response.
As we walked back up Ludgate Hill to St Pauls station past the tented protesters I thought of another form of sacrifice. The protesters are protesting against Mammon not God and yet ironically the damage they are doing is to God's work (the church). The job losses and revenue losses that St Paul's Cathedral has suffered reflect the fact it is the church which has made the sacrifice.