Death

Several people expressed a desire to read this one.

A Homily for All Souls’ Day
Trinity College Chapel:

Monday 2 November, 2009

St Matthias, Bellwoods:

Wednesday 4 November, 2009

I have to confess that I get tired of hearing people say “passed on” instead of “died”. To use a synonym or elegant variation of terms from time to time is one thing; but this is a euphemism, and that is quite another. Too often it seems that people are not so much afraid of death as afraid of talking about it. But on All Souls’ Day, when we remember in love all the Faithful Departed, we must think about death. Words are subtle, and as a metaphor to speak of death as “passing away” is respectable. In The Catholic Religion, Vernon Staley’s remarkably sane little manual of instruction for Anglicans, we read, “Death is the separation of the soul from the body. We speak of death as ‘the passing away’, for in death the soul leaves the body as a tenant quitting a house.” That’s fair enough, and it is certainly based on experience. Look on a dead body; something essential thing that made it a person is gone. But change the metaphor just a little, from “passing away” to “passing on”, or even, as I often hear “passing”, and you enter into a whole new world of thought. Perhaps it is because I have spent too much of my life in school, but I can’t help but think that when someone is said to have “passed” they’ve finished a course and moved up to the next grade. That image: going to the next stage in a process of growth and perfection seems to be an attractive metaphor for dying. Attractive it may be, but it is not an image found in Scripture: it is not the hope of the Gospel.
Many of the things we hear said about death are like that. Attractive images that are meant to help us cope. But the mission of the Church is not only, or not precisely, to give people attractive images that will help them cope with life, but to proclaim the Good News of Jesus Christ, who came to defeat sn and death, and raise us to new Life. And so on this All Souls Day we proclaim the words of Jesus,
Jesus said to them, … “This is indeed the will of my Father, that all who see the Son and believe in him may have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day.

How different from this is the idea of a person passing on, perhaps to some disembodied life in paradise. But that is the idea many, if not most people have of the Christian belief and hope. For a good analysis of common beliefs, you would do well to read the opening chapters of Bishop N. T. Wright’s recent book Surprised by Hope; but I have recently had to look at other evidence of it. Not long ago, I was asked by my family to look over a selection of verses that were considered appropriate for a memorial card. The selection is well worth reading, for in it we find the words of Scripture side by side with other writings that express a wide variety of beliefs that suggests a muddle of beliefs. Some are vapid, and even if they can give comfort, there is little of hope in them:

When a loved one becomes a memory,

a memory becomes a treasure.

Treasure the memories.

Others express what Wright calls “a sort of low-grade, popular nature religion with elements of Buddhism. At death one is absorbed into the wider world, into the wind and the trees.” The example is well-known:

Do not stand at my grave and weep.

I am not there. I do not sleep.

I am a thousand winds that blow;
I am the diamond glints on snow.

I am the sunlight on ripened grain;

I am the gentle autumn rain.

I am the swift uplifting rush

Of quiet birds in circled flight.

I am the soft star that shines at night.

Do not stand at my grave and cry!

I am not there. I did not die.

When you know perfectly well that someone you love and care for is dead, to be fobbed off with such stuff is galling. “Do not stand at my grave and weep.” What arrogance to say this among the people of Christ, who wept when he stood at the grave of his friend! Indeed we find that bit of gnosticism in the verses as well:

Don’t grieve for me, for now I’m free,

I am following the path God laid for me.

I took his hand when I heard him call,

I turned my back and left it all.

Is any of this Christian faith and hope?] Where is the goodness of creation, which God declares in the opening of Genesis? What of the promise of the renewal of creation, which is so triumphantly declared in the final chapters of Revelation, as we heard yesterday? Or is all this to wiped away, and replaced by something else? Where is the note of triumph that was once heard at every funeral? One would think that death was not the enemy that destroys God’s human creatures, an enemy defeated and trampled underfoot by Christ, but a friend who releases, even frees us from the body?
As Bishop Wright remarked, “if the promised final future is simply that immortal souls leave behind their mortal bodies, then death still rules—since that is a description not of the defeat of death but simply of death itself, seen from one angle.” And he calls us to look again to the scriptures and faith of the Church to discover once more the surprising hope that is promised: not of passing to another plane of existence, but the hope of the resurrection of the body and renewed life.

