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Remembrance Sunday
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A Sermon by
Fr. Mead
✛
Why Pray for the Dead?
In the Name of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost. Amen.
Today’s beautiful liturgy is a Requiem, the celebration of the Holy Eucharist for the souls of the departed, more particularly, the faithful departed; namely all those who, however imperfectly, died with hope in God and tried to live according to the light God gave them. They were sinners like all of us; they fell short of perfection. Yet at the heart of the Requiem is the consecration and re-presentation of the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ, who died and rose from the dead to release God’s forgiveness and mercy in the fullest possible way and thereby to open the kingdom of heaven to all who by God’s grace desire it. Today’s liturgy acknowledges the reality of death while at the same time it conveys in a special way the grandeur of the love of God. The composer of today’s incomparable Requiem music, Gabriel Faure, captures both these dimensions, our mortality and God’s grace.
Why do we pray for the dead? To summarize all the prayers for the dead in the Book of Common Prayer: We pray for the dead because we hold them in our love and memory and experience their ongoing influence in many ways, and because we want God to perfect them in the grace that he gave them in this earthly life; the same thing we want for ourselves. Both of these reasons to pray for the dead are clarified by the life of the risen Lord Jesus. It is not just that the spirits of the departed live on or that there is such a thing as the immortal soul, truths that these are. It is that the communion of saints is one of the many glories of our experience of the living Christ and of his mystical Body. This Requiem dramatizes in liturgy and music a reality that is ours every day and which springs directly from the Gospel, the Good News of Jesus Christ. If you attend to today’s lessons and texts closely, you will see that there is hardly a “more Christian service” to be had.
There is something sobering and life-giving about meditating about the departed. On the day after the first anniversary of 9/11, an editorial in the New York Times contained these striking words. “A year is, in many cultures, the traditional time of mourning. The dead slip into a new relationship with the living. Sometimes they can be re-imagined whole, not as people who were suddenly taken away but as people who lived well the time they were given.” I have kept those words in my Prayer Book, because they suggest the Resurrection of the Body and the Life Everlasting. They reach toward what Jesus Christ has in fact bestowed upon us and what we can receive by faith.
There are things to desire in and on the other side of death. “My desire,” said the Apostle Paul, “is to depart and be with Christ.” “My earthly desire has been crucified,” wrote an early church bishop who was soon martyred, “there is living water in me, water that murmurs and says within me: Come to the Father.” St. Teresa of Avila laid it on the line in her usual fashion: “I want to see God and, in order to see him, I must die.” Finally, as she lay dying painfully of wasting consumption, St. Therese of Lisieux, known as the Little Flower, comforted her sisters, “I am not dying; I am entering life.” In death we put off the burden of the flesh. We enter into rest. Still ahead of this intermediate state is our “re-clothing” in the body of Christ’s Resurrection, when, “in a moment, in the twinkling of eye, at the last trump, the dead shall be raised incorruptible.”
Death is not only something for the Christian to look forward to; death’s certainty is also a wake-up call for the Christian to live! Thomas a Kempis warned in his Imitation of Christ: “Every action of yours, every thought, should be those of one who expects to die before the day is out. Death would have no great terrors for you if you had a quiet conscience… Then why not keep clear of sin instead of running away from death? If you aren’t fit to face death today, it’s very unlikely you will be tomorrow.” Finally, St. Francis of Assisi, in his Canticle of the Sun wrote, “Praised are you, Lord, for our sister bodily Death, from whom no living man can escape… Blessed are they who will be found in your most holy will, for the second death will not harm them.” So in a Requiem we consider the peaceful rest of the faithful departed, and we are alerted to put away harmful distractions and get on with the real business of living.
The Requiem lays claim to the overwhelming mercy of Christ and asks God to use his grace to purge and turn away all our sin, all the way through the intermediate state beyond death and into the Resurrection and manifestation of our Lord. Today let us pray for the departed, take comfort in the Good News of God in Christ, and watch and pray and live life to the full. Time is short; eternity is long.
In the Name of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost. Amen.
