Sermon Delivered at All Souls Community Church

Grand Rapids, Michigan, October 29, 2006

Copyright © 2006

The Reverend Doctor Brent A. Smith

Our time is ambivalent about death. We’re not like the time of Jesus when death occasioned such anxiety that people hastened to scenarios that ended the world and resurrected their bodies. We’re not like Europe during the time of the plague’s Black Death when people warded off evil spirits with rituals of dread and fiery purging. And we’re not like the America of the latter 1800’s who saw death almost like a partner, when they would prop up the bodies of the deceased and stand next to them for a picture. And although forty years ago Elizabeth Kubler Ross wrote her now famous expose, “The Denial of Death,” I think we have made it through the valley of the shadow of denial and are now firmly ambivalent.

It is depicted through our version of the storybook, the movies. Death is now something a child sees: “I see dead people.” We don’t believe that, that anyone can; and simultaneously we fear someone does. That ambivalence makes the prospect a horror film.

There is a curious and powerful piece written in our hymnal which was written by a colleague’s father, himself a Unitarian Universalist minister, that I have kept with me since I began preparation for our faith’s ministry. It is written by the Reverend Napoleon Lovely, and concludes with “The bonds of love keep open the gates of freedom.” It is knowledge of the relationship between love and freedom that can navigate us through many of life deepest questions, including the ambivalence towards death that marks our time. Because our ambivalence towards death is rooted in fear, and it is fear that contains, inhibits, and confines freedom.

Remembering somebody specific, a beloved who has died, for me, my father and the several other men and women who have been my mentors, this is an act of love. But it is much more. Memory, remembering those whose lives so deeply affected ours, is the construction of a spiritual thread between two worlds.

When we visit the cemetery and place flowers upon a grave it is as though we are placing a fragrant sign upon the ground that points to a world totally separated from ours; the world above ground and below; a world into which all of us will enter but to which all of us now are denied. We construct in our minds a chasm between the worlds of the living and the dead so as to keep at bay the fear born of ignorance. In his deepest region human being fears death if for no other reason than it is the “great unknown.” We dwell here and not there. We are familiar with this life, not that one. We think we can predict what this life will bring, and know we know nothing of what lies beyond. Ignorance begets uncertainty, begets anxiety, begets dread, and finally, begets fear.

Since recognizing mortality thousands and thousands of years ago, and by this recognition evolving from pre-human to man, human being has been stalked by the knowledge of our demise disguised as our ignorance of the next world. Death is an angel but not usually a welcomed one. The Egyptians dealt elaborately with the chasm between the lands of the dead and the living, and the Greeks had Charron ferry souls across the river Styx that divided the two worlds. It is the gift of our modern times to understand the unconscious regions of human nature. It is the gift of modern times that we know about this fear of death. It is a knowledge that previous millennia dealt with ritually and through stories. Ours is a more bald-faced fear.

But when we remember a particular person whose love for us was distinctive and was a powerful influence on the development of our individual personality, fear can be transformed into a tie, a tether that is bittersweet, true; memory serves the duo function of eliciting the love we wanted to return to them but never fully did, with the realization that in using only memory we know their presence is denied to us now. But what’s established alongside of fear is a real bond. It’s a bond of affection. It is a connection from one land through to the other. And when we create that bond with beloved people from our past, we are creating a covenant with history, too. The thread of connection to those who helped form us becomes a responsibility not only to remember them, but to acknowledge symbolically through ritual and storied remembrance, that we are beholden to many men and women of the past whose names we do not know but whose influence we live by and whose affection we live under.

These are bonds of love we, by our living, extend to those whom we did not know, but whose lives kept existence and history unfolding towards the freedom and the fulfillment that is our destiny as creatures made in a likeness to God; those whose lives exhibited a unity between human being that makes us all into a family, a family of All Souls. Those whose lives radiated an affection that breaks the bands asunder of hatred and enmity and discord, because it is an affection whose origin is in divinity and extends to All Souls.

All Souls Sunday is a reminder. The boundary that we lift up between the worlds of the dead and the living, the boundary our eyes create when at the grave we see others alive standing next to us and stare blankly at the ground that covers the casketed body, these mark a real difference between bodies that breathe and bodies that do not, bodies whose hearts beat and bodies that not, bodies whose brain emits activity and bodies that do not. But the two lands are not utterly separate of one another. They are not in absolute isolation, as our fear supposes. They are made one in the Spirit. They are different, though oftentimes our elaborate visions of the afterlife make it a better version than this one. They are distinct, the world of the living and the dead, but there is a spiritual tether connecting them: The bond of love.

It is for and by love that we remember. We remember beloved men and women and children who shaped us into who we are, distinct personalities. We remember symbolically all those who have shaped our existence, whose shoulders we stand upon, whose broad affection we benefit from and whose prospective vision we aspire to. We live inside of a history that the more of it we know, the more apparent it is, that we exist to be free. That what divinity there is that works on the world does so in part through our memory to free us of our fear of death. For in the end the gratitude that we extend to those whose lives came before us, is the mercy we are willing to give to those whose lives now share this earth with us.

The bonds of love keep open the gates of freedom, until we grow into a divine likeness, until we grow a soul that sees a unity and freedom of the spirit, and expresses it through a love for all souls living and dead.

AMEN.