Collect
Almighty and eternal God, you have kindled the flame of love in the hearts of the saints: grant to us the same faith and power of love, that, as we rejoice in their triumphs, we may be sustained by their example and fellowship; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who is alive and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.
or
God of glory, touch our lips with the fire of your Spirit, that we with all creation may rejoice to sing your praise; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Readings
Old Testament – Micah 3.5–12
Thus says the Lord concerning the prophets who lead my people astray, who cry ‘Peace’ when they have something to eat, but declare war against those who put nothing into their mouths. Therefore it shall be night to you, without vision, and darkness to you, without revelation. The sun shall go down upon the prophets, and the day shall be black over them; the seers shall be disgraced, and the diviners put to shame; they shall all cover their lips, for there is no answer from God. But as for me, I am filled with power, with the spirit of the Lord, and with justice and might, to declare to Jacob his transgression and to Israel his sin. Hear this, you rulers of the house of Jacob and chiefs of the house of Israel, who abhor justice and pervert all equity, who build Zion with blood and Jerusalem with wrong! Its rulers give judgement for a bribe, its priests teach for a price, its prophets give oracles for money; yet they lean upon the Lord and say, ‘Surely the Lord is with us! No harm shall come upon us.’ Therefore because of you Zion shall be ploughed as a field; Jerusalem shall become a heap of ruins, and the mountain of the house a wooded height.
Psalm 43
1 Give judgement for me, O God, and defend my cause against an ungodly people; ♦
deliver me from the deceitful and the wicked.
2 For you are the God of my refuge; why have you cast me from you, ♦
and why go I so heavily, while the enemy oppresses me?
3 O send out your light and your truth, that they may lead me, ♦
and bring me to your holy hill and to your dwelling,
4 That I may go to the altar of God, to the God of my joy and gladness; ♦
and on the lyre I will give thanks to you, O God my God.
5 Why are you so full of heaviness, O my soul, ♦
and why are you so disquieted within me?
6 O put your trust in God; ♦
for I will yet give him thanks, who is the help of my countenance, and my God.
Epistle – 1 Thessalonians 2.9–13
You remember our labour and toil, brothers and sisters; we worked night and day, so that we might not burden any of you while we proclaimed to you the gospel of God. You are witnesses, and God also, how pure, upright, and blameless our conduct was towards you believers. As you know, we dealt with each one of you like a father with his children, urging and encouraging you and pleading that you should lead a life worthy of God, who calls you into his own kingdom and glory.
We also constantly give thanks to God for this, that when you received the word of God that you heard from us, you accepted it not as a human word but as what it really is, God’s word, which is also at work in you believers.
Gospel – Matthew 24.1–14
As Jesus came out of the temple and was going away, his disciples came to point out to him the buildings of the temple. Then he asked them, ‘You see all these, do you not? Truly I tell you, not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.’
When he was sitting on the Mount of Olives, the disciples came to him privately, saying, ‘Tell us, when will this be, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?’ Jesus answered them, ‘Beware that no one leads you astray. For many will come in my name, saying, “I am the Messiah!” and they will lead many astray. And you will hear of wars and rumours of wars; see that you are not alarmed; for this must take place, but the end is not yet. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places: all this is but the beginning of the birth pangs.
‘Then they will hand you over to be tortured and will put you to death, and you will be hated by all nations because of my name. Then many will fall away, and they will betray one another and hate one another. And many false prophets will arise and lead many astray. And because of the increase of lawlessness, the love of many will grow cold. And this good news of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the world, as a testimony to all the nations; and then the end will come.
Sermon on All Souls
November is the season of Remembrance, starting with this Sunday of All Souls. The liturgical colour is red, which calls to mind the sacrifice of martyrs, but also the coming of the Holy Spirit. Today we remember the passing of all whom we have known, the saints and sinners of our memory – those we have loved, those we have liked, those whom we have tolerated and even those who were so difficult to be near. They have all made up our past – and make us what we are today. In the midst of all that recollection, our readings this morning have a different cast, they are calling us to repentance, to change our ways.
Both the Old and New Testament lessons talk of false prophets and the misleading of the people by those in authority, whose interest is only in selfish gain, not the salvation of the souls in their care.
