Deathless love

A sermon for All Souls’ Day, 2 November 2023.

“I have to believe 
That you still exist 
Somewhere, 
That you still watch me 
Sometimes, 
That you still love me 
Somehow. 

 I have to believe 
That life has meaning 
Somehow, 
That I am useful here 
Sometimes, 
That I make small differences 
Somewhere. 

 I have to believe 
That I need to stay here 
For some time, 
That all this teaches me 
Something, 
So that I can meet you again 
Somewhere.”

Words by the poet Ann Thorp. Thorp is not a religious writer, though tellingly, the title she gave to this poem was ‘Belief’.  She conveys in simple human language something of what brings us here tonight, to mark the mystery of death and the truth of a love that isn’t ended by death.

All Souls Day, being that day dedicated to those who have died, and who are now at rest, is in one sense, you might say, a service for the past, - a service connected with memory.  But it is always a service conducted not by the dead but by those who live now.  In a few moments we will read out the names of deceased loved ones known to us here, as will people in thousands of churches around the world.  Each and every one of those names has been added by a living person who in their life now still remembers and loves their departed friends. 

That itself reminds us that the past is not entirely past – it still connects in certain ways with the present.  We have all chosen to come here to this church on a cold, dark night, because of the impact of those people we are about to name, people who have contributed to who we are now, both in the good they did and sometimes also the mistakes they made too, but chiefly in the love we bore for them as they were, as human people, imperfect like us, but still loveable, and loved by God.  So it is a service for the present, for those living to express their fraternal communion with those who have gone before. 

For Christians, that connectedness is what the Creed calls the communion of saints – that interconnection which binds us into the one mystery that is God wherever we may be – whether on earth, or in the world to come.  St Paul describes that communion in terms of a family in today’s reading – we are children of God, we are heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ.  God is Abba, Father.

We have the oneness of a family.  And the energy that unites that body, that animates that family, is love.  By coming here as those now living to remember and pray for the departed, we testify to a stunning but often unreflected-upon fact: that love always survives death.  Love is unaffected, sometimes it is even intensified, by the death of the one we love.  All of which proves beyond all possible contradiction St Paul’s famous observation in the Letter to the Corinthians, that while faith will one day come to an end, hope will one day come to an end, love never ends. 

But I want to ask you to consider something tonight.  If our love, our frail human love for the departed is as strong and ongoing as it is (indeed for some of us, it is the strongest feeling we have) – how much stronger and unending must be the love of God for those same people?  God, the one who eternally loved them?  Who wanted them to exist, to form part of his creation, who became their Creator, who rejoices in the image of himself which they bear and which he sees in them, who sees them, for all the mess that the world is in, as unique parts of his divine plan for the completion of all things?  Indeed as his children? The God who wishes his creation to be complete – the God who says in today’s Gospel “Come to Me” - will he allow, can he allow, the loss forever of any of those who die in him? 

These are deep reflections that give us hope.  As Paul says again “creation is waiting with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; the freedom of their glory”.  But because that hope is mysterious, humanity has been given a sign, anchored in history, of what God’s love wishes to do, and will do, to forever direct our hope.  That sign, that incredible signature by God on creation, is the mystery of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.  In the mystery of the Resurrection, where eternity erupted decisively into natural time, God has covenanted with us that death is not the end of our story.  And if, as we believe, by baptism we have become part of Christ then we are destined to share both in his death but also in his resurrection because we are part of his body too.  His mystical body to be completed throughout time.  By that unification of God with us we have an eternal destiny.  In other words, a future.  It is what the Book of Common Prayer calls a ‘sure and certain hope’.  So, this is a service, too, for the future.  The future of those who have died, and our future too. 

And that future starts with the lives we lead on earth.  Fr Timothy Radcliffe used to say, shockingly to some, ‘We Christians do not believe in an afterlife’ - that is, not if you mean afterlife to mean that we finish one life and then we go off somewhere and start a completely new one, after this one, which is nothing to do with this life.  What we believe in is not an afterlife in that sense.  What we believe in is eternal life: namely the life that we are leading now and that same person that we are now, is willed by God to continue forever into an ongoing, albeit transformed, life with Him.  The form of that life is inevitably mysterious to us now, but though its chrysalis is death, its end, we are promised, is Resurrection, the complete transformation of the universe which even the evolutionary process now hints at as the world moves over millennia from non-life to spiritualised conscious personhood.  We and those who have died have a destiny as the people that we are, purified from our imperfections and at the end transformed into God.  That is the yoke that is easy and whose burden is light.

To return to that poem.  As Ann Thorp says “All this teaches me something”. “I need to be here”. “I need to believe”.  Indeed it does, and indeed we do.  So on this day may we say with confidence – may light perpetual shine upon them.  May light perpetual shine upon us.  And may light perpetual shine on our future in God which we await together in hope.  Amen.

- James Chegwidden