PREACHED AT ST LEONARD’S CHAPEL, NEWLAND
By the Rev’d Christopher Sterry
Solemn Requiem Mass of All Souls – 2 November
2018 18:00
Hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured
into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.
I cannot tell you how many times I have heard that
awful poem, “Do not stand at my grave and weep” by Mary Elizabeth Frye. It is
often read at the committal, standing next to an open grave. It ends with the
words “Do not stand at my grave and cry /I am not there. I did not die.” I
always have to bite my lip to prevent myself from shouting “Yes, you did!”
These days people fall asleep, they pass; babies sprout their angel wings and a
new star shines in the sky. People are sent to their rest, their coffins stuffed
with all sorts of goods to enjoy in the afterlife, which increasingly, in
popular culture resembles a blend of Valhalla and a posh Nursing Home.
For our culture, as shown by that poem, and its
partner. Henry Scott Holland’s ”Death is nothing at all”, Death is something to
be swept under the carpet. All Souls, which we celebrate tonight in black,
reminds us of our mortality—something which our present age is reluctant to
confront.
It is three days until Guy Fawkes Night, Plot Night,
Bonfire Night, the Catesby Conspiracy. While many of the fireworks may remind
us of the different ways in which each Christian is called to shine in the
darkness, we also have to remember those that won’t light properly and those
which are frankly a great disappointment, as well as the ones which hurt and
destroy.
When I was a child in West Yorkshire, when every
household had a bonfire on the night itself, November 6th was always smoggy,
thick with the smell of spent gunpowder. The glorious flame of the fire and the
glitter of the sparklers and fireworks was replaced by cold, miserable ashes
and dead rocket sticks and cardboard tubes.
On Ash Wednesday the ashes remind us of what we are
without the glory of God. All Souls, after celebrating the glorious company of
heaven the night before, brings us up against the reality of death.
Genesis says of the death of Abraham
Abraham
breathed his last and died in a good old age, an old man and full of years...
It is always
satisfying to preside at the funeral of someone who has come peacefully to the
end of a good life and dies ‘old and full of years’. There is a sense of
completeness. But I have also presided at funerals of babies and small
children, of young men killed in cars or motorbikes, of people in their prime
cut down by cancer, of suicides, and murder victims, not to mention people
about whom it is hard to find anything positive to say. All my fellow priests
have done the same. Death is never neat and tidy, even when it is inevitable,
it is never expected. As we mourn we cry, “Why her? Why now? Why in this way?
Why when he has still so much to give? Why when there were so many loose ends?
Why when there is still so much to forgive?”
There
is nothing we can do, now, to put things right. And that is not a situation
with which 21st century man is happy.
Death
brings us face to face with helplessness. And helplessness, if we stay with it
and do not run away, leads us to the Cross.
At
the foot of the Cross there is grief, helplessness, uncompleted tasks and
shattered dreams. Yet it was there that Jesus cried—in the finest of all the
word plays in John’s Gospel—τετέλεσται—at the same time a cry of anguish, ‘It is finished’,
and a cry of triumph, ‘It is completed’.
At
the foot of the Cross, in human terms the supreme place of defeat, we wait in
hope. And hope, as St Paul says in that reading from Romans, does not
disappoint us.
Fr
Ian says, most Fridays at the beginning of Mass, “We worship tonight at the
foot of the Cross.” Each time we celebrate the Eucharist we bring to the Cross
our broken and incomplete selves, in penitence and hope, to be healed and
restored to the fellowship of God. We bring our intercessions for the Church
and the world, in hope that these intractable problems with which we wrestle in
our prayers, will be made whole in the kingdom of God.
And
tonight, most particularly, we bring with us our dead. We bring the recent ones
whose memory is sharp and painful, but also all those countless generations
which stand behind us and make us who we are today. We bring those who have
shone like lights, and we bring those who have been a disappointment.
We
bring them in prayer to the foot of the Cross, in hope—real hope—that he who
raised Christ Jesus from the dead will give them rest in peace, and bring them
to rise in glory.
We
kneel at the front of the Cross confronted by the awful power of death and
sin—revealed in our own lives, in the life of the world, and in the dead. And
we kneel there in hope—knowing that for us, for the world, for those we
have loved, Jesus is Resurrection and he is Life—knowing that
Hope does not
disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the
Holy Spirit that has been given to us.
St
Paul said in 2 Corinthians,
Wherever we go we carry death with us in
our body, the death that Jesus died, that in this body also life may reveal
itself, the life that Jesus lives
When the Cross is real, when Death is real, so is the
risen life of Christ made real in us, and in those for whom we hope.
