All Saints Sermon 2024

All Saints…All Hallows…All Souls.         Death and life and life eternal.

These past months have been challenging for us as individuals and as a community.  We have had too many deaths this year. Too many loved one and friends, too many members of our community and all of this has many of us feeling our own mortality.  I’ve never had as many people want to pre plan their funerals as I have this year. 

It’s not only us either.  The Diocese has also been plunged into uncertainly and grief with the news of Bishop Geoff’s terminal cancer.  (he has undergone some treatments and surgery, and is at home resting)

This all guarantees a certain atmosphere within the parishes at large and indeed our own parish; as we struggle to come to terms with the sobering issue of mortality that has been placed so frequently before us.   It can become easy to sit back, and despair.  So, as we grapple with these challenges on this All Saints Day….it is vital to remember.     We. Have. Hope!

Not only do we have hope, but we have a God who knows us.  Christ has walked in our footsteps, knows our grief and felt our pain.  He knows.

“When Mary came where Jesus was and saw him, she knelt at his feet and said to him, Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”  And “Jesus began to weep.”

As we grieve…Christ weeps with us, yet we still struggle and we ask …what happens now?

One of the challenges to our own peace at a time of death is the huge diversity of understanding and theology about life after death.  What happens if they weren’t baptised? If they died suddenly or tragically? Also, in our time and place there is the discussion around MAID, medical assistance in dying, which is still so new and so hard to wrap our heads around.  The bible which contains all things necessary for salvation does not address all topics. 

So, we do our best to interpret God’s scriptures, but no one really knows.   So we judge and decide what will happen to our loved ones based on what we’ve known, using earthly wisdom to pronounce eternal judgement.   When we do, we take upon ourselves the role of God, trying to determine who is worthy, who goes to heaven and what happens next.

However, one concept that we rarely take into account in all our deliberations is that God has promised to make all things new.

“17 For I am about to create new heavens
   and a new earth;
the former things shall not be remembered
   or come to mind. Says Isaiah

“16 From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way. 17So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! 18All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation;  so says Paul in Corinthians


and indeed we read today “ I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away….See the home of God is among mortals.  He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes.  Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.’:”

Those first things are the things that we mourn, the fears and deaths that haunt us, because we exist in a time when sin still holds sway.  Sin is what has separated us from God, all those thoughts and words and deeds which spiritually turn our faces from God and keep us focused on ourselves.  But in those days, the days of the new creation, we need not fear.  In God’s new Creation it is not sin that will hold sway, but reconciliation and righteousness.

In the days when God has created all things new our lives and our deaths will be seen and judged not through the dark lens of earthly judgment, but in the bright light of God’s own love. In that time, we will see with God’s own eyes, honest and true… and see without shame all our true self exposed.  We will see the damage, the pain, the tears we have caused and we, like Christ, will weep.  But God will wipe the tears from our eyes.  God himself will show us our own life from God’s own perspective …and we will see as God sees.  We will know the truth of our own lives, and we will see Christ’s sacrifice in a new and personal light.

21For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”

We will be reconciled, healed and made whole.  Our own true self as God intended.  All of us.  All the saints of God, known and unknown and in that moment, the first Earth will pass away.  That broken world, full of selfishness and hurt and in it’s place will come a new creation, an eternal and holy city, where in all of God’s children will live together in peace and righteousness.

“But be glad and rejoice for ever
   in what I am creating;
for I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy,
   and its people as a delight.
19 I will rejoice in Jerusalem,
   and delight in my people;
no more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it,
   or the cry of distress.
20 No more shall there be in it
   an infant that lives but a few days,
   or an old person who does not live out a lifetime;”

I believe, whole heartedly and truly that when God’s time comes and there is a new heaven and a new earth that all the brokenness of this world will pass away.  The sins of this world that are seen when we ignore Gods’ call to righteousness and reconciliation, and pursue selfishness, will fall away.  The brokenness that causes us to harm God’s own creations, God’s own people and so very often cause us to harm ourselves, will fall away and we will see truly, with God’s eyes.  We will see that we are loved.

And there will be a new heaven and a new earth, as God intended them to be.  A heaven and Earth in full reconciliation and in harmony as we see in Revelation 22.

“Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb 2through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.”

There will be healing.  There will be reconciliation.  There will be God and God’s people together, face to face, because we will no longer dwell in sin or shame, rather we will gaze in humility and joy on the one who has loved us since our creation, and who looks on us as a mother does her new born child.

This time of year we embrace the cycle of life and death and life eternal, All Hallow’s eve, All Saints and All Souls.  It is appropriate that we remember those who have passed, those who are dying and our own mortality, but not as a time of grief, but rather as a time of hope.

We are a people of hope. A people of resurrection. A people beloved of God.

It may seem like this world of sin, tragedy and death has hold of us in a very real and depressing way.  But when it does I remember the hope of Scripture and the word of John Donne, both priest and poet.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee

Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;

For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow

Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,

Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,

And soonest our best men with thee do go,

Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery.

Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,

And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,

And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well

And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then?

One short sleep past, we wake eternally

And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

 

…and all saints shall live, with God…eternally. amen