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Good Morning. Everybody in our village just south of Aberdeen liked our Billy. He and my father were cousins but had grown up together like brothers. He was an integral part of my childhood.Ìý He was someone who knew all there was to know about the places to set creels – lobster and crab potsÌý - where to put nets, and how to do that in mountainous seas standing in a tiny boat just visible from the cliffs .Ìý I also knew him as one of the funniest human beings I’ve ever met.Ìý Yet even as a very small child I knew something else about Billy – he’d been rescued at Dunkirk.ÌýÌýÌý

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He had a hard war.Ìý I’m pretty sure that he was wounded more than once and he certainly saw dramatic and unpleasant action – serving for the whole war, and in many ways never entirely recovering from it.Ìý But the Dunkirk experience was clearly – for him and for everyone else – something special.Ìý Even today most people know something about the extraordinary story of how between the 26th of May and the 4th of June 1940 nearly 340,000 troops were miraculously saved from capture by being lifted from the French coast by a motley flotilla of naval and private vessels.

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What could have been remembered as a massive defeat – which it was – is actually remembered so differently.Ìý It’s remembered for the heroism of the crews of the hundreds of small boats, people who put their lives on the line - indeed many of them gave their lives - to bring the army home.Ìý

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It’s surely the sheer improbability of the thing that makes it so special.ÌýÌý The heroes were just ordinary people responding heroically to extraordinary circumstances.Ìý Billy never forgot that and nor should we.

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Lord, we marvel at the example of those who were willing to risk their lives to save others at Dunkirk.Ìý In an often selfish age we are grateful for the reminder that it’s in our service to others that we can make a real and lasting contribution to the world. Amen.