All Saints & All Souls (B)
Isaiah 25:6-9; Revelation 21:1-6a; John 11:32-44
Every time we gather to celebrate Eucharist together we are reminded that life is much bigger than what we experience now, and that the church is much bigger than the sum of the countless congregations who are gathering around the world as we speak. We are also reminded that our relationships extend far beyond those we know in this life. Here, around this table, we are united with all God’s people. All of them! Not just those in every corner of the earth, but also with those who have died. Here we are united in Christ with every other Christian around the world; and we are united with the whole company of heaven in a mystical communion that extends beyond this world into the next.
This is the mystery we celebrate today. It is the mystical communion we call “Church”. The Church has been called by St Paul “the fellowship of the Holy Spirit”. We think of this fellowship as a physical reality, made up of Christians who are alive now. Today we affirm that our unity in Christ transcends death; that our relationship with those we love continues beyond death. Being Christian, therefore, is to be part of a fellowship of the Holy Spirit that far bigger than we can ever imagine or conceive. It is like being gently surrounded, held and carried in the immense waters of the sea. These waters that hold and support us and carry us – could be likened to the sea of divine activity; the continuous presence of the God, that is surrounding us, holding us, moving us, carrying us. At the centre of this divine activity stands Jesus himself. What he revealed is the continuous outpouring of divine love and grace. He showed us that our identity is formed in receiving love from God and returning that love to God and sharing it with others. This rhythm of giving and receiving is what Jesus revealed in the being of God; each member of the Trinity giving gifts of love and life, and each responding by passing that gift back to each other in a way that leads to a renewed overflow of giving. Jesus stands in the centre of this rhythm of divine gift giving and receiving. He came to make it possible for you and I to be drawn into this divine life of God, and he is continuing this work of drawing us to God in every time and place, whether on this side of the grave or beyond. So when we become followers of Jesus we are not simply following a distant figure of the past. Jesus is bringing us into this rhythm of divine life that draws us ever more deeply into the divine life of the whole Trinity. As we allow Jesus to do this for us, we find that we are inhabiting a much bigger communion of Christians than we realise at first. It includes the patriarchs and matriarchs and prophets of the Old Testament, the saints and martyrs of the entire Christian era, along with those we have known and loved, the whole company of heaven, a number so great that they are as numerous as the stars of heaven and the sand on the seashore.
We often think of the saints as the heroes of the Christian faith; people who have been set aside because of they are exemplars of the faith or because of their extraordinary sacrifice. That is no bad thing. Some of them have bequeathed their writings to us; some of these writings form the sacred texts we find in the bible. When we read the writings of Isaiah or Jeremiah or Ezekiel or S. Paul or S. Mark or S. Luke, it is as though God is reaching back through time and placing Isaiah, even the human form of Christ himself, back into our midst today so that their voice speaks to us directly about their experiences of God. The saints of old are present around this table and their voices are tongued with fire fanning the flame of our faith.
We must never forget, though, that the New Testament used the word “saint” to refer to every single Christian. St Paul wrote to the saints in Rome, to the saints in Corinth, the saints in Thessalonica, and so on. All of us are numbered with the saints and are called saints by the New Testament writers because we called to a life of holiness together in that great mystical communion we call Church.
The Isaiah reading sets before us one of the earliest visions of heaven that we have. Speaking of heaven can seem almost childish to our generation, so much so that the church has become rather coy about using words like heaven and speaking about life after death. Heaven is not some Christian fantasy for young children in Sunday School classes, neither is it an escape from hell. Heaven is God’s future rushing toward us through the work of the Holy Spirit. Whereas God brings the voices of the saints of old from the past into our present; so also, God reaches into the future, and brings that future into our present (theologians call this prolepsis). This means heaven is a reality that God enfleshes in us today, if only we will let him. Isaiah’s vision of heaven is a great banquet with tables laden with rich food and the finest wines. God is the host and we are the guests. Death has not become the end of everything, but the beginning of something new. The barrier of death has been removed, tears of grieving have been wiped away as God swallows up death forever, and all peoples of the world sit down together in peace to enjoy God’s goodness and plenty.
St Augustine said this about heaven in his book, The City of God. He said that heaven is a place where “we shall rest and we shall see, we shall see and we shall love, we shall love and we shall praise. Behold what will be at the end without end. For what other end do we have, if not to reach the kingdom which has no end.” The world of eternity God purposes for us is a world of joy in giving and receiving. It is an awareness of the glory and generosity of God in the context of the giving and receiving and rejoicing that is in the heart of the divine life of the Holy Trinity. Our best preparation for this eternity is getting accustomed to gift and joy, opening ourselves to God’s vision and practising receiving it and embodying it. For the Christian, life today is about becoming acclimatised to the sheer joy and reality of God; it is about living God’s future in the here and now. This is what prayer is all about. It is getting ourselves into a position where God can see us, putting ourselves in the light of his presence, putting aside our defences and disguises, removing the masks and identities we have wrapped ourselves in, so that the naked “me” stands before God so that what is deepest in us, what we most want, what we most care about, is laid bare before God. This is what we face as we go through death; the stripping away of everything so that the real “me” comes face to face with God. The deep work of contemplation is preparing ourselves for this moment. It is removing the old masks and identities we clothe ourselves in, and putting on Christ as we are taken into his prayer and love. As we do this, we become acclimatised to heaven, which is being in a living relationship with God.
The reading from St John’s gospel about Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead shows the depth of Jesus’ grief in the face of death. This story points forward to Jesus’ own death and resurrection and the hope of eternal life in God. Whatever resurrection of the body actually looks like, this story is showing that God holds on to us through death. He holds on to every aspect of us. When someone dies, their life is not ended. That person has a future in God. God is totally committed to us. All his action is toward our flourishing and our healing. His commitment to loving and to our healing continues beyond death. In fact, death is not barrier at all to God. He just carries on loving and healing. God never lets us down; God is there to receive and hold us on both sides of the grave. It is as if, in God’s eyes, death no longer exists. It has been swallowed up forever.
On this day we celebrate these aspects of God’s loving commitment to us. We proclaim that in death, life is changed but not ended; that those we have known and loved are not lost. They are held in the being of God. We will pray for them, they will be praying for us. For some here today, our prayer for those who have died will be deeply personal. If there are tears, let it be for our grief is part of the risk of loving and being loved. Their love and their gifts have helped to form who we have become and our lives have been made richer through the gifts they have shared. We are here to do what we always do when we gather to break bread. We gather in Christ in the presence of the whole company of heaven. We await the coming of Christ and the kingdom of heaven, and with all the faithful who rest in Christ we proclaim that death is not the end, for God’s love is stronger than death. From such love, nothing can separate us.
