In our church calendar, this past week could easily be labeled: the week of death. Besides Holy Week, no week in the church year is more death-loaded than this one. But, because we are a Resurrection people, death isn’t the end and a week of death focus is not morbid.
I’ll always remember the moment my father died. After 9 months of fight, he just couldn’t battle lung cancer anymore. We knew that it was The Day, for he had requested the morphine drip and the doctors said, once the morphine began he would fall into a coma and then slip away. Having never seen anyone in a coma before, I was shocked to discover that it’s not a passive state. Periodically he would moan, move around and, scariest of all, open his eyes… but behind those eyes, there was barely a hint of Dad….On the one hand, there he was. But, on the other hand, there he wasn’t.
Finally around 4 in the afternoon, he died. It was then that the creeping vacancy I’d noticed earlier was complete. Just moments after his death there was no semblance of “Dad” left. One moment I looked upon my father and the next, an empty shell—just an abandoned container of failing muscles and skin…Dad wasn’t there, he was GONE.
Dad’s soul had taken flight, his earthly fight complete. As we read in the Book of Revelation:
“He will wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there will no
longer be any death;
there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain;
the first things have passed away."
Dad’s first life, the temporal one was over, his second, life eternal continued… he was off to take his place with the saints.
I have shared these remembrances of Dad’s death with many of you before, and I’m sure I will again…for his death, the experience I had of it---has formed me and my theology of death, my theology of the saints, for the almost two decades since it occurred.
For at that moment I realized---not intellectually, not even religiously, but spiritually and temporally, in my soul and in my bones---I realized that who we are is far beyond what we see, or what we hear, or what we smell or what we touch. We are what’s inside—our soul—and that soul is encased in our bodies at birth and removed from our bodies at death. Our bodies are containers, they’re not us.
Ok, so this is a basic Christian belief and one you probably all thought I should have learned LONG ago—but knowing something and knowing something are vastly different.
On April 18, 1993 I learned that lesson.
A lesson which is at the crux of our theology of the saints.
Death is a fact of life-- it’s a universal experience. …and it fascinates, terrifies and befuddles most of us.
We spend a lot of time and energy trying to figure out just what the after-life is all about---it’s one of the reasons the book Heaven is Real is so popular---we want proof, we like proof--because even though we proclaim it, we don’t really know it—we can’t really know if Heaven is Real. We just have to believe it. That’s what faith is all about.
And that makes an awful lot of us uncomfortable.
This past week was our officially sponsored Church search for an understanding of life, death and the after-life—the Tridduum of All Saints—All Hallow’s Eve, All Saints Day and All Soul’s Day.
These three days give us three distinct glimpses into life eternal. Of life after death:
Halloween-- derived from an ancient Celtic observance of a time when the veil between this world and the next is thinned---lifted even---giving us a glimpse of the other side. This practice allowed the living to help the dead complete their journey from this life to the next—by protecting them from evil spirits so they could safely arrive into the embrace of the Holy.
All Saints Day--- a day to relish in the glory of the Saints, thanking them for what they’ve given us. It is so important to our faith we celebrate it twice—on the actual day, November 1 and on the first Sunday after Nov 1—today. I wear my gold, we pull out as many stops as we can—for we want the saints to know, we appreciate them, we love them, we rely on them.
The third and final day is All Souls—the Commemoration of all the Faithful Departed---a day focused on all who have died in the past year. A day we allow ourselves to remember those who have died. To miss them, to long for them.
The All Saints trifecta helps us to honor that Great Cloud of Witnesses, the great cloud of souls who have left us in one way, yet return to us in another.
Our uniquely Anglican theology says that this Great Cloud of Witnesses—the saints of God---is made up of all sorts and manner of people:
Saints of the Church Universal----Mary, Joseph, Peter, Paul
Saints of the Church specific---Elam Jewett, Darwin Martin, the Northrups, Ruth Noller, The Barry’s, John Mears, Fred Tripi
And Saints of our own families---my dad, my grandparents…
People who no longer physically walk among us, but who nonetheless inspire us, encourage us, berate us, and nudge us.
IS Heaven Real? Are the saints really surrounding us, right now?
Well let’s get real quiet. Listen….Listen intently.
Do you hear them? Can you feel them?…they’re right here…our parents, our grandparents, our sons and daughters, our friends and neighbors our patriarchs and matriarchs, the saints of the church universal, the saints of this parish specific, the saints of our towns, our families….
The saints of God, that Great Cloud of Souls are witnesses—witnesses to our lives, witnesses to our hopes, our dreams, our longings. Partners in our searching, helpers in our times of need. They are the Holy Spirit’s foot soldiers here on earth. Right now, we’re surrounded, surrounded by this great cloud of souls: Folks who long for us, miss us and pray for us. Just as we do them.
So Happy Death Week, Happy Eternal Life Week, Happy Day of All Saints--may we continue to be encouraged and sustained by that great cloud of souls---folks like you and me who have done and continue to do extraordinary things for us, Saints to Be. Amen.
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