Still Here After All These Years
Sermon by the Rev. Dr. Paul J. Carling
Wisdom 3: 1-9; John 14: 1-6
“In the time of their visitation they will shine forth, and will run like sparks through the stubble… Those who trust in him will understand truth, and the faithful will abide with him in love, because grace and mercy are upon his holy ones…”
What I love about the Episcopal Church is that we don’t tell each other what to believe. For sure, we’ve always been willing, as a church, to propose particular ways of thinking about what are essentially mysteries: the nature of God, grace, what happens in sacraments, life and death – we do have a catechism at the end of our Prayer Book, after all – but the beauty of our Anglican way is we don’t insist that any of us, as individuals, subscribe to any particular formulation about what is essentially unknowable.
Here’s one wonderful such formulation: as the Book of Common Prayer reminds us, every funeral or memorial service in the Episcopal Church is (and I quote) “an Easter liturgy. It finds all its meaning in the resurrection. Because Jesus was raised from the dead, we, too, shall be raised. The liturgy, therefore, is characterized by joy, in the certainty that “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, not anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
What that means is that for Episcopalians, funerals are a celebration of a life, even when it’s cut short far too early. They’re a statement of deep and abiding faith that the person we love has gone home to God. “In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places… I go to prepare a place for you.”
But even this image is difficult for many Christians. It implies that the person we loved is irrevocably gone to another place – some ethereal heaven in the sky, and that the only contact we can hope for is when we too pass through the pearly gates for the ultimate family reunion.
To be sure, as human beings, we tend to move in and out of each other’s lives. Our own sensitive psyches, our fears of intimacy, the dislocations of geography and focus that work and family responsibilities bring – all of these conspire against the kind of stability and continuous deepening we long for with each other. Our lives change, we start a new job or a new family; we move away; something is said or done that hurts – and we may go for years before we get over it. It’s hard to stay connected.
Take my dad, for example. We had more than our normal relationship strains during adolescence. And while I was still a teenager, in the middle of one of our deepest periods of estrangement, he died. What a tremendous sense of loss I felt, not so much for his presence, but much more the loss of opportunity – the opportunity to set things right, to rebuild our connection on a more enduring foundation.
Today we gather to remember those we have loved, and feel like we’ve lost. “Re-member” – from the Latin roots to knit together, to join again that which was broken or torn apart.
Of course, in the immediate aftermath of losing someone we love, the hardest thing to imagine is putting our life back together again; in fact it’s impossible. Life never can return to what it was. That’s why, often, one of our greatest fears is that we’ll forget those who have died; maybe forget the way they looked, or the way it felt to be around them; that we’ll fail to re-member them. Partly this is a fact of our biology; it’s the way we’re wired to move through grief – the way our bodies and our minds respond to loss is to dim our memories for a time.
But we don’t have to stay in that place. In the knowledge that we are joined inextricably by love, we can choose to “re-member,” to make those who have died an active part of our lives. Listen again to the words from our reading from Wisdom: “In the time of their visitation they will shine forth, and will run like sparks through the stubble… Those who trust in him will understand truth, and the faithful will abide with him in love, because grace and mercy are upon his holy ones…”
That doesn’t sound to me like some distant relationship with heavenly beings we won’t connect with until we join them in death, does it? No, my own experience has been exactly the opposite: having cast off all of the limitations that those of us still bound by our earthly bodies suffer with; the souls of those we love, while they are clearly with God, are just as clearly with us, and available to us, ready to be “re-membered,” to be knit together again with our souls.
As John’s gospel reminds us, God loses nothing that God has given. One grace that I’m so grateful for in my own life, for example, is how, over time, God transformed my grief over my father’s death into an invitation to take up the reconciliation and healing of that relationship that neither of us seemed capable of during this life. It’s been a long journey, but I’m happy to report that my dad and I are closer today than we ever were when we lived in the same house. I’ve discovered in him a kind of wisdom and an abundance of love that simply seemed unavailable here on earth; and I’ve developed such an openness and a hunger for that wisdom and love, that they’ve become one of my greatest resources for living.
Just as nothing can separate us from the love of God, nothing can separate us from the souls of those we love – if we simply choose to stay connected. Without bodily or temporal limitations, and completely infused with the love of God, the loved ones we’ve lost are waiting at every turn in our lives to inspire us, to cheer us on, to love us without limit. And all we are asked to do is to “re-member.”
So let’s rest a moment in this lovely garden, and thank God for the gift we’ve been given, the gift of walking this journey with our loved ones during their time on this planet… and for the even greater gift of their active presence in our lives, this day, and every day. Amen.