Jesus says, “because of the increase of lawlessness, the love of many will grow cold.” What do you make of these words? Do they make any sense to you? Or are they like the whole of the bible for many of our contemporaries, totally irrelevant and incomprehensible?
I would like to try to understand this saying today with you. This saying has been fitted into a discourse about the dissolution of the world order, the destruction of the everyday, when there are wars, rumours of wars, when nations rise against each other, and even those who confess the faith will fall away from their saviour because of the hardship such a witness undoubtedly causes when rulers torture believers. Brother will give up brother and sister will hand over sister to the authorities. Parents, as well, will be betrayed. Anything to escape the terror of arbitrary acts of a wicked government. Nothing will stand as we know it now, because a lawlessness will destroy all that exists, particularly any love we may have – a lawlessness which, I would say, comes about because of an absence of love.
Because we don’t love one another, there will be no cherishing of life – neither one’s own life nor any other person’s life. We can see it for ourselves. So much is starting to fall apart in our lives, isn’t it? There are cracks appearing in our own lives – we don’t feel the same about anything any more. Family is not so united. For instance, I don’t know why my sister isn’t talking to me, or why my godson has ignored me for years or why my brother shows me an active dislike. Then, to top it all off, my own children don’t want to listen to me. And if my family is falling apart, that family which should be the bedrock of love, that family which should be the finest example of unconditional love in our lives, what do we find when we look to our neighbours and beyond? We certainly don’t see the law of the love of neighbour. Is it any wonder that we panic when we go out of the house? It is no wonder we live in the midst of high anxiety!
Jesus has to be right when he says, “because of the increase of lawlessness, the love of many will grow cold.” We have experienced it, haven’t we? When I stop loving because others don’t love me as I expect, I have failed to keep the law.
What are we to do, if we want to keep love in our lives? “Anyone who endures to the end will be saved.” We have to endure these slings and arrows of outrageous fortune – we have to remain constant to the love we hold in our hearts. We cannot just give in to the lawlessness of hard-heartedness. We cannot listen only to the false prophets who preach only what many want to hear and present only a self-serving message, like the siren songs of commercial advertising. When we only hear those messages which have nothing to do with our care for each other, messages which promote selfish consumption, then we have fallen into that lawlessness deeper than we wish to acknowledge.
How depressing this is!
Our readings tell us about the dissolution of all we know, but they also tell us about real hope. The prophet speaks of the ill being done to the people of God in spite of the fact that those iniquitous leaders “lean on the Lord saying, ‘Surely the Lord is with us! No harm shall come upon us.’” That hope is real. We all hope on the Lord, don’t we? But the Lord is a righteous judge who will examine the whole of our lives to see whether we have been law-abiding or not. Will we be found wanting like those false prophets and leaders who proclaimed good times and everything they did only provoked more misery?
We should judge ourselves and our own generation by this standard. Do their words and actions complement each other? You might consider the Covid Enquiry as an examination of our current standards. I would say we are all culpable – leaders, witnesses and observers. We are all guilty of not loving enough so as to fulfill the spirit of the law – caring to keep everyone safe. Aren’t we also in the wrong if we are to judge ourselves by the law of love? The hope remains that we all know that law. The hope is that we will all obey that law.
If we do, the lawlessness around us will dissipate, no longer will our hearts be like stone. The hard-hearted whom God condemns through the true prophets will be transformed and so everyone will have hearts of flesh, hearts warm and embracing, hearts that will break when those around them are breaking. Because of their hearts of flesh, they will act out of love for the sake of the other. No longer will the lawless selfishness of the present limit our care for each other in the future – if only we endure in the keeping of that one law.
‘Keep the faith’ – they used to say – when those hippies of the love and peace generation ranged the highways and bye-ways of the land. When all they said was “peace, man” and hoped that peace would settle on the land. They might have been idle and stoned, but their hearts were in the right place, they were human hearts loving their neighbours.
The hope is that we will see through all the condemnation of the ill we have done, we will see the hope all the souls before us have had and hold out to us, that hope for a world where there is care for one another, a world where the law will be obeyed and no one will ever be abandoned, a world where the ills of the past and present will be obliterated in a future of peace and love. We need to learn from all the souls whom we remember today and begin to make the world a better place just as all the souls, both saints and sinners, tried to do in their own ways and in their own time for the future of those to come.