Readings: Psalm 130 & 1 Corinthians 15:20-22 &51-58
“Memory, my dear Cecily, is the diary we all carry about with us”. So, says Miss Prism in Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest”. And we know what she means, don’t we? We are who we are, to a greater or lesser extent, because of the memories that we carry about with us - especially the memories of those we have loved, those whose lives have touched us in some way.
The word “remember” has its root in the old word for body parts - members. To “re-member” someone is therefore, essentially, to put that someone back together in our mind.
And that, I hope, that is what this service will help to accomplish for many of us here today.But the effect that this act of remembrance will have on each of us will be different. Some of us will remember our loved ones with affection and pleasure, quietly celebrating their effect on our lives, thanking God for all they meant to us. They will be, to some extent, a fulfilment of the old adage that “God gave us memories so that we can have roses in winter”. Some of us will be content to rest in the certain, Christian, hope that God, the Lord of the living and the dead, offers eternal life through Jesus Christ.
But for some of us, the act of re-membering will bring unexpected emotions to the surface. Natural, completely understandable, but nonetheless difficult emotions. Feelings, perhaps of anger towards a God who apparently took away our loved one before what we thought was their time. Perhaps there might be unresolved grief which bubbles to the surface. Perhaps there are old wounds relating to our loved one - wounds which have not yet healed. Perhaps we worry about what comes next? What about life after death?
What might our response to such feelings be? - the warm and appreciative ones, as well as the more complex, difficult ones?
Psalm 130, which we heard just now, starts with words that many of us may recognise as our own:
“Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord; O Lord hear my voice. Let your ears be attentive to my cry for mercy”.
As many of you will be well aware, the Bible is a collection of writings assembled over many generations - it contains stories, metaphors, history, myth, song and poetry...all of which combine to offer us, if we will but grapple with it, a clear understanding of the God that Christians serve.
Ours is a God who listens to, and understands, our most heartfelt cries - the cries which, as Psalm 130 says, come from the depths of our innermost being - and from the depths of depressions and sadness too. Ours is a God who wants to be with us through all that life throws our way - so much so that he came, as a man, to live among us. Through that time he spent on earth, he experienced all that we experience. Not because he somehow had to do that in order to understand us...but rather that he wanted us to know that he understands...and to be able to trust him completely.
The shortest verse in the Bible, and perhaps one of the most eloquent, is the two words “Jesus wept” - recorded of an event in which Jesus himself was bereaved at the death of his friend, Lazarus. But as that story, and the story of his own resurrection powerfully demonstrated, Jesus had within him the power of God - the power to transform death into life...the power to raise first Lazarus, and then himself, from death itself.
The Christian God is the God who transforms death into life. “Listen”, says the Apostle Paul in the second of our readings, “Listen, I will tell you a mystery: we will not all sleep, but we will all be changed - in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye”. And so, he goes on, exclaiming “Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?”
How are we to respond to that exclamation? Especially, perhaps, when we feel bereft - depressed - lost - because of the death of our own loved one? We don’t feel much like making that kind of exclamation ourselves do we?
Well, I want to suggest to you, that’s where the Christian hope, offered to us in the pages of the Bible, really comes into play. The message of the Bible is absolutely clear...it couldn’t be more clear. We all have a clear choice...to live alone with our grief, mourning the end of life with no hope...OR...we can hold on to the promise of eternal life through Jesus Christ offered to us in the Bible, written by people who have experienced God for themselves, rejoicing in the plain truth that this life is just the starting point. Eternal life waits for us, through Jesus Christ... if we will but respond to his amazingly graceful, loving, call.
That’s what the Christians who gather here each Sunday are doing. Some of our practices may seem a little odd, some of our prayers and songs - a little old fashioned. None of us is perfect, and every one of us is grappling with life, death, memories, experiences. But each of us is expressing our ‘yes’ to the call of Christ...our ‘yes’ to his offer of life. When we gather around the Lord’s table we “re-member” the historical event of the Cross, and the resurrection to new life of our God.
And we say, with our lives and by our actions - “Where, O death, is thy victory? Where, O death is thy sting?”
So, today, we re-member our loved ones. We thank our loving heavenly Father for all that they meant to us, all the ways that their own life and love affected us. But we are also open to the call of God that we should, in the Apostle Paul’s final words “give ourselves fully to the work of the Lord”. We live as people who re-member those who have gone before, but also as people who look forward to the eternal life which is ours to share with them in Christ.
Amen
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