O eternal Lord God, who
holdest all souls in life: Give, we beseech thee, to thy whole Church in
paradise and on earth thy light and thy peace; and grant that we, following the
good examples of those who have served thee here and are now at rest, may at
the last enter with them into thine unending joy; through Jesus Christ our
Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one
God, now and for ever. Amen.
Dearly beloved, we gather here in the name of our loving
God to seek comfort and hope in the face of death. Last night, on All Saints,
we remembered and celebrated the saints of God throughout the generations, and
that is a good thing to do. The tone of All Saints is often one of festivity
and victory, as it should be. But when the saints that we are thinking about
lived not 500 years ago but maybe 50 years ago or 5 months ago, there is a much
more nuanced set of feelings.
This evening, I want to consider the idea of holy grief
by reflecting on Psalm 130. Often the Psalms are named according to the first
phrase in Latin. In the case of Psalm 130, that would be De profundis, which is the translation of “out of the depths;” and
you’ll notice that the Latin sounds a lot like our word “profound.” Indeed,
there is a deep sense of profundity in the Commemoration of all the Faithful Departed,
or All Souls. When it comes to grief and death, there is a depth of profound
questions, thoughts, uncertainties, hopes, and fears. All Souls is a day on
which to struggle with these depths and place our trust in the God who was raised
from the dead.
The Psalm begins with an acknowledgment that when we are
in the depths, we must rely on God. The Psalmist calls upon God to hear his or
her voice. A part of the profundity of death is that it is bigger than we can
understand. We have theories and theologies built up around death, but the fact
of the matter is that none of us have ever been dead. What death feels like, we
will never feel until it is our time. What Resurrection feels like, we will
never know until it is our time. What our final rest in the peace of God is
like, we cannot know until we rest there. Sure, we get glimpses of those things
in life, but death is always a mystery to us. As much as we might embrace
mystery in our liturgy and prayer lives, our minds are built to probe
mysteries. There is something very unsettling about a mystery that we cannot
solve.
That’s why many psychologists, sociologists,
anthropologists, philosophers, and theologians have all said that it is the
specter of death that haunts us and drives many of our decisions and actions,
and not often in healthy ways. Some people are crippled by this fear and some
try to avoid it with all sorts of coping mechanisms, but we call out to God
from the depths. On All Souls, we gather not pretend that death isn’t so bad,
but rather to hear that love is stronger than death is bad.
As it often does, the liturgy is influenced by our faith
and teaches us in the same. The liturgical color for today is purple. White,
representing the Resurrection, would not be inappropriate. We use white for all
funerals as we celebrate that death does not have the final word, but rather
that the Resurrection of Christ redeems all things. But white isn’t ideal for
All Souls. Nor is black the best color for today, though a case could be made
for a show of our holy grief with that liturgical color. Instead, we use
purple. Visually, it’s not quite as dark as black but it’s also “heavier” than
white. We use purple for All Souls because purple, liturgically, represents the
mercy of God and when it comes to grief and death, we very much are reliant on
the mercy of God.
To be clear, we do not use purple because we are hoping
that God decides to forgive our loved ones and allow them into the presence of
God’s love. Sin and Death were destroyed by the Cross and Resurrection of
Jesus. So we are not gathered to pray our loved ones into God’s grace. We are
not here because we are uncertain of the fate of their souls – to be clear, as
we heard in our first reading “the souls of the righteous are in the hand of
God.” Instead, it is we who need God’s mercy. The Psalmist, in verse 3, says
that in God there is forgiveness. One way of understanding forgiveness is that
things are “let go.” Yes, one way to understand forgiveness is that the
consequences of our wrong-doings and mistakes are let go. But forgiveness is
also about the fact that, in God, we can let go of our fears of the unknown. We
can let go of the need to have all the answers. Because God hears us in the
depths, we know that the depths will not hold us forever and that we have been
set free.
An oft-quoted part of this Psalm comes from verses 5 and
6: “My soul waits for the Lord,
more than watchmen for the morning; more than watchmen for the morning. O
Israel, wait for the Lord, for
with the Lord there is mercy.” As
we consider our own impending deaths and our loved ones who precede us in
death, we wait and hope for God as a watchman waits for the morning. If we’re
waiting for morning though, it means that there is still darkness around us.
Indeed, as we think about all those whom we love but see no
longer, there is grief. Anytime there has been a presence of love in our lives,
when that love is no longer present, there will be an absence, a hole, a
darkness, and we call that feeling of absence “grief.” Grief is a healthy and
holy emotion that reminds us of that presence of love that we experienced. All
Souls is about sitting in that place of grief, not rushing ahead to the light
of dawn, because we’re not there yet. Yes, we proclaim the Resurrection in the
Creed and in our lives daily, but it doesn’t mean that the pain of grief is
gone.
When it comes to death, there is a “both-and.” We have
both grief and comfort, both sorrow and hope. It is not unfaithful to have
grief. And because we still very much love our dearly departed, we still pray
for them. The reason why some people think that it’s wrong to pray for the dead
is that they misunderstand what prayer is. Prayer isn’t just about asking God
for things, as if God were a vending machine. Prayer is a means of holding each
other in love, and death does not sever the connection of love. So it makes all
the sense in the world for us to gather in the name of God and hold our loved
ones in prayer before the throne of God and break bread as we share in the
feast of God with them.
As the Psalm concludes, our translation says that with
God, there is “plenteous redemption,” which is a translation of a Hebrew word
that is full of meaning – perhaps you heard of hesed, which is hard to capture fully in English, but means
something like “lovingkindness.” The key though is that it is rooted in the
love of God.
When it comes to death and grief, though we may still be
in the darkness of night, there is light on the horizon and that light comes
from the love of God. As I said earlier, none of us know what death is like,
and I’m not going to claim that I have special knowledge about that. But what I
do know is the love of God that we saw in Jesus Christ. God loves us all, and
anything that is loved by God cannot be destroyed. Love is stronger than death.
God cannot love something that has no substance or existence. God does not
“forget” his beloved, and so that means that whatever death is, we still have
some sort of existence. What that looks like, I have no idea, but we remain the
beloved of God after death and that’s “plenteous redemption” for me.
We all know this to be true. When a loved one dies, we do
not stop loving them, we do not forget them, we do not act as if they never
were. And the same is true for God – God’s love endures all things, even doubt,
fear, and death. Because of the love of God, we can trust that all shall be
well. And so on All Souls, we root ourselves in this loving mercy of God
because love is our source, love is our purpose, and love will be our resting
place. The details of what that looks like are a mystery to us, and sometimes
mystery can be unsettling and scary. But God’s love is bigger than these fears.
On All Souls we remember our loved ones, we give thanks for the love we shared
and still share with them, we commend our loves ones to God’s gracious care and
keeping, and we put our hope in that same love. May the souls of all the
departed, through the loving mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen.