Time will not permit us even to start considering all that this implies. But let it remind us that we need to have a clear idea of what they believe about these deep and central questions of human life. And I would suggest that before we run off to look for our beliefs in other places, we look into our own traditions. At the core of traditional teaching we find the promise of the Resurrection, which is nothing less than the promise that it is the whole human person that is to be saved. This speaks volumes about the moral value of our life, of the body, of the actions we take in this life. But all I can do now is to urge you to look more deeply into the matter. Bishop Wright’s book is a good place to start, but you find the same doctrine in older works of theology, including Staley’s Catholic Religion, where we are reminded that the disembodied soul is only a part of the complete human person, and only by the resurrection can the whole person be perfected in eternity

Now I must finish with a word about the final verse of the epistle, which describes the end of faith as “the salvation of your souls”. Does this not teach that salvation is about our souls, with the implication, “not our bodies”? I hope you will forgive me if I quote the Bishop of Durham now, for he made a very helpful comment on the meaning of the word psyche in this verse:

'The word psyche was very common in the ancient world and carried a variety of meanings. Despite its frequency both in later Christianity and (for instance) in Buddhism, the New Testament doesn’t use it to describe, so to speak, the bit of you that will ultimately be saved. The word psyche seems here to refer like the Hebrew nephesh, not to a disembodied inner part of the human being but to what we might call the person or even the personality. And the point in 1 Peter 1 is that this person, the “real you,” is already being saved and will one day receive that salvation in full bodily form. That is why Peter quite rightly plants the hope for salvation firmly in the resurrection of Jesus. God has, he says, “given us new birth to a living hope by the resurrection of Jesus the Messiah from the dead.”'
Indeed, psyche is often to be translated not as soul but as life, as in Mark 9.35, “For those who want to save their life (psychen) will lose it, and those who lode their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it”. Elsewhere the dictionaries tell us it means a human individual. It seems then, a bit arbitrary to insist on its meaning immaterial soul in 1 Peter.

There is more to say,* but perhaps I can sum up all with an adaptation of the traditional prayer for the departed which is fortunately becoming more common.
Rest eternal grant unto them, O Lord; and may light perpetual shine upon them.
May they rest in peace and rise in glory.

*After I preached at St Matthias, the thurifer expressed the hope that on another All Souls' Day I might explain that people do not become Angels when they die. I said that I believed most people at St Matthias were aware of this

Thy Will Be Done

Sermon for All Saints’ Day [Year B]
Preached at the Church of St Columba & All Hallows, East York
Sunday, 1 November AD 2009

Every day, Christians repeat the words, Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Since we say this prayer every day, it can easily become so familiar that we pray it without much thought — this is not only true of those who seem to be trying for a new speed record in getting through the Lord’s prayer; it really does take some effort to concentrate on familiar words. So it helps to give some thought to the meaning of the prayer before we pray it, and there are questions that we can ask about these words. We can ask if we have a very clear idea of what God’s will is, and what the world would be like if it were done here as it is in heaven. We can ask ourselves just who we expect to be doing God’s will on earth. Perhaps we are content to imagine that someone, somewhere, will do God’s will, and everything will be all right. But I hope that all of us have at least a suspicion that this prayer means thy will be done, on earth, by me, as it is in heaven, that God’s kingdom comes whenever I , and other Christians, and other folk, do God’s will.
On All Saints’ Day we think of how this prayer has been answered, for it has indeed been answered and is being answered today in the lives of Christian folk, of men and women who respond to the call to follow Christ, men and women who turn away from self to serve those in need, men and women who seek to give themselves to their Lord and in him to their brothers and sisters. For the Saints whom we remember and celebrate this day are not beings of some different species, holier than the rest of us, but those whose witness has been made visible in this world the love of God and his victory over sin and death in Christ Jesus our Lord.
We have all heard many times that when we hear or read references in the New Testament to “the saints”, what is meant is the members of the Church. For example, in the ninth chapter of the Acts we read,

