Sunday Evening Sermon: "In Times of Grief" (Sunday 18 September 2022)

the queen um spoke about grief she said grief is the price we pay for love and I don't know if you've been down to Westminster I don't know if you've been down to be in the queue or see the queue but the the scale of the response to her death um is I think a measure of how much she was loved if grief is the price we pay for love I'll leave it to the the BBC to tell us over the coming weeks what that means about the monarchy as a whole but what I want us to reflect on is about what we're going to be part of tomorrow about the funeral and everything around it in one sense it's just a funeral for one individual isn't it but in some ways this is a funeral for the whole nation that in fact the whole world has been invited to and if you see all the um you know the TV compounds it looks like the whole world is going to be watching and an astonishing number of people um actually all across the world as well as here have been hit with real grief and that's where I want to start I've got two Reflections for us tonight um and the first it starts in grief so first um we are grieving a death tomorrow um you'll probably have seen the condolence book I'm just in the entrance of the church on the way in your last chance to sign that is tonight uh on your way out and um sitting in the the entrance hall there and watching people come in there was real painful grief going on for many and I I doubt that many of those people had ever met the queen and if you'd seen those people um on their way walking down the streets and you wouldn't have been able to pick out who would be affected um you wouldn't have said oh there's someone who looks you know like maybe that they're going to be crying when they get in the building um tall and short and young and old and male and female people in tears about someone they'd never met and their dad and normally when someone dies we say things to each other that are designed to make us feel better but really I think there are sort of a sort of negotiation with death on a kind of pricing scale of sadness so we say things like um or he had a full life as if there is a number of years or an amount of experience that means that we shouldn't feel sad I'm if that was really how it worked well then the 8th of September 2022 should be one of the least sad deaths ever shouldn't it I'm 96 years old 12 great grandchildren around a hundred State visits let alone all the others we said last week 15 Prime Ministers and 750 000 handshakes but what's been surprising and striking is that um lots of people's first response has been shock surprised that um what was really probably the most planned for most anticipated least surprising death that any of us will ever experience but people have been shocked I thought she was going to go on forever and that um shocked that grief um is actually something I'm giving thanks to God for um I wasn't praying for it um but it would have been a good thing to pray for for a a real and a profound experience of grief and someone that um I saw being interviewed and picked out of the crowd and she said it's like the nation's grandmother has died so actually this this grief it reminds us all of grief maybe for our own grandmother our own mother or someone else and moderna actually the experience of covid was an experience of death without funerals uh we had these graphs in the paper every day of huge numbers of people dying but without a way to make them personal or make them real I um went off to take my uncle's funeral during lockdown and there were about a million covered rules still in place we couldn't eat together and they gave us little chocolates on the way out of the funeral and said please will you all eat these at 10 pm tonight as if we were together and even at that funeral The Undertaker he said it was the first church funeral he'd taken since covid started and we were well over a year in at that point so um just all over the country in communities flats and houses going dark as people died but without the chance to get together and to grieve um and grief is terrible and painful and debilitating but the absence of grief is worse grief is the price we pay for life and sometimes um sort of well-meaning funeral poetry sometimes tells people don't be sad and actually I can think of a funeral I went to that was um was a real shock um it was the most shocking funeral in fact the saddest funeral I've ever been to but the funeral itself was was utterly thoroughly dishonest about how we should feel don't be sad I'm not sure that's even really human as a response and it certainly isn't what the Bible says about death so the verses that um Chloe read for us they talk about death as an enemy um death is imagined at the end of the chapter like a hideous Scorpio made Dangerous by the the poisonous sting of death sorry poisonous thing of sin that's what gives death his power and the chapter that we've got open it's page 1156 if you've closed it's from the New Testament it's written about 15 years after Jesus death but the chapter is full of images taken from the the very first chapter of the whole Bible written well over a thousand years earlier the account of creation and how good creation is how good this world is human beings are meant to live life is good and health and strength is good and death is alien and miserable and Corruption and weakness and Decay they are bad so every death is a defeat by an enemy one more notch on the scythe and the the evening that the the queen died I went down to Buckingham Palace and there wasn't very much to see at that point and flowers were arriving I didn't see any Paddington bears but I'm sure they were on their way but what you could see was the flag see the flag at half mast and you may know that half mast is not actually half master at all you don't bring the flag down halfway you bring it down just far enough to fit another flag over the top and that is a military reference it's about capture it's like when the enemy captures a ship at sea or a castle on land and they want their army to know that they have one uh no need to keep pushing we've won victory so you bring down the flag and then you put it back up again but you put your flag over the top their flag your flag to say they lost we won captions so half mast it means that we we bring the the flag down of a living breathing human being and then we put it up again but with the invisible flag of death over the top death has won again another human life captured and the um the wind lost statistics are looking good for death every time no matter how much we love them Without Really seeming to care whether the life has been full or not death is an enemy and with the death of the queen we're all looking death in the face and potentially our own deaths in the face