All Souls Eve Memorial Mass 2009 – Homily
“Hope does not disappoint us.”
Earlier this year I addressed the assembly at Woodford House up the road, and I asked the girls what they thought the most valuable commodity in the world is. I got a variety of answers, water, clean air, being a school someone had to say education, and some girls said love, and to some extent they were all right. All those things are valuable and to some extent all of them are vulnerable and easily lost, but I didn’t ask for a list of valuable commodities, I asked what was the most valuable commodity, and I am convinced that above all others, at the top of the list, is hope.
Without water, we are thirsty. Without clean air, we are sick. Without education, we are ignorant. Without love, we are lonely. But without hope, we are hopeless.
Tonight is officially the eve of All Soul’s Day, and today, during All Saints, we have celebrated the saints and martyrs of old; those who have championed our faith and inspired Christians onward. Now, this evening, we prepare to remember our dead, those we love but see no longer, some well known and some recalled by us alone, but all a part of who we are and who we will be.
Death is inevitable, that remains a constant fact, just as grief is inevitable when we lose someone we have loved and cared for. As Dame Cecily Saunders, the founder of the hospice movement, once wrote, “We are in a world in which love and loss seem to go together, and perhaps they have to go together.”
I know that if Sande were here she would undoubtedly make some comment about what she would call the ‘pious platitudes’ that often get spouted at times of grief – phrases like ‘she’s in a better place’, or ‘it’s all part of God’s great plan’ – things we say because, quite frankly, we don’t know what else to say, and while I would personally suggest a somewhat different set of words, at the end of the day what we want to offer, what people really need us to offer, is hope.
I often think that funerals happen too soon. At a time when we are often still reeling from the shock or overwhelmed by grief, the words of hope in the prayers and readings at a funeral simply wash over us unnoticed. We aren’t capable of taking them in, yet we so need to hear what they have to offer.
The readings we’ve heard this evening are anything but pious platitudes. These are words of hope, but this is hope wrapped in a blanket of pragmatic realism. The poet who pours his heart out in Lamentations begins with an honest admission that “my heart is bereft of peace; I have forgotten what happiness is.” Yet in the midst of grief and sadness come the recollected words of the psalmist ‘the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases’ – “this I call to mind,” the poet says, “and therefore I have hope.”
In Romans Paul writes to those facing trials and troubles and promises that ‘hope does not disappoint us’. Our reading actually starts half way through the sentence so we miss the source of this promised hope, which is in fact the character that comes from standing firm in the knowledge that God walks with us throughout.
Finally, in John, Jesus lays out the hope which is himself. In these words we find the promise of the Gospel – the kingdom of God has come near, or, as we’re reminded in our communion prayer often, God is with us, here we find new life. Here we find hope.
Hope – true hope – does not disappoint us. Hope gives us courage and strength to face up to what is real and move forward to what will be. Hope can be found in many places – in the love and support of family and friends, and in the sometimes pious and simplistic things they say because there’s nothing else to be said. Hope can be found in the memories that we cherish and the stories that we tell. And true hope, I believe, can be found in the treasured words of our faith, passed down through century after century by those saints who have gone before us, and offered to us daily anew, to do with as we will, and to remind us once again that ‘Blessed truly is the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whose great mercy we have been born anew into a living hope.’ Thanks be to God.