Sermon for All Souls by Jessica Martin

Sermon for All Souls, 2 November 2022
Ely Cathedral, 7.30 pm
Canon Jessica Martin
NT: 1 Peter 1.3–9
Gospel: John 5.19–25

Although you have not seen him, you love him (1 Pet.1.8)

We are joined to the invisible work of love. We are entangled in its bonds, marked by its effects, changed by its force. We steer by its sights.

The writer of the letter of Peter was thinking of the ascended Jesus, part of this invisible Godhead, when he wrote these words to his readers: ‘Although you have not seen him, you love him’. He was speaking of the way that we who are Christian walk by faith and not only by sight. But our making, our being in the visible world, has also been shaped — and shaken — by human lives, human loves, now withdrawn from bodily sight and touch, invisible to the beings we are in this space, this time. For each of us here is joined to the dead that made us, and who we honour through remembrance in this requiem mass.

There are the dead whom we name, bringing them in our naming into the circle of the present. Those beloved names reach beyond sight and touch to the deep knowledge of memory and longing. Their absence is a wound in our present time, but we speak of them believing that past and future are always ‘now’ to God; that what has been is, for our Creator, never lost, never out of reach. Good and bad together, sorrow and joy, bitterness and division, misunderstanding and reconciliation, the blunders that shake our lives, the encounters that make it – all stand within the divine sight, for judgement; and for mercy. In speaking the names of the dead we do not only speak loss; we do not even only speak recollection. We bespeak our hope that all that has ever been exists for redemption in the eyes of God, through the resurrection of his son, our Saviour, Jesus Christ. This is what it actually means to walk by faith and not only by sight.

Just a little out of sight of our remembered and beloved dead, lie those who are being forgotten, the names and beings slipping out of human memory. Sometimes, with the tail of our eye, we see them going. In a conversation with a nonagenarian in my last parish, he mentioned names of local villagers buried in the churchyard. Not all of them had headstones. Not all of them had been living even in his time; their resting places had been remembered by his parents, by the adults of his childhood in the early years of the twentieth century. Are their graves and names recorded, or did their memory slip away when the man I knew died, just a couple of years ago? What are the names and histories of the babies and small children buried in local graves housing members of my mother’s family? Only two or three generations have swept their short lives beyond our sight; we do not know how they felt, what they saw. Yet they live, in the eternal now; in the eye and heart of their loving Maker.

The act of remembering keeps our love in sight. And the act of remembering, the human act of remembering, stands in for everything we don’t know about our beloved dead. The most open, the most communicative of people will take much of his or her life forever away at death, across the river that divides the living from the dead. As the spirit returns to God who made it, its most private thoughts and feelings fall out of the earth and into the divine hand. My own dreams and nightmares, my own betrayals and spiritual victories, the things I saw on a particular day, at a particular hour forty years ago – many of them are no longer available to my memory, let alone anyone else’s. Much of what shaped and shook the person I have become is beyond my own knowing, now. But all this is known to God, before whom we are always and forever fully known.

As we remember, we participate in the great act of recollection that is God’s constant work. But it is not our work, not primarily. It is God’s work. It is ‘kept in heaven for us; imperishable, undefiled, unfading’. Such a thing is hard even to imagine.

We shall not all sleep, but we shall be changed. The past is not static. It works in us. The Jesus of the past, who died and was raised, makes all the dead live. But the dead are not only raised to life and breathe again. The dead past is brought before the living eye of our Saviour, and changed: from blunder to wisdom, from incomprehension to understanding, from fear to love, from pain to recognition. We are not only meant for life, but for the redemption of our life. Not only shaped, but shaken into newness, into seeing afresh. As we hope to come home, so also do we hope to find ourselves always coming home in the sight of God’s bright homeliness.

Remember the beloved dead. And remember the forgotten dead. And offer to God the Father all that you yourself have forgotten. For, in the end, through Jesus who lives in the love of the Father, all that is hidden shall embrace the light perpetual, and all that lies unknown shall be for ever recognised.

Blessed are those whose strength is in you, in whose heart are the highways to Zion.

Who going through the barren valley find there a spring; and the pools are filled with water.

They will go from strength to strength; and appear before God in Zion.

(Ps.84.4-6)

Amen.