5th November 2023 –All Saints Sunday; A Service of Remembering

The death of someone we love is a profoundly life-changing experience. 

The space and time that person once occupied has become empty.

The love that we had for that person no longer has a physical focus – we can’t hold them, or see them or hear the sound of their voice.

 A bereavement changes who we are, and how we navigate the world around us, it changes how we feel about ourselves and about other people.  A bereavement requires us somehow to reconfigure how we are going to live: how we are going to be in the world without our loved one.

 A bereavement leaves us in no doubt that life will never be the same again – there is no going back. 

 Experiencing the death of someone we love challenges all our perceptions of life as we know it – death takes our hopes and throws them up in the air.  It disrupts our dreams and our imaginings; the rhythm and order of our daily lives are thrown out of kilter.

 Death can be strange and troubling, chaotic and frightening. Death changes us. And it brings us close to a mystery at the very heart of life. 

 Those who grieve carry a wound that is deep and precious.

 For death has given us a gift. The gift of a new sort of vision.  In death our loved ones have gone beyond the limits of our sight and knowledge, and so we too have begun to look beyond what we can see and know – perhaps we’ve stretched our imaginations to wonder where the dead have gone; perhaps we’ve been pondering whether life has any meaning and purpose; perhaps we’ve begun to face the reality of our own mortality.

 (As one writer on death puts it: ‘in grieving, we have been initiated into a world where we will see things differently – but we have become enriched, not impoverished by our pain.’)

 In grief, God is at work in us.  St Paul tells us that even though we feel like we are wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day.  We are being prepared, he says, for glory beyond all measure.  Because we no longer look at what we can see, but we look at what cannot be seen.  We look into eternity. 

 And our vision, the way that we see things, is very important in the way that we remember our loved ones.  To remember someone, is to call them to mind, to bring them into our thoughts, and we naturally look to our memories, to what it was like when they were with us in the flesh, sharing our lives with us in time and space.  But with our new eyes for the eternal, we might also call them to mind as they are now, and as they will be in the future. 

 And to help us to do that, we have the story of Jesus Christ – God in the flesh.  The story of a God who, loving what he had made, came to live with us in Jesus, becoming a person who was born and who died.  He loved and lost, he hoped and feared, he suffered grief and despair, and he was wounded, dying a disturbing and frightening death.

 But his death was not the end of his story.  For this God broke out of the tomb where he was dead and buried; and clothed in glory, he declared, ‘I was dead!  But now I am alive for evermore.’  Death could not contain him.  And this new life, bursting forth out of death, is promised to all God’s people. 

 As mysterious and strange as this story is, it gives us a picture to hold on to –– a picture of hope finding its way out of despair – a picture of a life after death where God continues to act, always creating, always loving.

 None of this takes away the anguish and despair of grief and death.  But it helps us to see that all is not lost.  For beyond the door of death, our loved ones abide in the presence of God, who loves them beyond all measure, clothed in glory and radiant with the promise of the resurrection.

 Amen