Now as Peter went here and there among them all he came down also to the saints that lived at Lydda

Again, many of St Paul’s letters are addressed to ‘the saints’ of such and such a place, or to ‘those called to be saints’, by which he means simply the members of the church.. Now the word ‘saint’ means ‘holy’; as the Catechism says, the Church is called Holy, “Because the Holy Spirit dwells in it, sanctifying all its members and endowing them with gifts of grace.” Or we could say that Christians, who are made members of the Body of Christ by Baptism, are called to be holy because he is holy. So to speak of Christians as ‘saints’ does not mean that the people God chooses and calls are particularly holy people themselves, but that he calls sinners to forgive them and make of them a holy people. Read what St Paul has to say to the saints at Corinth: they do not seem to have all been super-holy people. Indeed, we may say that the Church has no saints who are not redeemed sinners. The Psalm today [24] tells us that it is those who have clean hands and pure hearts who can ascend the hill of the Lord: but we know that those hands are clean because God has washed them, and those hearts are pure because he has cleansed them with his Spirit.
Now in the history of the Church, the word ‘saint’ came to be used in a special way for particular men and women whose witness to Jesus Christ was known to the world and gave an example to others. In the first place, it was those who would not turn back from Christ Jesus evne though it meant death. These were called the witnesses, which in Greek is “martyrs”. The day of their death on earth was counted as a heavenly birthday. It is of such folk that we read in the Book of Wisdom [3.1-9]: in the sight of men they were punished, their end seemed to be destruction, but they found life in God. When the days of persecution ended, others who gave all for Christ, and whose lives were a constant witness, were honoured as particular saints. Look at the calendar at the beginning of the Book of Alternative Services and you will find the names of some 120 individuals from many countries and all centuries of the Church whom Christians have delighted to honour because they lived lives of faith and commitment to Christ and through them his work has gone on in the world. In other Church calendars there are countless more, too many for each to have a particular commemoration —which is why we have a day to remember All the Saints, and to thank God that the fellowship of the Church is made up not just of those on earth today, but of all who are bound together in Christ by sacrament, prayer, and praise.
I have not said anything of today’s Gospel [John 11.32-33]: there we are shown the model for all the saints, and for all of us who want to follow Christ. And that model is Lazarus. For all who are called to follow Christ are called out of a tomb as Lazarus was, which is the life without God. There is a resurrection at the last day, but Christ is calling us to the new life now, now he wants the stone rolled away,—the stone which shuts the soul in its tomb of anxiety, or worry, or resentment—so that he can call us from death to life.
In the lives of the saints we see those for whom this has happened and in whom the work is perfected, and we learn from them that is may be done and perfected in us Their lives show us that they are like us, not a special breed of super-holy men and women. I do not have time to go through the list, but we all know that St Thomas doubted, that St Peter denied his Lord and had to be forgiven. I can mention St Jerome, a great scholar who was also a man with quite a foul temper, who seems to have fought with just about everyone. We commemorate King Charles I, who was a devout man and a good father, but perhaps not the wisest of rulers, and whose life was tragic. There are trivial details that show how human the saints were: St Thomas Aquinas was a very fat man. In other calendars we find some unlikely saints, such as a British abbot, St Pyr, who died when he fell down a well blind drunk. His monastery was so badly governed that his holy successor had to resign. I can’t go on with this, but I assure you that to read the lives of the saints not only inspires to follow them in following Christ, it assures us that there is very little that can stand in the way of Christ’s love if we care to follow him. There is excusing ourselves by saying “Oh, I’m no saint”.
But do we really care to? Or do we put up the one real barrier to his grace? This barrier to grace is indifference, being content to do what we want, to stay as we are and follow the path we choose. Oh, we believe in God and in Christ all right, but we want them to work for us, so that our will be done. Often our faith means that we want our life on our terms, with God and his blessings as an added extra to make everything better. So here is another reason to learn from the saints: they sought to do God’s will, even when it meant denying their own. But as I said at the outset, it is for this we pray every day when we say: Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.