All Saints and All Souls

A sermon by David McEvoy, Reader,  3 November 2019

I am sure Canon Tom Clammer, Precentor of Salisbury Cathedral is a very kind and holy man. However he started his sermon on All Souls Day last year by saying that there is one thing people do that make him want to punch them in the face. It is when he has experienced a tragedy or a bereavement and someone out of the kindest motives says ‘I know how you feel’. ‘No, they don’t know how I feel’ he said ‘How could they?’ He also added that he resisted the temptation to punch them, an act which would not befit a senior Cathedral cleric.

We all come to this service from different places. Some of us have lost loved ones recently. Some many years ago. Spouses and life partners; parents, brothers and sisters; friends and colleagues. Some were brothers and sisters in Christ; others weren’t able to profess a faith.  

Some of us will come with a grief that is still raw. We will be struggling with the loss of a loved one and struggling to find a way to live without them.

Some of us will come with grief that has changed over time, so that we may have found a way to live with the loss, holding sorrow together with love.

Some of us will come with a grief aggravated by regrets and tensions that were not resolved. Words said or not said. Things done or not done.

We each of us come today with our own, unique form of grief. As the book of Lamentations puts it: ‘Is it nothing to you, all who pass by? Look and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow?’  There is no sorrow quite like my sorrow. No sorrow quite like your sorrow.

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But although we are alone in our grief, we are united in the fact of our grief. We may pray privately and silently in our hearts for our loved ones, but today we come together to name them and commend them to God.  So although grief may separate us, today it also unites us. When we name our loved ones, we stand alongside each other in our own grief and we support each other and hold each other in love.

And our grief also unites us with Christ. We can be confident that when we weep, Christ too weeps in our tears. The man who wept when his friend Lazarus died, the man who experienced the despair of pain and abandonment, weeps with us and shares in our grief.

And when we name our departed loved ones we can also be united in hope. The hope that comes from knowing that the love of God is stronger than death. The love of God for us in Jesus was strong, strong enough to transform Jesus’ death on the cross into new life. And this love promises the same new life for us all. The love of God for us is stronger than death itself.  As St Paul wrote to the Romans, ‘For I am convinced that neither death nor life … nor anything else in creation,  will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

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God makes everyone in God’s own image:

• the heroes of the faith, those saints whose names the Church honours;
• the humble unsung saints unknown or long forgotten;
• the everyday ordinary saints we knew who have touched our lives with their example of their love and faith;
• and those who have shown us kindness, love and self-sacrifice but without defining it as faith.

All were made in God’s own image. And what God made, God loves; and what God loves, God will not allow to be lost.

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After we have affirmed our faith in the Creed and heard the choir sing the Anthem, Carole, Peter and I will read the names of departed loved ones. If you haven’t been able to write a name on the list, please name the person silently.

Let us love them and pray for them in death as we loved them and prayed for them in life, holding them up to God and commending them to God’s keeping.  And let us pray for each other, supporting each other in our sorrow and our hope.