Feast of All Souls
2 Maccabees 12:43-45
1 Corinthians 15:53-55
John 5:24-27
+ In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
For this corruption must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality. So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written: Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory? (I Cor. 15:53-55)
+ In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
I am now in my fifteenth year as headmaster of Saint James, which seems almost a blasphemous thing to say in Father Owens’s home parish; he of course was headmaster for 29 years, so I have a while to go before I cease to be “the new one.”
Nonetheless, I have been at Saint James a while, and I am now the longest-serving priest in Hagerstown, so I am often in demand to take funerals not just in the school chapel but also in the parish church in town. As the people I am burying now are often my friends, I am not really in a position to refuse, because as we all know there is nothing worse than a funeral when the priest does not know the deceased.
When this is the case, one of two things can happen in the homily. First, the priest just ignores the individual person who has died and preaches his standard sermon on the resurrection. At least this does no damage, and we can all benefit from an additional opportunity to reflect on the foundational and central miracle of the Christian faith, but it can feel a little impersonal and is not always a great comfort to the family, especially if he uses the wrong name, the first name, for instance, which no one ever used, or mispronounces the nickname that only the family used, or maybe even uses the name of the person he buried last week.
Secondly, and this often much more disastrously, the priest just repeats the pious platitudes which the grieving family expressed when they were still in shock and on their best behavior the day before in his study. Typically, superlatives are used: the best mother or father ever, the most devoted wife or husband, the perfect employer or employee, the very best friend. The reason why this approach is so destructive is that it is patently not true, and even the most casual acquaintance attending the service is forced to look towards the front pew where the faculty sits to make sure that he has come to the right funeral.
In their very amusing book, Being Dead Is No Excuse: the Official Southern Ladies guide to Hosting the Perfect Funeral, Gayden Metcalfe and Charlotte Hays call this the “nudge-producing eulogy:”
When Sally Bashford’s dreadful old stepmother died, the Methodist minister lavishly eulogized her. You’d have thought somebody in town actually liked the old bat. There is rarely a eulogy at St. James’ [the local Episcopal parish], though in recent years a homily has been added to the funeral service. A brief note in the program explains that there won’t be a eulogy. God doesn’t need to be reminded about the deceased. Neither do the rest of us. While eulogists are going on and on about what a model citizen and devoted husband Mr. So-and-So was we’re trying to keep straight faces. He was a notorious fanny pincher and crook, who was lucky not to have ended up behind bars. Yes, dead or alive, we’d all like to have praise heaped upon us. But isn’t it safer, really, to wait until everybody is at home with a toddy? That way, if you can’t stop laughing, you can claim you had too much to drink. (30)
There is a sad and dangerous tendency in our modern American church to turn souls into saints, reflected I think in the modern practice of wearing white vestments at funerals and not purple, let alone black. Every funeral these days is a “celebration of a life” and a “Feast of the Resurrection,” which certainly is true and in many ways correct, but we have lost a balancing awareness of our sinfulness and of the judgment of God to come. We are therefore missing a proper awareness of our humanity, of the many ways in which we have failed to love God and to love our neighbor as our self. And worst of all, we have presumed to do the work of God ourselves, forgiving ourselves of our sins. I sometimes think that we are like passengers who jump on a train as it is leaving the station and declare ourselves “arrived.”
We have banished from our burials those traditional and scriptural words which make us so uncomfortable: “In the midst of life we are in death; of whom may we seek for succor, but of thee, O Lord, who for our sins art justly displeased? . . . Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts; shut not thy merciful ears to our prayer; but spare us, Lord most holy, O God most mighty, O holy and merciful Savior, thou most worthy Judge eternal. Suffer us not, at our last hour, through any pains of death, to fall from thee.” (BCP, p.484)
And not only do we declare ourselves saints at our funerals, we declare ourselves saints when we are alive. According to our contemporary “I’m ok, you’re ok” theology, there is no sin in you and no sin in me, and therefore no need for repentance and change on our part, or indeed grace and forgiveness on God’s part. What is missing is that middle and more reasonable ground in which we both embrace our humanity with all its need and also celebrate the way in which God can use and redeem our humanity to serve His purposes in the world.
But in order to do this, we need to appreciate two essential aspects of human life which we all too often fail to fully appreciate. First, we need to appreciate the importance of living in community, like this parish for instance or my school, so that we can relate to each other safely and lovingly as human beings, and thus know each other really, with all our faults and our weaknesses. It is only when we live in isolation from other people that we can believe that we are somehow better than they are or indeed better than we actually are.
We need to live in community to understand the consequence of our sins by not being able to avoid the pain which we cause others with our words and our actions: vows broken, promises not kept, apologies neither given nor accepted, all our petty disloyalties and vanities. For it is only in this way that we can learn from our mistakes and come to accept in our hearts the challenging but liberating teachings of Christ.
And so secondly, we need to appreciate that our lives are a journey: my journey and your journey, each of us in different stages of moral growth and spiritual maturity, losing more and more of our selfish desires and our self-serving fears, growing with every fault acknowledged and every sin confessed, growing ever more powerful and more settled in the loving purposes of God.
This is why I like to take the funerals of my friends. I personally enjoy the opportunity to consider their lives and all that God was doing with their lives for me and for all who knew and loved them. I enjoy remembering them in the company of their family and friends, not as fake saints but as real souls with all their human faults and moral challenges. Yes, my friend could be too blunt, but she was usually right. My colleague could be kind of lazy and incompetent, but he was also quite wonderfully kind. And yes, my uncle could be too impatient and too stingy at times, but he was a lot of fun at a party.
Yes, we have need of God’s grace, but God’s grace finds its home in us. In preparing the chalice, the priest prays at the altar: “By this mystery of water and wine may we come to share in the divinity of Christ who humbled himself to share in our humanity.” As these three drops of water enter into this wine, may the Spirit of Christ enter into me and permeate my very being; may my humanity become inspired by His divinity, and may I change and grow in Him.
This Feast of All Souls calls us to pray for the dead, for those whom we knew and loved in this life and by whom we were known and loved in return. It is a feast in which we celebrate the journey of life in this world and look to life in the world to come. And so, we pray for our friends departed just as we pray for our selves, knowing that they left this life not perfect yet, but trusting in the mercy of God. For they were by God’s grace real gifts to us and are gifts to us still, calling us to consider by their journeys our own journeys, the sins we have yet to amend and the sacrifices we have yet to make, to recognize in our lives all the ways in which we still fail to love as Christ and not as the world commands us.
And so, we do well, I think, also to pray for ourselves, our own journeys and our own challenges, our own statements in this life. Am I yet that gift which God intends me to be? Or do I have more of myself to give and to offer?
For surely, as we pray, we can only be reminded of that great truth in life that I am not ok and you are not ok. So I need your forgiveness and patience, and you need mine. But God has made us this way to reveal Himself in our redemption, to reveal His nature and purpose of love in our lives, by our words and actions, despite all our efforts to stop Him.
He has made us his clay, not yet his finished vessel; his coal, not yet his diamond. To declare ourselves perfect or indeed any we love perfect, living or dead, is to deny the touch of His hand upon us, the breath of His Spirit within us, and His grace to use and change us.
Those we love are with God, and we are with God; let us pray this night that He will do His work in us.
+ In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen
© 2006 D. Stuart Dunnan
