O Lord Jesus Christ, who by thy death didst take away the sting of death: Grant unto us thy servants so to follow in faith where thou hast led the way, that we may at length fall asleep peacefully in thee, and awake up after thy likeness; for thy tender mercies’ sake. Amen.
There’s a marked difference between All Saints and All Souls. Last night, we had a festive high mass in which we celebrated the Church Triumphant and gloried in the legacy of the saints. Tonight has a much more somber and tender to it. To be sure, on both All Saints and All Souls we proclaim the Resurrection and thank God for those who have gone before us in faith. It’s just that most of us don’t have a deeply emotional connection to Anselm or Hilda. Yes, their lives might serve as an inspiration in our own, but I don’t know that many people grieve their deaths. All Souls is different because we are reminded of our grief tonight.
To
be very clear, grief is not unchristian at all. As I often say at funerals,
when there has been a presence of love in our lives, and that presence becomes an
absence, there is a hole left in our hearts and in our lives. And the name of
that hole is grief. We can be confident of the Resurrection and still miss our dearly
departed. We can entrust them to God’s never-failing care and keeping, and
still wish they were still with us. There is nothing wrong with grief. Instead,
there is something wrong with a faith that can’t handle grief other than to
dismiss it.
This
is what St. Paul is getting at in the portion of his first letter to the
Thessalonians that we heard this evening. He writes that we are “not to grieve
as others do who have no hope.” He does not say that we are to only have hope
and never to grieve. Not at all. Rather, he says that we are to not grieve as
though there is no hope. Our grief takes on a unique character because of the Resurrection
of Jesus Christ – hope. This hope does not undo the grief, it doesn’t even
necessarily lessen the grief. But it does change it. Our hope proclaims that we
are not alone in grief and that, as the Psalmist says in Psalm 30, “Weeping may
spend the night, but joy comes in the morning.” Yes, sometimes it is a long
night, but our hope is in knowing that there comes a joyful dawn.
We
heard “we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about those
who have died.” There certainly are a lot of uninformed ideas about death and the
afterlife out there. I won’t get into all the ways this misinformation about death
shows up in our culture, but if we pay attention to these words from First
Thessalonians, we find the Gospel truth that counters all of that bad theology.
Right
in the middle of the text that we heard read, there is a verse that may well
have been an early Creed of the Church: “For since we believe that Jesus died
and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have
died.” That verse is why we do not grieve without hope.
First
is our belief that Jesus died. Jesus’ death on the Cross was the atoning sacrifice
for Sin and a demonstration of God’s abundant love. Jesus’ Crucifixion for us
and for our salvation assures us that nothing stands between us and God. Not
the mistakes that we’ve made. Not the doubts that we’ve had. Not the things
that we never accomplished. Nothing. All that separates us from God has been
atoned for, removed from the balance sheet. And in its place, we are given the righteousness
of Jesus. This transaction is what we call grace. We contribute sin and are
given salvation. As St. Paul puts it in Romans, “For I am convinced that
neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things
to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation,
will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” We
can have hope that nothing can separate us from the love of God because of the Cross
of Christ. This is why on All Souls, the appropriate liturgical color is
purple. Because on this day we realize our need for the mercy given to us on the
Cross. And casting all our cares on God, we know the consolation of his love.
However,
the Cross is only half of it, the other half is that Jesus rose again. The Resurrection
not only affirms the depths of God’s love that we saw on the Cross, but it also
demonstrates that not even God’s own death can prevent us from being loved by
God. As we know from St. Paul’s writing in First Corinthians, “Love never ends.”
This is how our grief is different from those who do not have hope. For them,
there is nothing beyond the grave, but we know the truth that is expressed in the
Eucharistic prayer at funerals, “for to thy faithful people, O Lord, life is changed,
not ended.” As they say, change is hard; and it is. Grief is hard. But grief is
not eternal because death is not eternal. And we are confident of this because of
the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, which shows us that God can handle death.
Then
St. Paul continues and says that “through Jesus, God will bring with him those
who have died.” The great anthem of Easter is the Pascha nostrum, which is a
collection of verses from the New Testament. Part of that anthem proclaims, “Christ
is risen from the dead, and become the first fruits of them that slept. For
since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. For as
in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive. Alleluia.”
It’s
not just that Jesus was raised from the dead because he was God, but our hope
is that he was the first fruit of the Resurrection and we, and all of our
dearly departed, are the later harvests. One poet has said, “I will die, but
that is all I will do for death.” There’s no way to cheat death. But that doesn’t
mean that we owe death anything – not our fear, not our energy, not our lives.
Our hope is in Jesus, who is our way that leads us to eternal life. All of the joy
of Easter shall be ours in the Resurrection, and it is in that joy and peace
that our dearly departed now rest. And that is our hope in the midst of grief.
At
the end of this passage, we heard “Therefore encourage one another with these
words.” This is why we mark All Souls, to do something productive with our
grief: to hope. We do not deny our grief. We do not skip past the pains of
death. We do not pretend that death is not a big deal. No. We lament. We
grieve. We give our pain and uncertainty to God and trust that the very same
love that drove Jesus to the Cross and raised him up on the third day is the
love in which our dearly departed rest and where we will one day, by the mercy of
God, join them. ✠ In
the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
