A LITTLE MORE....

Sunday 4 November, 6pm

ALL SOULS MEMORIAL SERVICE

www.ssaviours.org

We’ve come here today to remember those we love who have died; to pray for them (as we prayed for them at their funeral services) and also to pray for ourselves – for the healing and wholeness which God brings to all of creation.

I’d like to focus our thoughts briefly tonight on the act of remembering.  Memory is a hugely important part of being human – its one of the things that places us above the other creatures in the way we are able to recollect and contemplate.  We can train dogs, rats, squirrels (you name it) to do all sorts of things, but no matter how amazed we may be at the achievements of our animal friends, it never equals our human ability to remember. So as we gather today to remember those who have died, we are doing something which is profoundly human.  And in so doing we make ourselves more human.

Remembering is important in the Church as well.  Next Sunday is Remembrance Sunday and of course this year we mark the 100^th anniversary of the end of the First World War.  But the theme of remembering the departed runs through the whole month of November.  Last Thursday was All Saints Day, when the Church honours those Christian disciples of ages past who have come closest to fulfilling God’s call on their lives (although to be honest a good number of them just seem to be plain bonkers!)  Then Friday was All Souls Day – the commemoration which this evening’s service echoes – when prayers are offered for all those who have died.  There’s a danger that in keeping both feasts back to back we seem to set up a kind of apartheid in the afterlife; the winners followed by the runners up, making All Saints a bit like ‘speedy boarding’.  But the intention is actually to help us to see ourselves – and those we have lost – in a much bigger picture. Remembering is profoundly human, and humanising – and it is also at the heart of Christian worship.

Whether you’re in the smallest of parish churches or the grandest of cathedrals – worship is a remembrance of what God has done and is doing in the lives of his people, and responding to that love with gratitude and praise.  But especially, and above all else, we remember with bread and wine, the broken and risen body of Jesus.  We re-member Jesus.  And to re-member him is to realise, to make real, his presence with us.

So as well as being a natural, human instinct, remembering has a deeply spiritual quality – again making a distinction between us and other creatures.  To remember is to reconnect – and that is possible because in Jesus death itself is conquered.  Through his death and resurrection, eternity is blown wide open.

Those who we will remember by name today are all different and unique.  Those whose names are read aloud in a few moments will have died in the last year, or in the last few years – or even 10, 20 years ago or more. However long ago doesn’t matter, because in the simple act of remembering we are able to reconnect with those whose lives have shaped our own.  With those whose love and example and human-ness has been God’s gift to us in years past.

There’s a favourite prayer of mine, attributed to William Penn, the early quaker and founding father of Pennsylvania that tries to articulate that same sense of connection:

We give them back to You, O Lord

who first gave them to us;

yet as You did not lose them in the giving, 

so we do not lose them by their return…..

For what is yours is ours also,

if we belong to You.

Love is undying, and life is unending 

and the boundary of this mortal life is but a horizon, 

and the horizon is nothing save the limit of our sight.

Lift us up, strong Son of God, that we may see further.

Cleanse our eyes that we may see more clearly….

And while You prepare the place for us,

prepare us also for that happy place 

that we may be with You, and with those we love forevermore.

 Of course our remembering goes on day by day – and even when its not prominent in our minds its whirring away in the background – but our remembering today is shaped by faith and hope - the confidence that death is a journey on which we travel in the company of Christ himself (symbolised by the large Easter candle at the front)  In a short while, before the names are read, you will be invited to come forward and light a candle.  That simple act can symbolise many, many things, but in particular today it represents our remembering in the light and hope of Christ.

Please don’t wait to be ushered.  Come forward down the central aisle, collect a candle and once Fr Andrew or I have lit is, step onto the platform and place is on the altar.  Then please (to avoid a collision) step off the side of the platform and return to your seat via the side aisles.

And s you leave your candle behind, be aware of what you take away:

a little more light,

a little more love

a little more of God’s healing grace.

Amen.