All Saints Feast 31st October 2010

Sometimes I get exasperated in my pastoral encounters, especially when people seem over concerned with material things.

Don’t get me wrong, with the government squeeze many of us are feeling the pinch and we’ve a duty to be alongside the most vulnerable.

Sometimes though, I find among us an over concern for this world’s goods and their security.

I want to dare to say in those pastoral encounters what I can say quite fearlessly in the pulpit on All Saints’ Day.

Remember – the most meaningful thing in life is what conquers death.

Earthly life is a prologue. The book of life proper starts beyond the grave with Christianity’s Founder who is the life, the truth and the way.

Christians live knowing their homeland is in heaven. We come to church to develop a taste for that homeland through bread and wine that anticipates the heavenly banquet and through the word of God which promises the same.

Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. Happy are those who are called to his supper.

In the eucharist we come before Jesus. We’re happy to eat and drink of him now knowing we’ll be the happier to eat and drink with him in his kingdom.

Happy are those who are called to his supper. That phrase in the liturgy has a double meaning referring to both the eucharist and the celestial banquet. This Holy Communion service is, like the cinema trailer, the preview of a forthcoming attraction in the joy of all the saints.

If people in our village could see the way things really are they’d fight to get a place at this celebration! It’s our failure, my and my predecessors, your and your predecessors as worshippers failure, to believe and to communicate this that is robbing them of this privilege.

The most meaningful thing in life is what conquers death.

I go to the Chemists and see a rack of booklets on how to overcome various conditions - arthritis, indigestion, osteoporosis, stress, varicose veins and so on.

One question not addressed is how you deal with dying.

Perhaps you wouldn’t expect doctors to have much to say about how we deal with death. Maybe they see death as the ultimate defeat for health professionals.

Yet the whole of life leads up to death. It's something quite natural, in a sense. The end of man - but in which sense - 'end' as 'finish' or 'end' as 'fulfillment'?

Dying is just as much a daily medical condition as arthritis or indigestion. Yet how do people find a consultant who can advise them on how to die?

Where do people facing eternity go to for help?

Our Christian Faith is built upon the risen Christ. He is our Consultant.

Who else can advise and prepare, console and strengthen in the face of death than Jesus?

Jesus, who in dying bore the agony of death for us.

Jesus, who in rising burst open the gates of paradise!

Our Consultant writes these words for us in his manual - though you walk through the valley of the shadow of death, fear no evil. I am with you.

This church points up to a world beyond this world because it is the church of Jesus Christ

That community is one mystical Body of Christ where there is no division between the living and the dead but all are one in the death defying love of God.

Dead or alive we belong to the same family - so we pray for each other. On All Saints feast we recall our solidarity with the Christians who’ve gone before us especially those who’ve worshipped in this church over 40 generations.

These stones that have echoed their praises are holy, and dear is the ground where their feet have once trod. Yet here they confessed they were strangers and pilgrims, and still they were seeking the city of God.

We are one today also with our beloved dead - our families, friends, benefactors - those who have inspired us or enriched our lives, who now pray for us wrapped in the mantle of God’s love for all eternity.

We are one in worship with angels and archangels and all the company of heaven.

This worship no better described than by a person who attended the Divine Liturgy in the icon filled Cathedral of Kiev in the Ukraine:

‘There is always a crowd’, he said, ‘ a promiscuity of rich and poor, of well dressed and tattered, a kaleidoscope mingling of people and colours - people standing and praying, people kneeling, people prostrated... There is no organ music, but an unearthly and spontaneous outburst of praise from the choir and the clergy and the people worshipping together...
‘And from the back and from the sides - and from the pillars and from the columns, look the pale faces of antiquity, the faces of the dead who are alive looking over the shoulders of the alive who have not yet died...All praising God, enfolding in a vast choric communion the few who in the Church have met on the common impulse to acknowledge the wonder and the splendour of the mystery of God.

‘You lose the sense of Ego, the separated individual, you are aware only of being part of a great unity praising God. You cease to be man and woman and become THE CHURCH (the Bride of Christ)’

And that is what we are this morning – the church, the community of Jesus - stretching beyond these four walls into eternity - living with lives that gain meaning from the conquest of death which brings and should bring our humanity into its right mind.