O God of the living and the dead, help us to wait
in faith, hope, and love. Amen.
“I wait for the Lord; my soul waits for him; in his word is my hope. My soul waits for the Lord, more than watchmen for the morning, more than watchmen for the morning,” so says the Psalmist. On All Souls, we watch and wait. We name the fact that the idiom “time heals all wounds” is a lie. We acknowledge that grief is never something we “get over,” but rather it is like a scar that reminds us of a wound. In a world that does not know how to sit in grief, on All Souls’ Day the Church says that such waiting is the holiest thing we can be doing.
Though
the name of this liturgical occasion is either “All Souls” or “the Commemoration
of All the Faithful Departed,” it is not really on their behalf that we gather.
I hope that none of us are here tonight because we are concerned about the state
that our dearly departed are in. As we heard in Wisdom, “the souls of the righteous
are in the hand of God, and no torment will ever touch them. In the eyes of the
foolish, they seem to have died, but they are at peace.” We have every
confidence that they are held in God’s love with is far stronger than death.
One of the laws of thermodynamics
says that matter can never be created or destroyed, only changed. Well, one of
the laws of love is that if something is loved by God, it can never be
destroyed, only changed. The very fact that God loves someone gives that person
a reality that is deeper than matter, for God cannot logically love that which
does not exist. We know that God loves all of us as children, and we know that
we do not stop loving our family and friends at death, so how much more this is
the case for God. The power of God’s love is such that even when we have died in
the flesh, we remain alive in God.
It
is on this ground that St. Paul tells us to encourage each other with these
words. Jesus himself says that the hour has come when the dead will hear his voice
and live. Now what exactly happens after we die – I really don’t know. I simply
haven’t been there. But our hope and confidence are in that we will be with
Jesus. As Jesus tells the thief crucified next to him, “Truly I tell you, today
you will be with me in Paradise.” What specifically Paradise is, I don’t know.
But if we’re with Jesus, we know that all shall be well. Our loved ones who
have died rest in the peace and love of Jesus. They are good. We do not need to
worry about them.
Rather
it is us, who still see through a glass dimly, who need All Souls’ Day. Anytime
there has been a presence of love in our lives, when that presence turns into
an absence, there is grief. And because the absence remains, so does the grief.
I once heard someone describe grief as a circle. When a death occurs, the
circle fills almost the entire sphere of our lives – grief can be all-consuming.
What happens over time is, like a scar, life grows and expands around the
grief. The sphere of our life is enlarged. The size of the grief remains the
same, but it no longer occupies the majority of the space. But, again, the
grief doesn’t go away or shrink. We gather on All Souls longing for more hope
and healing to surround our grief.
One
of the things that I so value about the Episcopal tradition is that we do not
have “celebrations of life” when someone dies. Instead, we have funerals. A
celebration of life implies that life has come to an end, which is a pagan or
secular belief, not a Christian one. A funeral names the fact that grief is
normal and it is holy. To deny grief is to deny our humanity. Jesus wept at the
grave of Lazarus. In one of his letters, CS Lewis wrote that praying for our deceased
loved ones is the most natural thing for us to do.
As
we heard in 1 Thessalonians, it is in the assurance of eternal and Resurrected
life that we do not grieve as others who have no hope do. One theologian said
that any fool can see death, but it takes the eyes of faith to see signs of
hope and redemption. As Psalm 130 proclaims, we watch for the morning, for those
dawn rays of Resurrection possibility. But to watch for the dawn, we have to
gather in the dark. We have to enter into the darkness of the tomb, and only
then are we able to enter, even if tearfully, into the joy that awaits us all.
At our best, this is what the Church provides in a funeral and on All Souls –
the opportunity to sit in the depths and anticipate morning.
And
so we wait. We tend to think of waiting as something we do passively – we wait for
a bus, we wait to be called back at a medical appointment, we wait in the
carpool line at school, we wait for test results, we wait for a package to be delivered.
The problem with this view of waiting is that it is not Biblical and it leaves
us powerless, with nothing to do. Waiting in the Biblical sense is active.
To
wait, in the language of this Psalm, means to watch, to guard, to anticipate. When
the Psalmist says that she waits for morning, it’s not a thumb-twiddling activity.
Rather, it is like a watchman, someone posted on a tower who is not only
scanning the horizon for signs of danger, but also for the first traces of morning
light. We are not sitting around and waiting to die so that we can be reunited
with our loved ones, rather we actively watch for signs of the Resurrection and
anticipate the fullness of that eternal life. When we think of waiting, think
of the waitstaff at a restaurant. They are called waiters and waitresses, but
only the bad ones sit around with nothing to do. Instead, waiting is about
active preparation and attentiveness.
And
there are places where we can fix our eyes to look for the rays of Resurrection
light. One is in the love that carries on in the beloved community of the Church.
We do not grieve alone and we do not have to carry our burdens alone. The
community of the faithful is a sign of Resurrection hope.
When we gather for the
Eucharist, we are partaking in a meal that is rooted in the Resurrection which
means that the barriers of time and space do not apply. When we break bread in
Jesus’ name, we do so with all of those whom we love but see no longer. In the Eucharist,
we see the light of morning breaking upon our shore.
And the grief and lament
that we carry are also signs of hope – for they remind us of that great truth
expressed in 1 Corinthians, that love never ends.
Morning has already
broken and though we still carry grief, we are also surrounded by the dawning
of Resurrection light. May God grant us eyes to see it. Amen.
