All Souls Day 2014

All Souls Day is about names written on hearts.

Each year the Church encourages us to name aloud those who remain in our hearts but have passed beyond this world.

So in a minute or two we’ll read the list of our dear dead naming them aloud before God.

This year thanks to J Gumbrill and Freeman Brothers who employ Kevin Scott of Chapel Lane our war memorial has been renovated free of charge and we’re to bless that renovation at the end of this service.

The 33 names of those who died in World War One whose centenary we’re now marking shine out afresh on our village war memorial.

They are in black set on grey granite.

That blackness, like the blackness of the vestments on this day of the departed, reflects the sadness of lives sometimes wrenched from the earth and the many broken hearts our loved ones passed from this world have left behind.

In the first passage of scripture chosen for this memorial eucharist St Paul speaks tenderly of people on his heart, the absent friends he has in the Church he founded in Corinth.

Surely we do not need, as some do, letters of recommendation to you or from you, do we? He writes. You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts, to be known and read by all; and you show that you are a letter of Christ, prepared by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.

This afternoon we too have tablets of stone in mind, the graves of loved ones and the village memorial stone. We come also with names written on tablets of human hearts. Surely our dear dead live on in our hearts, and those of the war dead live on in the hearts of our community for which they laid down their lives.

Paul goes on to speak of the confidence we should place in God. Such is the confidence that we have through Christ towards God. Not that we are competent of ourselves to claim anything as coming from us; our competence is from God, who has made us competent to be ministers of a new covenant, not of letter but of spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.

Christianity isn’t having all the answers. It’s having the humility to admit you don’t have answers over things like death but you do have confidence in One who does. That lends you a solid competence.

A Christian is a far sighted one. Someone adventurous. One whose confidence in the victory of Jesus over death spurs them on. One who presses competently through the false boundaries of unbelief, sin, apathy, fear, sickness and, last of all, death, towards the gift of God in Jesus Christ.

To be a Christian is to be opposed to nostalgia in the sense of wanting to stop the flow of time and change. Christian faith is a forward journey with an eternal perspective that welcomes the challenges and surprises of life with Spirit given creativity since Jesus Christ is ever new.

If you live your life not content with a boring sameness but with what is other than, or apart from, yourself, this fascination draws you forward day by day into the possibilities of God which exceed your imagining.

If you centre in love on what is other than yourself you get prepared to face what is the ultimate strange ‘other’ – I mean death. We come to see death as nothing more than the frame of our earthly life.

A frame is the picture’s friend. It shows it off. Without the defining of our life’s duration in time the span of our life would stretch into an infinite void. Without being born and dying we would be ageless beings. No one would be older or younger than anyone or anyone’s parent or child – we would be no one at all!

Who I am in my inner self is what matters ultimately. This is a product not just of heredity and environment but of my own free choices - to love or not to love. By growing love in my life I make of myself, with the Lord’s help, a being stronger than death.

Paul reminds us, returning to the passage, and his words reach beyond the first century Corinthians to twenty first century Sussex, that something has indeed happened to change the way we see death, and its something linked to the coming, the teaching, the suffering, the death and the rising of Jesus now ever present by his Spirit

Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.  

That freedom came first from the stone rolled away from Christ’s tomb and it flows down the centuries and across the continents into hearts that welcome the risen Lord Jesus.

It is the name of Jesus that makes sense of all other names from history including those held in our hearts today we will shortly be commending. Lifting them to the Lord at All Souls Day’s memorial eucharist will be transformative for them and for us.

As the large Easter Candle brought into the sanctuary for the day of the departed reminds us, there is one human alone who is immortal and his invitation stands as much before us as it does before our dear dead.

It is the invitation to move nearer to him.

As our passage concludes And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.

As part of our prayer today we have opportunity to light candles for our departed loved ones from the Easter Candle and place them in the sand tray. As we do so we are saying Jesus from your risen glory give your light to my loved one who has passed into death’s dark vale.

Give them eternal rest, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them.

The Lord who welcomes them welcomes us this afternoon, as we heard in the brief yet eloquent invitation he gives us in our Gospel reading which I make my last word to you:

Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.  Matthew 11:28-30