We remember our dead because, as the collect says, we love them, but seem them no longer. Our presence and prayers here tonight is testimony that love crosses all boundaries—even the so-called “final boundary” of death. Our prayers for the departed echo the prayers that were said at their parting—for peace, for perpetual light, and for the working in them the good purpose of God’s perfect will.
So, as in any funeral or memorial service, our gathering is act of looking back and remembering what once was. But life is not lived backwards, nor is it healthy or helpful to live in the past. Life is instead lived into the future, and Christian life is lived consciously into God’s future, and the hope God has set before us all. Life without hope is no life at all, for it sees no future. Hope leads us to begin each day as a gift from God, full of new possibilities.
From 1 Peter we heard that we have been “given … a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ…” (1 Peter 1:3) It is in the spirit of this hope that we gather and pray for the departed, those whose souls “…are in the hand of God.” (Wisdom 3:1)
The hope we have for them which brings us here today is the hope we are given, and in which Jesus sends us forth from this place—that we too shall claim that “…inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you.” (1 Peter 1:4)
Let us then remember those who went before us, bringing to mind all that they were, all that they have left with us, and all that they have become. This remembrance is both an act of love, and an act of living hope.
Tonight, the Paschal candle burns as a sign of the Resurrection of Christ from the dead and his continuing presence in our midst. He is the first-fruits of the new life, opening for us the gates of eternal life, and bequeathing to us the hope in which we live and in which we pray for those who have passed to his nearer presence. As they are in God’s hands, so we affirm our hope for ourselves, in the name of our Risen Lord.
Amen.