Wednesday, 2 November 2011

All Souls' Day
The Rev’d Lloyd Prator
St. John’s in the Village
New York City

One of the most fundamental, basic questions about human existence is “what happens when we die?”. When we are a child and our pet whatever dies, we ask our parents, ‘what happened?’ Will we see Muffie again? Is Rover in heaven? What happened?

At a deeper, more profoundly human sense, the question recurs: What shall happen to me? Do I cease to exist? Some theologians, notably Anselm of Canterbury, suggest that the very notion that we have a longing for a life beyond this one means that such a life exists. It would be inconsistent with the very nature of God as love to have us long so deeply and perfectly for something which could never be ours.

It was this fundamental existential question which Paul sought to answer in the second reading today, from the first Letter to the Thessalonians. He pictures a cosmology which probably does not appeal to many of us, but here is: We have a hope, he says, and that hope lies in the death and resurrection of Jesus. God will bring with Jesus all who have fallen asleep.

And it happens like this: There will be a cry of command, the archangel’s call and then the trumpet of God. And, the dead will rise first, then those who are alive, and all of us will be caught up in the clouds. In this way we will always be with the Lord. Comfort each other with these words.

Paul’s implication is that there will be an extent of time, history will unfold for a while and then there will be this climactic moment. At that time, all of us, in our proper order, will be swept up into the presence of God.

Now you may have a certain gnawing sense that this is not the only cosmology you have heard in the New Testament. In the passion according to Luke, Jesus hangs on one of three crosses, and those on each side of him are the two thieves. One of the thieves is moved to confess faith in Jesus: “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.’ And Jesus replies: Today you will be with me in Paradise. Today, you will be with me in Paradise.

For Paul, a good bit of history will elapse until the faithful departed meet God along with Jesus in paradise. For Luke the evangelist, it will happen today. Today you will be with me in paradise.

So, which is it: Today, or at the call of the trumpet at the end of time?

Consider this possibility. When Paul wrote about that moment down the corridors of time, when the trumpet would call and the dead would be raised, he was describing what the church calls eschatology, the end of time.

Suppose that those early Christians got it wrong, and that the end of time was not its termination, but its purpose. Maybe what God was trying to get across was that the end of time was the moment we would see how things are meant to be when the purposes of God are fulfilled. Perhaps when we die, our own individual “end” places us in the presence of God—that very day—so that in those moments we see how the world and creation is meant to be. Perhaps for them, time stops, and they enter the realm of God where there is no longer any suffering and death.

In a sense, then, both are true statements: It is the end and purpose of God that all be brought to him in love and compassion. That will all happen for us one day. But at the very day it happens, time has come to an end, at least for those who die today

but it is also true that what we need at the moment of our final suffering is given to us immediately, and `the kind of God we believe in scoops us up in his strong arms and holds us when our strength is dissipated, our life flowing out or our bodies Paul is right in point out that the Christian teaching about death and everlasting life is a part of our belief about the end of time, the eschaton. But it is also part of our belief about the compassionate and powerful god who stops time in its course and gathers to his heart all who suffer.

To the conflation of those two powerful streams of faith and belief, we commit the souls of all who have died-- the famous and the ordinary, the ones we love and ones we respect, for at this moment the trumpet has sounded and this day they will be with the Father in Paradise.