St George's Cathedral, Cape Town

A Sermon preached at the Solemn Requiem for All the Faithful Departed in St George's Cathedral, Cape Town, on Sunday 2 November 2008, being the Thirty-First Sunday of the Year.

In the mid 1930s Dylan Thomas. the renowned Welsh poet, published an introspective collection of poems which had their origin in his personal religious attitudes and in his understanding of the forces of nature. The volume included a compelling poem that spoke directly to the spirit of the time – between the First and Second World Wars, in the midst of the Great Depression.

And death shall have no dominion, [he wrote]
dead men naked they shall be one
with the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
they shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.

These confident and triumphant words echo those of St Paul, 'O death, where is thy sting, O grave, where is thy victory.' They give new voice to those we heard from the Wisdom of Solomon, 'In the time of their visitation they will shine forth, and will run like sparks through the stubble.'

There is affirmation here. That death shall have no dominion. There is confidence here. That life lives through death, pushing death aside, trampling it down, overcoming it. There is triumph here. That though death presumes to shut down, to take away, dares to write Finis across life's page with bold assurance - death shall have no dominion, and the grave no victory. Even at the grave we make our song, Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia.

This sings well, and perhaps even preaches well, but what do we believe about death, and what do we think we are doing here tonight?

The celebration of All Souls has a troubling origin. Odilo, the abbot of Cluny in the early 11th century, received a pilgrim who had just returned from the Holy Land. The pilgrim told the abbot of a violent storm at sea that tossed him onto a desolate island. There the marooned pilgrim met a hermit who told him that in amongst the perilous rocks all around the island there was a chasm that led to purgatory. Through this ominous gateway the groans of the tortured souls languishing there could be heard night and day. The hermit also claimed that he had heard the devils complaining of the efficacy of prayers of the faithful when they beseeched God to grant the souls in purgatory eternal rest - requiem eternam, requiem sempiternan. So it was that November 2 came to be set aside for intercession for all the souls in purgatory.

This tale has echoes in religious practice down the millennia – a concern for the welfare of the dead, and the efforts of the living on their behalf as they journey to the afterlife, are present in the mummification rituals of Egypt and in the burial customs of many cultures. The modern day Latino celebration of Dia De Los Muertos, the Day of the Dead, with its origins in ancient Aztec religious practice, is another example of this religious concern with the journey of the dead. Our own indigenous African spirituality holds that the dead are in fact the living dead, the ancestors whose presence remains to guide and challenge, hallow or unsettle.

Do we sing a Requiem tonight in an effort to wrestle loose the shackled souls of those who have died? Or do we sing a Requiem that they should find rest in the midst of an eternity filled with everyone from every time and place that has been, a sort of divine bazaar or Souk – a multitudinous gathering in which the billions who have ever lived converge, and in which doubly widowed and remarried spouses are sorted out in bliss?

Part and parcel of the secularization of Western culture has been a marked decline in the traditional belief in the immortality of the soul, and with it has come a more frequent denial of death. We can affirm the resurrection, and vaguely hope for life after it, but what do we believe about it and about those whom we love still but see no longer?

Karl Rahner, the eminent Roman Catholic theologian of the last century defined human living as the free acceptance or rejection of God's revelation of God's self. Every act by which we know or choose or love a specific being generously, unconditionally selflessly is an act of accepting God's self-revelation - since God is the creator of all. Similarly God is rejected every time we reject truth and refuse peace and justice, freedom and love. In Rahner's theology then, death is a universal and definitive manifestation of our free acceptance or rejection of God's communication of God's self. In that sense, death is the culmination and fulfillment of our freedom, the final and definitive establishment of our personal identity. Death is not simply a transition to a new or continued temporal life. It is fulfillment and realization.

To put it another way. God is the Love that creates all things, nurtures all things and redeems all things. God is the Love that Holds the Universe Together. This Divine Love has been glimpsed in a hundred thousand individuals all across time and space. Beyond any measure of doubt or confusion, this Love entered our history in the person of Jesus Christ. In him the human call to free acceptance of God's self-revelation was perfected. Christians participate in this perfect acceptance by their union with Christ. In him their free acceptance becomes perfect. In him their life in the eternity of the Love that Holds the Universe Together becomes possible. In him, by him, through and with him, they share God's reality.

Of course, these are still not much more than affirmations. We need a theology of death. Why, you ask – for living primarily, rather than just for dying, but since dying is part of life, we need a theology of death for that too. Professor James Lapsley of Princeton Theological Seminary writes in this connection, 'We need a theology of death to provide us with the shape of an imaginable, viable future, to provide us with the hope necessary for productive risk in the present. And taking Lapsley's point further, Leander Keck, Senior New Testament Editor of the 12 volume Interpreters Bible Commentary points out that 'the starting point for a theology of death and of resurrection is moral outrage against a world in which there appears to be no justice on which the weak can count.'

It seems to me that Karl Rahner provides a clue from which to launch a theology of death.. Death is part of life. Life is the journey of choices by which we either freely choose God as God reveals God's self, or we freely to choose to reject God's self-revelation. That living choice is acceptance or refusal, each and every time, of truth and peace, justice, freedom and love. Death then brings the ultimate choice and the opportunity for the defining freedom. It is Christ's cry on the cross – jubilant with arrival – 'It is finished.' First and foremost, as well as last and essentially, being human is about choosing: freely to accept or freely to reject the face of God as God shows God's self to us. That choice shapes our present and shapes also our eternity.

And so as we sing Requiem for the departed souls we remember tonight, we sing it also for ourselves. It is a song about choices and choosing. In the morning when I rise, when life is fresh and new and all its paths yet untrodden, give me Jesus, so I can choose justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with God. When midnight comes, dark with night and I am bone-weary with the load of life's burdens, give me Jesus, so I can still choose justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with God. And when I come to die, and when I come to die, and I must make that final choice to see the face of God who is justice and love, mercy and peace, give me Jesus.

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