At a 10am service, Dr James urged the cathedral congregation to "remember with some realism" that "terrible things happen" in war and people sought "signs of hope".
He recalled that, last month, people had gathered at the cathedral to bless and dedicate the Parata Chapel to honour the grandparents of Canon Hoani Parata, who served as a military chaplain in World War 1.
Dr James said he had been struck by a story shared last month concerning Invercargill man Private Victor Spencer, of the 1st Battalion Otago Regiment, who was shot by firing squad at dawn on February 24, 1918.
That morning, Canon Parata had been the chaplain who walked beside Pte Spencer, whose last words were: "Are you there padre?"
The chaplain had replied "I’m here", and the squad had fired.
On Remembrance Sunday, this "grim incident" was remembered, as well as the "anguish and shame" suffered by Pte Spencer’s family, and also his "posthumous pardon, too many years later, in 2007".
Each year people made the promise, in the words of the "Ode of Remembrance":
"At the going down of the sun and in the morning/We will remember them".
"The promise to remember what we have never ourselves known is a rather tenuous thing, however well intended."
To give the promise "some integrity" required the exercise of "our moral imagination".
This year marked the centenary of what had been called "New Zealand’s blackest day", the Passchendaele engagement of October 12, 1917, a "futile attack" on the Bellevue Spur at the cost of about 846 men. To remember was also to "engage the past with our present", which involved "moral imagination".
New Zealand society had changed and he asked how people felt about the emergence of deep social and financial divisions that had made us "a nation of haves and have-nots".
The concept of care for the common good had been "horribly eroded" and the "common bonds that make for a truly civilised society" had become increasingly fragile.
"As social bonds have fractured — for instance in the cost of housing, access to health care, the fact of child poverty and diminished job opportunities — the question of where we stand as a society is not just a rhetorical flourish but a matter of where we set our hearts and minds," he said.
