All Souls’ Day, 2nd November, by The Rev’d Lucy

1 Peter 1:3–9, John 6:37–40

As you entered the church this afternoon, you will probably have noticed the plaster casts of bare feet scattered throughout the building: some resting on the stone floor, others laid on folded blankets, some tucked beneath pews.

They belong to young people from YMCA LandAid House who have experienced homelessness and displacement, and were made during a series of workshops over the summer led by the artist Helen Barff.

In those workshops, we explored how journeys are carried in the body – in the things that travel with us, in the scars on our feet and the dust that gathers beneath them. They are tender and unsettling all at once, because they suggest both presence and absence.

One of the young people told me that, when the exhibition ends, he plans to wrap his cast and send it to the family he left behind in Syria. He hasn’t seen them for twelve years.

Twelve years of absence. Twelve years of loving people he cannot see.

That gesture has stayed with me. It is so simple, yet it speaks volumes about what it means to love across distance, across absence, across all that separates us.

On All Souls’ Day, when we gather to remember the departed, I think that’s where many of us find ourselves. We are learning what it means to love those we can no longer see.

Death brings an absence that cannot be denied – empty chairs at the table, silence where there was once a voice. We light candles and speak names, trusting that love still endures beyond our sight.

Peter writes to early Christians scattered across Asia Minor, facing persecution and fear. He says this of their relationship with Jesus:

“Although you have not seen him, you love him. And even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy.”

They had never met Jesus in the flesh. They didn’t walk with him in Galilee, hear him teach on the mountainside or stand beneath the cross. Everything they knew of him came through testimony and the witness of others.

And yet they loved him. Present tense. Real love for someone they couldn’t see.

Their faith – their trust amid absence – was already the shape of resurrection life. They were, as Peter says, “born into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.”

This new birth, this living hope, is not a distant promise but a life already at work within them. What is entrusted to Christ is held secure, “an inheritance, imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you.”

And because their lives were held with Christ in God, what was given into Christ’s keeping could never be lost.

The Gospel of John echoes that same assurance. Jesus says, “Everything that the Father gives me will come to me and anyone who comes to me I will never drive away… this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day.”

These are not just vague comfort, but the deepest truth of our faith; the love that binds us to Christ is stronger than death itself. Nothing entrusted to him is ever forgotten or cast away. He will lose nothing – not the departed, not the living – of all that the Father has given him.

Such promises don’t remove us from the present; they enable us to live within it, even when life feels fragile and impermanent.

The gospel doesn’t ask us to look away from what is hard, or to pretend that loss doesn’t wound us. It teaches us instead to see our fragility within a larger story, one held in the mercy of God, who gathers us before we ever reach for him.

The love that holds the departed in Christ’s keeping is the same love that holds us now.

The plaster feet around us give that truth a visible form. They speak of lives marked by hardship and endurance – of young people who have lost homes, left countries, and seen the things they trusted in fall away. Some bear the impressions of scars and plasters, signs of where skin has healed but not forgotten its injury. They remind us that life in this world is fragile; that we carry our scars with us, and we will all, one day, die.

And yet Peter insists that even what suffers can be held within God’s larger story: through the resurrection of Jesus Christ we have been born into “a living hope,” an inheritance that cannot perish.

The here and now are impermanent. The promise of God is not.

The risen Jesus still bore the wounds of crucifixion. When he appeared to his friends, he showed them his hands and his side – the same body that had been broken, now alive. His scars still spoke of what he had endured, but they also revealed that death had done its worst and failed. The wounds remained, but their meaning had changed: what once spoke of loss now bore witness to God’s victory.

This is the realism of the gospel: not that we escape death, but that in Christ, death itself has been overcome.

The resurrection is not the making of all new things to replace what was lost, but the making of all things new; the renewal of what God first made and still loves. The same life that was given up on the cross is the life God raised – the life that will one day raise us too.

Our hope, then, is not for escape from the body but for its renewal; not for mere survival in spirit, but resurrection in fullness. Those who have died in Christ will rise again, recognisably themselves, body and soul restored. We shall see them face to face, just as we shall see Jesus face to face. In the meantime, we remain united with them in the communion of Christ’s body – one fellowship of the living and the departed, held together in him.

When we come to the altar and share the bread and the wine, we join that single fellowship in its visible and invisible parts: us here on earth, them with Christ in heaven. And when we do so, we are not only remembering the past, Christ’s death and resurrection, but standing within God’s future – the life that Christ has already begun to make real among us. In bread and wine, the life of the world to come touches our own.

Those we remember tonight have already gone to their true home. By faith we trust that they are with Christ, who will lose nothing of all that the Father has given him. They are safe in his keeping. Our remembering is not nostalgia, but faith – faith that love endures beyond sight, faith that what we entrust to God is not lost but transformed.

And when God makes all things new, the love that endures across distance and death will be shared once more, in the presence of Christ and of one another. Until that day, we walk by faith – aware of our frailty, yet our lives gathered and held in the mercy of Christ.

The plaster feet remind us that the ground beneath us can give way, yet also that there is a deeper ground – the love of God – that gathers us when all else falls apart, and that will one day raise us into resurrection light.

That love is the true ground beneath our feet and the true home toward which we walk, where those we remember now already dwell, and where, by God’s mercy, we too shall see them again. For love is not ended by death, and there is nothing that can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.

Amen.