Go here to watch this sermon on video.
A poem by Seamus Heaney:
When all the others were away at Mass
I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.
They broke the silence, let fall one by one
Like solder weeping off the soldering iron:
Cold comforts set between us, things to share
Gleaming in a bucket of clean water.
And again let fall. Little pleasant splashes
From each other's work would bring us to our senses.
So while the parish priest at her bedside
Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying
And some were responding and some crying
I remembered her head bent towards my head,
Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives
Never closer the whole rest of our lives.
***
We will gather again later this evening, in the dying of the year, in our burial garden, to pray for those we love who have died. We honor our grief, and their lives, with solemnity. We proclaim our hope with faith. And we make our song of alleluia with confidence, even if our voices break with the freight of it all.
Our earliest forebears in the Christian faith, those who knew Jesus personally and the couple of generations that followed them: they were especially concerned about the topic of death. Many of them had assumed that Christ would be returning in their lifetimes, so the deaths of the first members of the movement were alarming and upsetting. They had to reinterpret the Gospel. They had to make sense of how they were a people of the Resurrection who nonetheless experienced physical death.
And so they have left us tonight’s passage in the first letter to the Thessalonians, which may be the very oldest book of the New Testament, in which Paul deliberately, consciously tries to console the first Christians that the dead will rise again and meet them, with the Lord, in the air. We may or may not imagine trumpets and clouds, but we share their great hope, and we proclaim with confidence another consolation they gave us: The first Christians taught us that we meet our beloved dead even now, long before a great apocalyptic reunion. We meet our beloved dead here at this Table. At this Table, the great cloud of witnesses descends as we go up, and all are together for the feast.
But I want to bring all of these grand ideas home for you with a story from my father, from many years ago. It happened in the 1970s, when he was still an attorney in southwest Minnesota. He was beginning to shape his career around family law, focusing particularly on the legal and social needs of children. This focus developed across his career, into the years when he sat on the Minnesota Court of Appeals.
One of my father’s clients was a woman in a domestic dilemma. I don’t recall the details, I think mostly because as her attorney, my father wasn’t at liberty to reveal the details. And they are none of our business, of course. As they worked together, my father learned that this woman was a person of faith, but did not have a community of faith. It’s possible that the family situation had left her abruptly without a church home, for some reason. She was in deep personal distress. She felt alone; she was alone.
My father invited her to come to church – to his church, the church where all seven of his children were baptized, St. Matthew Lutheran Church in Worthington, Minnesota. He mentioned that they offered Holy Communion, if I recall correctly, once a month. (Here, at St. Paul’s, tonight is our fifth celebration of the Holy Eucharist in just four days!)
He invited her to church, and then my father said this to his client: “If you come on a Communion Sunday, you will probably be sitting somewhere else in the room, away from me. We will probably get up at different times to receive Communion. If you see me up there while you’re at your seat, or if you see me in my pew while you’re up there, I want you to know: We are at the same table. Together.”
We are at the same Table, together.
My father is not near my pew now, which in these years of my life is that bench over there. When I receive the sacrament, I do not see him with my eyes. But as I grow older, I look and feel more and more like my father, and I am weaving these stories of his into my own life. I sometimes look across this room and see someone, and feel that same connection he described to his lonesome and frightened client.
None of that is possible for me without my father, whose physical presence has escaped far beyond this room, but whose spiritual presence is palpably here, alongside someone you love but cannot see. And so, yes, like you, I grieve, but then I dry my eyes, and I see my father in my very own hands – I have his hands – and I see my father when I look across this room and see you.
Our beloved dead sometimes tear our hearts apart with grief. But they are here with us, meeting the Lord with us, joining their prayers with ours, and drawing alongside us at the Table that banishes loneliness and fear.
***
Preached on the Feast of All the Faithful Departed (transferred), November 4, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington.
Wisdom 3:1-9
Psalm 130:2-7
1 Thessalonians 4:13-18
John 5:24-27