at the moment but in the Bible Christians are told not to grieve like other people so we do grieve dishonest and subhuman not to grief we must grieve because someone we love is no longer with us and we miss them but we do not grieve like other people like people who have no hope the verse says and her majesty had put her faith publicly in her King Jesus seems that for her that was life long but it also seems that she made a decision in about the year 2000 to tell us about it more to speak more openly more directly about Jesus her Lords her um her Christmas broadcast they weren't just one more speech from a politician they were the speeches she wrote herself where she was free to say what she believed and in 2011 she said this said God sent into the world a unique person neither a philosopher nor a general important though they are but a savior with the power to forgive the The Sting of death is sin and uh our chapter verse 3 says Jesus died for our sins then he was buried in death verse 4. and then he was raised on the third day and the the chapter here it includes a list of the people who met him after he had died and when this was written and those people they were still alive and accessible this is good eyewitness testimony to a real world event an event where King Jesus defeated death and he didn't just do it for himself not just so we could say Well done Jesus so the the win loss score would be you know 50 billion to death and one to human beings Jesus rose it says as part of a bigger Harvest and look at verse 20 it's the first verse that Chloe read for us and the image there Christ has indeed been raised from the dead the first fruits of those who've fallen asleep meaning that those who die trusting in Jesus they've fallen asleep but they have fallen asleep in Jesus included in him and the one resurrection that was seen by Peter and James and Paul and 500 others that was not just a one-off that was the first taste the first ripe piece of fruit out of a harvest that is going to follow on inevitably afterwards and one of the arguments here in these verses this is a wonderful deep rich chapter of the Bible but one of the arguments is that the resurrection of Christians is necessary to the victory of Jesus so in verse 25 we're told Jesus is a king who must have all of the enemies under his feet he must win and The Last Enemy verse 26 is death and the the thing that puts death on the floor and Jesus standing on him is dead Christians in new Resurrection indestructible bodies Jesus has not won until you and I have indestructible bodies in the future until we are a new creation a second order of humanity like Jesus Christ in the same way that we have been like Adam with these bodies that break and die and then we tend to think to think of life after death as something nice that Jesus might do for us if he's in a good mood but Paul who um wrote this chapter of someone whose life was changed utterly by meeting Jesus after Jesus death Paul says no raising us as physical created indestructible bodies that is essential for Jesus if he is going to be king of the universe and king of all so I want to change that first heading if I can and we are grieving at death but really this is a different sort of grief this is grief after Jesus defeated death the different kind of grief which is why why Christians we can be honest about the pain at a funeral but we can also be cheerful at the same time and full of Hope because belief in Jesus now unites you to him and so it guarantees us a physical Resurrection on the day of his return um I don't know about you but for the um the week after the queen died I just found myself humming God Save the Queen everywhere I went I think because it was her song wasn't it um and I think it'll take quite a while before we can sing King unless we really really think about it in my mum's Hometown and the mayor had to do that Proclamation about the new king and he he did it all fine and he got through all the long words and the proclamation and then he sort of tripped up at the the last bit where he said three cheers for his majesty the queen um and that didn't really work God Save the Queen that is the one thing we do not need to sing now she had a lifelong solid trust in her savior who has saved her and she is with him now the king who defeated death so we grieve but we grieve differently we grieve like those who have hope okay that's our first reflection I'm going to spend a bit less time on our second one because we spoke about some of this last week um second one we have lost an example now I can't tell from here what your personal feelings are about the British queen but as a church here at All Souls and the queen was Supreme governor of the denomination and actually the crown is the patron of this church here at All Souls which means I can say just about truthfully that the queen appointed me to come here as Rector I didn't actually meet her you need to understand that the work was done by someone else by A very wise and experienced civil servant called Helen but my um my name it did have to go across Boris Johnson's desk and then Helen she got me to write something for the queen to read about me said the queen she likes to know about her Vickers slightly you know terrifying given that the queen you know MI5 would presumably do whatever she really wanted to know about me but um so as a church um we have lost a leader and above all we've lost an example and we spoke last week about how directly the queen herself she connected her life choices to the example of Jesus dying on the cross um Christmas 2012 we quoted last week God sent his only son to serve not to be served she served He restored love and service to the center of our lives in the person of Jesus Christ and so the queen she swore to devote herself to service servanthood my whole life whether it be long or short shall be devoted to your service and last week we spoke a bit I guess about what we have to do in order to live like that what we'd have to do to ourselves is kind of what we said make our bodies Our slaves but tonight with one Corinthians 15 open I want to speak a bit about what you have to believe to live like that so please look at the the last verse in the chapter verse 58. and it's a verse I've used at quite a few funerals including of my own family where the person who had died was about the same age as the queen some ways I think this verse captures what used to be normal and maybe what we have lost so verse 58 therefore my dear brothers and sisters stand firm let nothing move you always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain and one occasion I read that to my cousin after the death of my uncle his father read in the verse he said that's it that's him you've described him stand firm let nothing move you always give yourself fully to the