Day of the Dead

Vespers for the Day of the Dead

in the Graveyard

Reading: The Dry Bones of Ezekiel

Homily:

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

The dead live.

They are not lost. They are not even truly gone. For indeed, they are all alive to God.

Bizarre as it may sound to modern ears, nevertheless the Bible insists that God did not create death—at least not death as we know it, as something fearful and final. It was never in God’s plan that we should one day simply cease. God takes no delight in the death of the wicked. It is not the will of our Father that even one of His little ones be lost.

Yet death has entered our world, not simply as a peaceful sleep but as something often tragic and awful. Children die. The innocent die. Our loved ones and someday every one of us will die. And we want to know—don’t we?—what God’s going to do about that. Why would a loving God stand idle while His children perish? Why would He permit death to reign over our world?

I think it important to remember that death is not a thing. It has no substance, in and of itself. Death is merely the absence of life, just as cold is the absence of heat, and darkness the absence of light. It isn’t really there. God Himself is the Life, forever pouring Himself out in love, that we, and indeed all things, might exist from moment to moment. For in Him we live and move and have our being. Separation from God, from Life, is death.

Yet when we went astray, God would not abandon us to our self-imposed exile. He is the Good Shepherd, after all, who lays down His life for His sheep. And so He dealt with the problem of death in a most astonishing way: He embraced it. He embraced death. He became one of us, a human being born of a mortal mother, and poured out His life from the Cross, pouring out the very life and love of God into that wretched chasm torn open by our sin.

Thus in dying He destroyed death, for hell has no more power over God than shadows have against the sun. He filled up death with life, and thus transformed the grave from a thing of existential horror into the very gateway to everlasting life! God died that we might live. And we die that we might rise again in Christ Jesus. This is the promise of God. And God does not break promises.

These gravestones mark the resting places of our forebears in the faith. Their souls we commend to the mercies of God, while their bodies await the Resurrection at the End of the Age, and the final mending of the world. Every bone here laid to rest will rise again, whole and complete, nevermore to die. On that day God will dry every tear and heal every wound, and death itself shall die, like a moth eagerly consumed in flame.

Until that day, we have faith that our real death happened years ago, when we were drowned and resurrected in our Baptismal Font. In those waters we were joined to Christ’s own death, already died for us, and to Christ’s own eternal life, already begun. Christians are the walking dead! Our dead live in Christ, and our living have already passed through the waters of death. What is left, then, for us to fear?

Live your life, my brothers and sisters, with the grave ever in mind. Use the time given to us wisely, lovingly, generously. We only have so much in this world. But know also that beyond the veil betwixt this world and the next, we are surrounded and upheld by a great cloud of witnesses, all those who have ever loved us and who ever will, the saints and angels of every time and place with Christ Himself gathered at the great Wedding Feast of the Lamb which has no end!

And there at that Table is a place reserved for you, a place no other soul could fill—a place that each and every one of us will claim, and be welcomed with joy, each in our own good time.

The dead live—and living, shall never die.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.