Memorial 2007
For many you gathering who have gathered here tonight the year has been a time of loss, a time of sadness and grief. Someone close to you, a member of the family, a wife, husband, father, mother, a son or a daughter or a close friend has passed to his or her rest.
We have gathered here on this Sunday after Easter to give thanks before God for their lives, to remember them. Each candle alight on the cross at the front of church representing a life remembered, a life, a person given thanks for, a person held before God.
There are moments in our times of loss when well-meaning folks, wanting to give a word of comfort but not always sure quite what to say, will come out with words such as these “with time you will come to terms with your loss”.
I am not sure that is ever true for most of us, it is rather that we learn to live with the new reality in which we find ourselves. No amount of time can replace or hope to replace the one that is lost especially if we have been close to them or they have played a key role in shaping the people we are.
So often when somebody passes to their rest, regardless of the circumstances, it is much more than a person, a character that is lost, be they quiet and unassuming or loud and brash. It may well be that so many other links that are broken too. The person may have been the focal point of family life, the figurehead; they may too have been the last of a generation and with their passing a great wealth of knowledge, a link back into history, like the curtain coming down on an earror.
I once knew a lady, well into her nineties, who had lived in the same place all her life. One the joys of last years of life was going back from time to time into her old junior school and telling the children what it was like sitting where they were sitting some eighty or so years before. With her passing that great resource and link, that living history went too and could never be replaced.
Many of you may be able to relate this sort of thing from your own experience of loss over the last months or years. Loss is so much more than a person simply not being there.
As we give thanks tonight for what has been, we also hold before God those who pass to their rest – and a question we need to be ask, that may well help us to move forward with a greater sense of confidence is where does the Christian faith fit into our loss?
How does it help us make sense of something that comes to us all - death? And how does it help us move on?
Firstly, let me pick up what St Paul says in one of his letters and I quote “The message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.”
The image of the cross – It’s an image we are all familiar with, many of us wear small crosses around our necks. But what do they mean, what do they say? And why do we wear them.
Taken at it most basic - the cross is an instrument of torture and execution and a very cruel one at that used by the Romans.
As Paul says to many it has no meaning apart from defeat. And that was exactly the message the Romans used it to send out. How can anything good or positive come from such a thing, yet for the Christian it lies at the very heart of everything he or she hopes for?
It is the very real symbol of God who really cares for all he has created, all he has made. It speaks of a God who does not walk away when things get hard or go wrong, when those he loves and longs to have love him in return go their own way ignoring not only his will but also his very presence.
Rather it is the image of God who gets involved in the most profound way possible going to the very heart of the problem - our problem sin - our desire to put self, I first in front of everything. It’s the image of God with us, in the person of Christ his own Son. God’s own son who died on a cross to save us, to point us back in his direction. In many ways the cross is the second half of the Christmas story.
It is the symbol of victory taken and snatched from the jaws or apparent jaws of defeat.
The cross though on it’s own does not and cannot bring us hope. May have died in such ways as martyrs to this cause or that. All they have become is a note on the pages of history what they have not done is change lives in a very real way for two millennium.
It is only when the cross is coupled with the resurrection and the Easter hope, which the church celebrates during this Easter season that it can be truly understand, that its real power can be seen. The Christian faith is not about death it is about death defeated. In away that brings living a new living and very real hope.
Or to quote again from Paul and our second reading “The truth is that Christ has been raised from death, as the guarantee that those who sleep in death will be raised.” That is the Christian hope.
For the women in our first reading as reality of the first Easter Morning began to sink in it must have been almost unbelievable, all their dreams that where shattered on the cross where again alive, but dare they believe it. The words of that angel changed everything. “Don’t be alarmed, I know you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He is not here—he has been raised!
The empty tomb and the risen Christ opened up so much.
For the Christian Christ’s defeat of death is not a one off - it was only the beginning of what will be for all those who believe on the day of resurrection. The reality of a living way back to God has already opened up. Those we love are in God’s care until that day and our lives too can be very different in its light. It is as if what will be has already began.
If the cross marks the defeat of sin – the resurrection is the manifestation of that as a living reality. A reality that we can all know and experience. As St Paul puts it another one of his letters "all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus." (Romans 3 verse 23)
As we move forward from our moments of loss we need to do so living in the light of that reality. Because if we do we find hope for ourselves, we find a new and living way, we find the peace and the power of God.
As move now in our service to our Act of Remembrance we do so remembering before God those who have passed away in the last giving than for their lives. But also in the hope of the resurrection.