Sermon preached at the Sung Eucharist on All Souls' Day 2025

This is a place of death. It’s inescapable; written in the walls, the floors, the skulls, the skeletons of memorials, the dust and clay of our fellows long and lately gone. We speak of death all the time; the death of our saviour, praying for those we have lost, praying that when we die, we might join our Lord who is alive and reigns. It is not uncommon for someone who has been bereaved to talk to one of us at the door. Sometimes they weep, always they apologise for weeping, but if you cannot speak of loss and grief here, where can you? We pray for them and with them, and we bear away a little shard of grief shared, however briefly to join the inchoate mass of those who come to mind when we say: we pray for those who have died. Sometimes names come to mind, sometimes faces, sometimes neither, just a trust that God knows who we are praying for, and a prayer for peace.

This is a place of life, all of us together; vital, breathing moving bodies with our needs and our wants, our human strengths and human failings. Last year, on average nearly 4000 people walked through the Abbey doors every day, changing and being changed in turn. We speak of life all the time; the risen life of our Saviour, praying for those whose lives are hard, praying for people in their times of joy as well as in sorrow, praying that when we die, we will know eternal life. It is not uncommon for someone at the door to tell us it’s their wedding anniversary, their birthday, their once-in-a-lifetime trip to London. We pray for them and with them, and bear away a little shard of joy shared, however briefly.

This is a place of death and a place of life, and that fact is brought into sharp focus in this service: the Commemoration of the Faithful Departed, or All Souls’ Day. In this service we lament and we praise, we fear and we hope. All of these pairs of words—life, death, hope, fear, praise, lament—we are used to thinking of as opposites; things that cannot exist together. But in this place, on this day, we learn that they are all a part of what it means to live a Christian life and to die a Christian death. Not opposites, but threads in the great tapestry that is the outcome of our faith, the salvation of our souls.

It is right that we should be sad when someone dies. They are, after all, lost to us. The Bible is full of lament, of grief, of tears. Jesus wept at the grave of Lazarus his friend. We lament their loss because we loved them, perhaps not even personally, but the love that one has for a fellow-human who is not here any more and cannot come back. There are many ways that we express that love and grief after someone dies, perhaps as many ways as there are people, but one way that we can express it is to pray for them. To pray that they might be at rest seems most apt when someone has perhaps come to the end of a long and terrible illness, when personality has been overshadowed by pain. But life is work. To pray for rest when that work is done, be it long or short, is always apt, and over and over again in this service we pray: “Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine.” “Rest eternal grant unto them, O Lord.” Because we can trust that they are at rest. Our praise is that we can trust. At the beginning of this service, the choir sang: Rest eternal grant to them, O Lord: and let light perpetual shine upon them. Praise befits you in Zion, O God: and to you is offered prayer in Jerusalem. Hear my prayer, for to you shall all flesh come. We praise God that when we die, to him all flesh comes, that in him they find their rest. Our grief overflows into prayer, our prayer overflows into praise, they are not opposites, but the movement of our love and our faith.

And then there is fear. The fear of death and what comes after. There is the peace of the grave, but there is also the clamour of the last trumpet: of judgment day. John Donne speaks eloquently of it: “…God, that made the whole earth, is now making thy bed in the earth, a quiet grave, where thou shalt sleep in peace, till the Angels Trumpet wake thee at the Resurrection, to that Judgement where thy peace shall be made before thou commest, and writ, and sealed, in the blood of the Lamb.” We hear that fear in the extraordinary Dies Irae that the choir will sing during Communion. Our stumbling attempts to imagine what it is to be judged and found wanting. We often shy away from talking about judgment—it has so often been used to remove people’s agency and bring them into line—whereas in fact judgment reveals that what we do matters. Judgment is good news, not bad, because we believe in a merciful Lord who does not willingly afflict or grieve anyone. Judgment is good news, not bad, because we believe in a Saviour who died for our sins. Our peace, our everlasting life, is writ and sealed in the blood of the Lamb, as Donne put it. Therein is our hope. It is right that we should fear, because if we don’t, what we do doesn’t matter, and we are made in the image of God with agency and free will. But in our fear is our hope of everlasting life, bought for us by Christ’s blood. If we were not promised everlasting life, but rather an extinction into nothingness, there would be no fear; no need of it. In our fear is our hope, not opposites, but the movement of our love and our faith.

Today is about life and death, lament and praise, fear and hope. Death is a reality that we should not ignore, that we should lament, that we should fear, and it would be unutterably terrible if that were the end of the story. But death is not the end. We are promised peace, we are promised eternal life through our crucified, risen and ascended Saviour. And so we praise, and so we hope. At the end of this service, of this Requiem, at the point where the coffin would be taken out to its final resting place, what the choir sings changes. They have been addressing God, now they directly address the one who has died. On this All Souls Day, in the absence of that Coffin, they address us: ‘May the angels lead you into Paradise; at your coming may the martyrs receive you and lead you into the holy city Jerusalem. May the Choir of Angels receive you, and with Lazarus who once was poor may you have eternal rest.’ Amen.