work of the lord your labor in the Lords and then we said last week it's become I think clearer and clearer that this is what the queen was doing um early on in her life maybe you think she just enjoys shaking hands and waving maybe that's the thing she likes to do but two days before her death we said last week at the age of 96 after 70 years of hard labor visibly unwell and she is on her feet and smiling and installing a new prime minister when nobody would have begrudged her a day off no one would have begrudged her a chance to stop firm and immovable and working fully given to this service until the end until death but did you say in the verse the word therefore at the beginning and the word because this life it comes out of a belief that labor is not in vain because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain not waste it and why believe that well that therefore at the beginning it drives us back into what we've just been saying uh under reflection one the rest of the chapter back into the defeat of death by Jesus see the the generation passing with the queen they are in general unusually hard-working I think unusually service oriented and unusually certain about things my uncle's again who died in their 90s they said things like Life After Death is certain or um some things in life are just certain Jesus he is absolutely reliable and we in the the generations that are followed we normally think of that certainty as a weakness as a kind of closed-mindedness but you have to acknowledge it makes a difference when it comes to a funeral and a death your own death to approach it certain about what is the other side of the door and actually there is nothing um 1920s or 1930s about belief in the resurrection or about certainty that you can build a life on that faith that attitude it's available to all of us and the the life that it generates could be ours as well this is certainty about something true something based on hard and real evidence and that's not close-minded what is that that's just thought um knowledge wisdom reason so actually I want to change our second heading as well we've lost her example but we can share her belief and follow her as she followed Christ so this is about the servant life because of tomorrow and we can live that servant life if we share this belief and I've called it there I believe in tomorrow which is because of something that's in verse 32. and so just um we'll start at verse 30. come back across the page to where Paul is talking about his own death discussing death he says verse 30 that he lives a life of danger and persecution verse 31 he says I face death every day and then in 32 he asks what is it that would put a human being into a Roman arena for a fight with a wild beast if you didn't have to and would you do that for just normal human hopes no because you would gain nothing you know a well-fed lion and that is not sufficient motivation for the servant like and if you are not certain about what comes after death which would be most of the people in our country now most of the people around the world if you're not certain about what comes after death then verse 32 tells you how you should live it says if the dead are not raised let us eat and drink for tomorrow we die so in the um funeral tomorrow as you're watching the funeral um that is the other option as we reflect on the woman who has died the other option is the life in verse 32. you could live the way she did firm immovable fully given over to service until death or you could look at death coming down the track towards you and decide to grab as much of life now as you possibly can eat and drink and all the rest because we just don't know how much of Life we've got left um in particular in this chapter this is how you will live if you don't believe in the dead race meaning raised with new bodies raised in a new creation and and that is actually the the other cruelty I think of most funerals and most funerals were offered a kind of spiritual survival after death like our um our Consciousness has well literally been uploaded into a cloud and of a place where we can exist but not live human life in the Bible is about bodies bodies United to spirits and Minds it's about physical creation doesn't actually matter to me much if my emotions will go on or my memories if my body has no future then I still need to eat and drink as if there is no tomorrow death without concrete physical hope is necessarily corrupting and degrading it will necessarily drive me towards a selfish way to live but a certainty about physical Resurrection after death that is liberating means you can believe in tomorrow in an everlasting tomorrow of physical enjoyment and activity and life and if you believe that then you're free to die every day here in this decaying world in these decaying bodies and that's the connection to the the series that we've put it's the connection to chapters eight to ten and what this Bible letter does is it works through all of the problems there were in that church and there were a lot so it takes 14 chapters to do the problems and then the answer is chapter 15 Where We Are Tonight um I want us I pray I would love us to be the way Paul is calling us to be love us to be a church family here where we give up our freedoms and our rights for each other and if you're um here tonight as your first time in church or if you're visiting or you're in London and you're looking for a church I hope that would be attractive we'd want to hope to do that for you though it's also a big ask isn't it come and die every day for these people serve them so I'm going to pray for us now and pray for us and the watching World watching that funeral as we grieve tomorrow and I'll pray for us first that we'll grieve like those who believe Jesus defeated death and then second I'll pray that we will live like those who believe in tomorrow live the sacrificial life so if musicians want to come up because after that we're going to sing love divine I'm going to sing about the love of Jesus but let's pray our father thank you that you did send your son not as a philosopher not as a general but as a savior and that in his death and Resurrection the great enemies defeated and that if we believe in him we have a tomorrow a secure and certain hope so we pray father that you would help us to grieve but to grieve like those who have that hope and then to live and to live like those who know that nothing we give up in this physical world is wasted because we have that great physical concrete creation hope waiting for us when we see Jesus again and we asked these things for his glory amen

Channel: All Souls Langham Place

Views: 769

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Id: nwJw86m3Ffs

Length: 29min 24sec (1764 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 21 2022