Sermon Archive

The Day of Resurrection

Fr. Mead | Solemn Requiem
Sunday, November 11, 2012 @ 11:00 am
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Remembrance Sunday
Veterans’ Day

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Solemn Requiem
11:00 am
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Scripture citation(s): Wisdom 3:1-9; I Thessalonians 4:13-18; John 5:24-27

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In the Name of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost.

Why do we pray for the dead? That is a question in An Outline of the Faith, or The Catechism, of the Episcopal Church’s Book of Common Prayer, 1979. It is part of the last section of the Catechism, entitled “The Christian Hope.”[1] And we get a straight answer both humane and biblical: “We pray for them, because we still hold them in our love, and because we trust that in God’s presence those who have chosen to serve him will grow in his love, until they see him as he is.”

All right then, if the souls of those who have chosen to serve God are safe and even growing in his love until they see him as do the pure in heart, what about their bodies which have been dissolved to dust? Is God’s heaven a place of spiritual disembodiment? No, all is an intermediate state until the end, when those who rest in Christ will take their part in the great getting-up Day of Resurrection. Then, in the words of John Donne, putting today’s Epistle to poetry: “At the round world’s imagined corners blow your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise from death, you numberless infinities of souls and to your scattered bodies go…”[2]

That trumpet will sound on the Day of Resurrection when Christ the Lord descends from heaven in glory to judge the living and the dead – the day whose date no one knows, and for which we can only be prepared by realizing that time is short while eternity is long, and that repentance is in order every moment of our lives.

What does this Resurrection mean? It means that God will raise us from death in the fullness of our being, body and soul, just as he raised Jesus Christ on Easter morning; and it means that we will attain the perfect bliss of a new existence in which we live with Christ in the communion of the saints: reunions and introductions everlasting.

When my father-in-law was very near death, he slept most of the time. One day, while I was sitting across the room, he suddenly came to and asked me, as clear as a bell, “Will we meet foes in heaven?” He had always been an unusually thoughtful person. I wondered, does he mean enemies in the war he fought in as a young man, personal adversaries, what? And then I said, yes Sam, I believe so. But it’s ok, because it’s Christ’s heaven and he will be in charge. He looked, considered, nodded, and went back to sleep. And indeed the communion of saints is the whole family of God, the living and the dead, those we love and those we hurt, bound together by Christ, reconciled by his atoning death, now members of the mystical Body of God’s Son, the Body of Jesus Christ.

What then is everlasting life? Everlasting life is everlasting, because it consists of a perfect relationship with God. Since the fall of humanity into sin, our relationship with God has been imperfect at best, disrupted by sin and marked by the consequence of death. But Jesus’ relationship with God his Father is entirely unmarred by sin, perfect, so that he who has truly seen Jesus, perceiving his Personal Identity, has seen the Father himself.

How do we go from our broken relationship into that filial bond of the Son? We go there by repenting, that is, turning to Christ and trusting in him, following and obeying him, and exchanging our sin for his life and power. The exchange has already been given to us in the Sacrament of Baptism; it is renewed, as it is today, in Holy Communion. It is ours for the receiving, if only we will.

Look for a moment at this crucifix to my left, the 9/11 memorial. This is how the Son gives his relationship with the Father over to us. Jesus the Son took our place, once for all. He, who knew no sin, was made sin for us, so that in him we sinners might become the righteousness of God. He not only came down from heaven; he went all the way down to death, dying our death and descending into hell to reach us. We can say this only because on the third day God raised him from the dead. And this is why praying for the dead, and most especially a Requiem Eucharist, is an act of the spirit based on Easter.

In the Name of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost. Amen.
[1] The Book of Common Prayer, 1979, pp. 861-862. This sermon follows the rest of “The Christian Hope” in the Prayer Book Catechism.

[2] John Donne, Holy Sonnets, VII.