Seeing as how this is the eve of all Saints’ Day, I thought, rather than preach on the Gospel of the day I could say something about death and what happens after, since, although death is central to our religion, we often don’t talk about it except at times when we can hardly think straight because of it.

           If I were to ask you what it is that makes the Christian faith such a special religion what would your reply be? Most people would say something like "Jesus Christ saves us from our sins", or they would quote scripture that perhaps they learned away back in Sunday School, like John 3:16: "That God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have eternal life. " While all these statements are true, and while they do express the heart of the Christian faith, we have to "unpack" them a little, express things a little differently to make the wonderfulness of Christianity apparent.

           Too frequently we have heard the same words so often that we have forgotten their meaning, or, sadly, we never knew the meaning,- just learned the words, and then when critical events in our lives arrive, we are unable to relate our faith to these events. This becomes particularly evident when someone we love dies, because, in spite of hearing talk of everlasting life, eternal life, life after death, and so on, all our lives, suddenly we realize we don't know what it means, and we can find little or no comfort in our faith, a faith that everyone keeps telling us should give us comfort.

           Our faith should give us comfort because, if nothing else, Christianity provides the answers to all our questions about death, and is the only way to allay our normal human fears about death. You see, although Death is the central theme of our religion, we have distanced ourselves so far from it with euphemisms and polite God Talk, that we have emasculated the real good news of Jesus Christ in a way that Satan himself never could. And too often, by not really knowing what this faith we profess is all about, we do ourselves and others great harm. So it is important to look death in the eye as it were, and examine from time to time just what it is that Christians have faith in.

           Simply put, the heart of the Christian faith, the core of what we believe, is this: God created human beings to love Him and to enjoy His love. But because love must be voluntary, human beings were created with free will, so they could choose to love. Yet the very first time Humans exercised that free will they chose not to love God. They turned their backs on God and His will. This willful nature of humanity is the basis of what we call sin, and the horror of sin is that its effects never stop with the sinner. Because of the sin of the first man, all of creation was corrupted, and because of sin we die. That's what it means in the Book of Romans where Saint Paul says the wages of sin is death(6:23). Death is the price we all must pay for the fact that human beings took the divine gift of free will and used it to turn away from God.

           Yet God never stopped loving us even when we stopped loving Him, and right from the beginning He set into motion a plan to fix things. The climax of that plan took place when He became one with us as His son Jesus Christ, so that He could take upon himself the punishment for our Sin. And that is the saving work that Christ did for us on the Cross. He took upon himself the burden of our Sin, so that for those of us who are "saved", our death is not the finality that it otherwise would be. And this of course is the heart of the good news; that God himself died so that we would not. This means that we now have the opportunity to live forever, basking in God's love and loving Him in return.

           But, you ask, if God died so that we would not, then why do we ? The answer is that the death Christ's sacrifice saved us from was eternal death, the absolute end to being that would mean that this life was all any of us would have to look forward to. As Christians, our bodies die because saved though we be, we are creatures still, and subject to the rules of the natural world. But our death is of the body only and is temporary. We are only, for a time, separated from our bodies.

          You all know that Christmas, when we celebrate how God put on human flesh and became one of us, is also known as the feast of the Incarnation. That's what the word "incarnation" means, "the becoming flesh". It's got the same root as the word "carnival" which refers to the festivities at the beginning of Lent when we say good-bye to meat, flesh, for forty days; in Latin : carne vale.

           So what happens when a Christian dies? He becomes "discarnate". The soul, that whatever-it-is that makes us who we are, becomes separate from the body for a time. The body wears out and stops working because we are, biologically speaking, simply organisms, not a whole lot different from trees or insects or four footed beasts. But because we have been reborn into a new life through our baptism we share in this gift that Christ gave us on the cross, and our souls do not die, they simply become discarnate for a time, awaiting the day when God will bring body and soul back together, transforming us back into what we were originally created to be, on the day of the general resurrection when we will see God.

           The Christian, when faced with death, has this great comfort that others cannot have, and that is simply that death is not the end. In Death we only pass into a different state outside of human time and space. It is a mistake to think that simply because we cannot see or feel or measure something it doesn't exist, that simply means that it isn't in this plane of existence, and death is little more than a passage from one state into another, not unlike the process of birth into this life that we have all experienced. And just because we cannot see our loved ones doesn't mean that they don't exist any more, they are just elsewhere. They exist just as much as kinfolk we might have who live in Australia do. We cannot see them, but they exist just the same.

           We often speak of the dead as being at rest, but that doesn't meant that they are asleep. In fact the Christian believes that the discarnate souls of the departed are very much awake, that they are aware of goings on here on earth, and while they do not share the same time and space that we do, that they are, somehow, not very far away. Thus it is more appropriate to speak of them as "at peace" rather than "at rest". "At peace", because they are beyond the pain and temptation and suffering of this life, "at rest" only in the sense that the time of testing that this life is, is over for them.

           In the Creed we say we believe in the Communion of the Saints. And this is what we mean: Because the departed are conscious, and capable of rational thought, just as they were when here on earth, we believe that they continue to pray and worship God, and we believe that when we come together to worship, that the souls of all those who worshipped with us in life continue to worship with us after death. This is why traditionally Christians are buried in the churchyard. Not because of convenience or sentimentality, but because they share in our worship and this is their place of worship as much as it is ours. This is what the writer of the letter to the Hebrews is talking about when he says that we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses. They are all here with us right now. And it is them whom we honor with this feast of All Saints’.

           Finally, after this period of separation from our bodies, when we are discarnate spirits, comes the Resurrection. Christ showed us what that would be like on Easter morning. We too will be reunited with our bodies, but they will be transformed, just as his was. At that time we will all see each other again, but more importantly, we will see God and will begin our new life for ever after; the life we were created for in the first place, a life of loving God and being loved in return.

           This then is the comfort that the Christian faith has to offer, this then is the Good News of Jesus Christ: that the chains of sin have been cut, death has no power over us. It has no power over us because Christ has conquered death on the cross. Death cannot harm us because in the long run it means no more than moving from this town to another does in this life. Because of the intervention of Jesus Christ for us, death is simply a transition, not an end. Those that have died have very literally passed on, passed on to a state of waiting until that time when we will see them again. And since God himself has promised us all this salvation and after this time of waiting will restore us to the life we were intended for since the beginning, and God is all powerful, all perfect, and all good, nothing in all of creation can separate us, or any Christian, from basking in His love.

           What a glorious, wonderful, indescribable thing we have to look forward to! What a magnificent gift our God has given us! May we always thank God for the comfort and peace this good news gives us! And may we with all his saints rejoice in His love for us. Through Jesus Christ his Son our Lord, who lives and reigns for ever and ever, AMEN