For All the Saints

Recently the local paper had a couple of articles on life after death. Sort of. One, headlined “What happens when you die,” featured the work of a funeral home and cemetery. The other article was about Iowa ghosts, a not unexpected topic around Halloween. The only mention of belief in either article was a discussion of what different faiths do with their dead. I should not have expected anything about the afterlife in a newspaper, given that cultural relativism tells us that all religions are valid, if not fundamentally the same.

Last week R and I watched "The Bishop’s Wife," perhaps in anticipation of the upcoming diocesan convention. Loretta Young is smashing in the title role, and David Niven is the perplexed bishop trying to raise money for a cathedral. His prayers are answered when an angel played by Cary Grant arrives to give him guidance. Of many memorable moments, there’s one where Grant sits down at a harp and starts playing. Of course! He’s an angel, and all angels play the harp, right? This is 1947 culture: Christianity is assumed, but bowdlerized, inoffensive. Angels are good-looking, perform minor miracles, play harps, and have to leave when they start getting too attached to humans. God and Jesus hover in the background but are never mentioned (unless you count the Christmas setting, but that’s mostly for making us feel good and providing a memorable skating scene.)

The reality of Christian faith in the Bible is quite different. For one thing, death is looked squarely in the face. That is possible because Jesus passed through death to rise again on the third day. We still celebrate the day of resurrection every Sunday, the day when death lost its final power over us. I say “final” power, because we do still die, of course. Yet as the prayer book burial service says, “All of us go down to the dust; yet even at the grave we make our song: Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.” There lies the great hope, the great belief of Christian faith. Like Christ, we will die. And like Christ, we shall one day rise again.

That’s why we have All Saints’ Sunday. We remember all who have gone before us in Christian hope, waiting for the resurrection of the dead. At our church there will be pictures and other remembrances of the saints in our own lives. Those saints are truly blessed. They hunger no more and thirst no more. God has wiped away every tear from their eyes.

But what about us who are left here without them? For us there are tears and mourning. There is hunger and thirst for the righteousness of God. We will bring pictures because we truly miss those faces and those voices. Yet we still have this incredible promise from God, a promise about which the Apostle John wrote: “Beloved, we are God’s children now. What we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.”

And that’s it: we are promised the vision of Jesus. When we see him, we will be transformed. We will be like him: no longer dead, but alive; no longer in this body that hungers and aches, but in a resurrected body more solid and fresh and imperishable that anything we have experienced on earth. That’s a promise that Christ himself gave us. As for whether or not such a body comes with a built-in ability to play the harp – I guess we’ll have to wait and see.


[All Saints’ Sunday: Revelation 7:9-17; Psalm 34; 1 John 3:1-3; Matthew 5:1-12. I discovered via Google that Gail Laughton actually played the harp in "The Bishop’s Wife"; it is his arms and hands we see in the close-ups. He also dubbed the harp segments in Harpo Marx’s movie appearances, in spite of the fact that Harpo was an accomplished, if unique, harpist.]