Vicar’s sermon All Saints/Souls 2.11.25

All Saints’ Sunday/All Souls 2025
The first to arrive at the scene of the car crash were two young police officers. Blue Lights. BBC police drama: we’re still catching up so no spoilers please. Members of the Northern Ireland Police Service, Aisling and Annie are not long out of their probationary year. They had never attended anything like this before ..they needed ‘back up’…’send everything’ was the message relayed back to base. Exposed on a dangerous corner they needed their colleagues to secure the scene, paramedics to arrive quickly, possibly the air ambulance. There were two vehicles involved. In the one an older driver had suffered a traumatic injury to his leg. The other car had rolled and it didn’t look as if the young driver would pull through. ‘Stay with me, stay with me’ – it was powerful stuff but you could write the script. Anyone watching might have predicted that the young man would die just as the ambulance arrived on the scene: could it have been any other way in prime-time TV? What we might not have predicted was that Aisling (brought up a Roman Catholic and having attended a Catholic school) should have noticed the man’s rosary in the car and offered to pray with him. ‘Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.’
Over the coming weeks I imagine we will see Aisling trying to deal with the trauma of the crash. Her prayer was broadcast over her intercom: her colleagues don’t know what to make of it. …her boy-friend Tommy is confused. ‘I’ve seen bodies before’ she says ‘but never been there when someone died’. ‘It was kind of beautiful. Makes you think we have a soul’.
Perhaps that’s as far as our script writer will go with their exploration of faith or the borderlands of life and death. There are many who would steer well clear…only Stephen McGann with ‘Call the midwife’ comes to mind as a writer* who is not shy of portraying people of faith (particularly Christian faith) onscreen. But my catch up viewing this week seems highly appropriate as we celebrate All Saint’s Sunday and All Souls’ day. Both days are celebrations: opportunities to call to mind the great saints of old and our more local versions: but both days are overlaid with the biggest question of all – ‘What happens when we die?’ Or, putting it another way ‘where do we go after we’ve taken our last breath?’ This is sensitive territory. My working assumption is that everyone here has lost someone special. So, we tread carefully and respectfully.
Where to start? Ours is an Easter faith. We could start with the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. We could say that His resurrection challenges something that is often said about what lies ahead of us, namely ‘we don’t know because no one’s ever come back’. A statement that is patently not true as far as the New Testament is concerned: He has come back! ‘He is Risen’.
But that only gets us (and our forebears in the New Testament) so far. 1 Corinthians 15 comes to mind – a really long chapter in which the apostle Paul tries to reconcile the fact that Christ has been raised with the glaring reality that the general resurrection of the dead hasn’t happened (either in his lifetime or, indeed ours).
So, ‘where are our loved ones in this intermediate time?’, was his question as well as ours.
Perhaps something needs stating clearly lest we skirt passed it too easily. Down the ages and through the scriptures the people of God gradually came to look towards a time when the righteous dead would stand before God and be welcomed into His Kingdom. That moment, the general resurrection of the dead, was to be looked for in the future. Not everyone believed in it at all. For some Jews this life was all that mattered. Speculation about resurrection was a waste of time. There is some truth here, perhaps encapsulated in Christian Aid’s strapline ‘We believe in life before death.’ But… when life can be cruel and unjust…when evil triumphs and good is held under its heel…does it not make sense to think that, if God is righteous, He will put the world to rights, reward the righteous and judge the wicked. That time is clearly yet to come.
So again. Where are our loved ones? One image used of those who have died is that they are asleep. ‘Rest in peace’ finds its origin in biblical thought and ‘sleep’ is usually a good thing. (Though Hamlet’s soliloquy might beg to differ ‘to sleep, perchance to dream’ and so on). This image of our loved ones sleeping can be comforting. Time has no meaning as we sleep. One moment we have dropped off, the next we wake to a new day. This sleep however, has an end. The bible imagery is that the trumpet will sound and the dead will rise (think Handel’s Messiah!). We don’t sleep forever. There is an end, a moment when we rise to see and meet Christ. For us, here on earth, the years pass slowly. For the faithful departed, time has no meaning. The sleep of death is followed by resurrection as if instantly.
But till that time, till the general resurrection, ‘where are they?’ The apocryphal book of Wisdom says ‘the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God’. Jesus says ‘in my Father’s house there are many dwelling places…I go to prepare a place for you.’ The book of Revelation speaks of the martyrs of God ‘resting under the altar in heaven’.
The imagery may or may not help. The message however is consistent. God’s people are safe. God’s people are held by Him. They are loved. We might feel loss but they are not lost. Why? Because behind our Easter faith is what CS Lewis in the Narnia books described as a ‘deeper and older magic’: resurrection is an expression of the length, depth, height and breadth of the love of God for us. Nothing can separate us from this kind of love. God is love and God is faithful: this is enough for us to be confident that those we love are held for ever and when we are close to God we are closest to them.
May they all rest in peace and may they rise in glory.

• Stephen McGann is actually married to the writer of Call the Midwife: Heidi Thomas