The Assurance of Immortality: A Sermon for All Souls Day

• Wisdom 3:1–9
• 1 Thessalonians 4:13–18
• John 5:24-27

On March 31, 1848 in Hydesville New York,  two sisters, Kate and Margaret Fox, reported that they had made contact with the spirit of someone long departed. This spirit was said to be able to communicate with the sisters through rapping noises or knocking sounds that were audible to anyone present. The two sisters soon became a sensation, being taken in by a Quaker couple named Amy and IsaacPosts who took the sisters on tour to cities like Rochester, Schenectady, Troy, Albany, and of course New York City.

In 1888 the Fox sisters admitted that their communication with the dead was all a hoax. They later, however, recanted their recantation! Despite this blow to their credibility, the cat was already out of the bag and all over the United States and Europe the curious were attending séances and consulting spirit mediums.

Historians often mark this as the beginning of the modern religious movement called, “Spiritualism” which is characterized by the belief that the spirits of the dead have both the ability and the desire to communicate with the living.

The source of the popularity of such beliefs seems to be an anxiousness about death and an eagerness to confirm, through practical experience, that their really is a life after death. Even in recent times books like, “Heaven is for Real” about a young boy’s near death experience and journey to Heaven, sell millions of copies. We want some assurance that our departed loved ones are in a better place. We want assurance that this world is not all that there is. We want to believe the soul survives death.

It is no accident that Spiritualism began to flourish during a time when confidence in the existence of God and a spiritual dimension to life was being challenged by advances in the natural sciences. Confidence in the established church was also declining and so people began to search desperately for some kind of comfort from other sources.

Christianity has always strongly discouraged the use of mediums or occult techniques to contact the dead, but we have at least this is common with spiritualism: we believe that there is more to life than meets the eye and that there is a life beyond death. A strong attraction for Christianity has always been the hope of eternal life and victory over death through Jesus Christ.

When we commit our loved ones to the grave we do so, in the words of the Book of Common Prayer, “In the sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life.”

We also have this is common with the spiritualist; we believe that human beings, by the grace of God, have been endowed with an immoral soul. This is both a blessing and a curse. It is a blessing because of the possibility of fellowship with God in eternity, but it also means that our choices have eternal consequences.  C.S. Lewis, as always, puts it very eloquently:

It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare.
All day long, we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealing with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendours.”

For those of us who are grieving the loss of loved ones, the immortality of the soul has further implications. It means that the core of the person we loved, the part of them that makes them who they are, has survived their death.

As our reading from the Book of Wisdom says,

 “The souls of the just are in the hand of God, and no torment shall touch them.  They seemed, in the view of the foolish, to be dead; and their passing away was thought an affliction and their going forth from us, utter destruction.  But they are in peace.”

But what of the spiritualist notion that spirits continue to evolve and advance beyond death? Does this belief have anything in common with the Christian faith? Many believe that at death the tree lies where it fell as it were. This life is the time God has given for us to know and love him and to advance in his grace.

But how many of us die in a perfect state of sanctification? Surely there is much more we should expect from the grace of God. What also should we make of the church’s long practice of prayers for the departed?

We offer our prayers, and present before God the atoning death of his son Jesus Christ in the holy sacrifice of the mass, that he might receive them more and more into the presence of his light and his love. We ask that everything that is impure or unholy in them might be purged by his fire and washed in the blood of the cross.

We trust that the good work that God began in them in this life might be brought to completion on the Day of Jesus Christ.

There are cultural constraints, physical weaknesses, and psychological temperaments that impede our progress in this life, but at the dividing of soul from body these will be no more. Yet I have little doubt that there will be a moral and spiritual learning process that most of us will undergo when the veil and entanglements of this world are lifted. It stands to reason that we may need to learn to walk in that world just as we needed to learn to walk in this one. Our prayers are meant to assist those we love in that growth.

Even after our death we continue to press forward to the upward call of God in Jesus Christ. It is not merely the immortality of the soul that is the bedrock of Christian hope, but the resurrection of the dead. We long to be further clothed in glory.

Those who are looking for a firm and practical confirmation of the reality of God and the hope of life beyond death should cling to this practical assurance, Christ is risen! His tomb is empty and the stone is rolled away!

The amazing truth of the resurrection as a historical event provides much more solid assurance than any spirit rappings. The testimony of the apostles, saints, and martyrs is more trustworthy than any sisters from New York or any spirit medium. The hope and assurance the spiritualist longs for is found only in Jesus Christ.

Saint Paul declares, 

“We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about those who have died, so that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have died.”

We can be confident that although we are separated by death, we remain spiritually connected in the undivided body of Christ. The saints on earth and the saints in heaven are one body and one fellowship. We will stand with them in the resurrection of the body on the last day.

I leave you with the beautiful words of the catholic theologian Karl Rahner,

The great and sad mistake of many people...is to imagine that those whom death has taken, leave us.  They do not leave us.  They remain!  Where are they?  In the darkness?  Oh, no!  It is we who are in darkness.  We do not see them, but they see us.  Their eyes, radiant with glory, are fixed upon our eyes...Oh, infinite consolation!  Though invisible to us, our dead are not absent...They are living near us, transfigured...into light, into power, into love.

May the souls of all the faithful departed, through the mercies of God, rest in peace.