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Praying for the Dead

the Rev. Peter C. Schellhase • Nov 02, 2022

Homily at the St. Michael’s Requiem Mass for All Souls, November 2, 2022

As some of you know, I grew up in an evangelical context. And while that was good for me in many ways—particularly in teaching me the importance of a lively and personal relationship with Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior, and giving me a respect for the Scriptures as the inspired and infallible word of God—it also contributed certain other habits of mind which I have had to unlearn.

For one thing, one of the assumptions I used to have was that one of the reasons I came to church was to learn, or to put it more accurately, to hear something new that would change my perception in some way. Whereas what we actually do in church is to hear things that are old; things that we already know; things that we have heard before, but have not yet completed their work within us. More than that, we come to encounter Jesus in the scriptures, in the sacraments, and in the fellowship of the congregation.

But even that account leaves out one of the most important aspects of corporate worship: prayer. We come to pray, which does not directly do anything. We make our requests, but it is up to God to fulfill them. We offer praise, but to a God whose all-sufficiency means that he does not actually need anything from us, not even words of affirmation. Even our greatest prayer, the one that is most central to our worship, which we call the Eucharist, the great thanksgiving, or the Mass, does not do or cause anything directly in itself. It is a petition, a commemoration, a request that, through our feeble human and earthly means, God will give us the grace that we need. The sacraments are powerful because they come with a promise, that if we use them, God will offer us what he promises through them. Or in other words, while God is present and active everywhere at all times, we know for certain that in the sacrament of the Altar he is present to us in a particular way, just as in baptism we have the assurance of forgiveness and being born again.

What does this all have to do with All Souls' Day? Well, in the Eucharist we do not so much offer up a new prayer to God, as enter into a worship event which is already and eternally taking place. We join the angels, and for a moment are lifted spiritually into the holy and heavenly places. It is a foretaste of what is to come. But we believe that those who have died in faith—the "faithful departed"—are already there in the presence of God. Ordinarily they are not present to us. Their souls have left this world, and only what was mortal of them has been left behind. (This includes, of course, their bodily remains, but also perhaps their memory and influence. Who of us can hope to be remembered two hundred years hence, except as, perhaps, a name on someone's family tree, a story passed down, an official record somewhere? How little I remember even of my own grandparents!)

The promise of All Souls is that there is one who does remember, and whose remembering is not limited to sentiment or the recollection of past events, but is strong enough to hold the reality of those who have departed this life in the power of his own life. Thus the dead are said to "rest," but they do not cease to exist, because they are known of God, and in the resurrection they will be fully restored; not merely to what they were on earth—transient, frail, and fallen—but to their fullest potential as created beings who share the divine gift of eternal life.

Now, as a young evangelical I was taught and firmly believed in the persistence of our souls after death, in the reality of heaven and hell, and in the hope of the resurrection, just as I preach today. But I was also taught to view "prayers for the dead" as a superstition, incompatible with the supposedly biblical understanding that after a person dies their fate is fixed, and they go immediately to heaven or hell. I am not sure now that scripture is all that clear about the immediate fate of the dead, or whether they are in need of our prayers. It is a matter of some controversy, and I don't think we can settle it today. But what we can do is to reflect on the communion of the saints. If we believe in the communion of all the saints, those who are made holy by Christ, both in this world and in the world to come, then we continue to be bound to those who have died, insofar as we all, living or dead, participate in Christ. Just as in the Eucharist we pray "by him, and with him, and in him," both our own spiritual life and the life of those who have died is by Christ, and with Christ, and in Christ. We offer our prayers through Christ, and they are answered according to the merits of Christ, not our own worthiness.

So when we pray for the dead, we do not do it because we think that every prayer of ours grants them some amount of time out of purgatory, or some such thing. We pray for them because we know that, wherever they are, God's will for them is the same as his will for us: that they would grow in the knowledge and love of God, to be more fully conformed to his image and attuned to his love. And we pray that we too might persevere in faith, so that at the resurrection, when the dead in Christ are raised, we also will be among them, united forever, through Christ, in the eternal life and love of God.

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By Peter Schellhase • 24 Dec, 2022

“Again the Lord spoke to Ahaz, saying, ‘Ask a sign of the LORD your God; let it be as deep as hell, or high as heaven.’ But Ahaz said, ‘I will not ask, and I will not put the LORD to the test.’” In those days the southern kingdom of Judah was besieged: the northern kingdom of Israel was in league with the Assyrian king, and their joint forces had reached the gates of Jerusalem. The prophet Isaiah had gone to Ahaz, king of Judah, with God’s reassurance that he was not idle in Judah’s defense; that the enemies of Jerusalem would not prevail and would themselves be judged, cast down. Ahaz, as we see, was unwilling to take God at his word; to ask a sign, any sign, that he would deliver them. Why? Ahaz phrases his refusal in what may sound like pious terms. After all, in Deuteronomy 6, Moses warns, “Do not put the LORD your God to the test, as you did at Massah,” referring to a memorable episode of unbelief during Israel’s wandering in the desert. Jesus himself quotes this injunction when he is tempted by the devil. But Ahaz misinterpreted and misapplied it. He refused to ‘test’ God—yet not in faith. God invited him to ask for a sign, and put no boundaries on the sign. Ahaz was unmanned with fear because of the army outside the walls, but no longer believed in the power of God to save. His refusal was the counsel of despair. The Psalmist gives us another response in similar situations. He acknowledges the providence of God in the trials of his chosen people, yet calls on God for salvation. “You have made us the derision of our neighbors, and our enemies laugh us to scorn,” and yet, “Restore us, O LORD God of hosts; show us the light of your countenance, and we shall be saved.” The Psalmist waits and hopes for God to act. God offered Ahaz light and hope in the darkest hour, life snatched from the jaws of death. “Ask a sign of the LORD your God, be it as deep as hell, as high as heaven.” As it says elsewhere, God’s throne is in heaven, he beholds all the dwellers upon earth” (Ps. 11), and Isaiah later wrote, “Behold, the LORD’s hand is not shortened that it cannot save, nor his ear heavy that it cannot hear.” Not God’s inabilities, but your inquities, have made a separation between you and your God, and your sins have his his face from you, that he will not hear.” Ahaz, not God, was being tested, to see if he would turn to God in his time of need. In short, he failed the test. And yet, as Isaiah goes on to describe, God promises to accomplish a deliverance greater than Ahaz could imagine, with or without the king’s cooperation. “He saw that there was no man, and wondered that there was no one to intercede: then his own arm brought him salvation, and his righteousness upheld him.” “The LORD himself will give you a sign,” and this sign is both as high as heaven and as deep as hell, “for behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.” After all human strength, all human goodness, all human courage and hope have failed, God reveals his power paradoxically, in human weakness: a young woman and her infant Son: a son whose name, Immanuel, means “God with us,” and a woman who through her free act of faith and obedience becomes the Mother of God. This is a sign, and not only a symbol but a reality that encompasses everything. It means the salvation of the whole world—and salvation offered to each one of us—a sign that comes to us from highest heaven and fathoms even the depths of hell. So in these two individuals we have the two ways; the way of life and the way of death; the broad and easy way that leads to destruction and the narrow way that leads to salvation. The Blessed Virgin Mary is our preeminent icon of this way of life—“be it unto me according to thy word”—and Ahaz, not that Scripture lacks a sufficient number of such examples, reminds us today of the fate of those who refuse to put their hope in God. Ahaz misses out on much more than a way out of his present difficulty. He misses out on being a part of God’s plan of salvation. The Christian doctrine of hell, so much a part of Jesus’s own teaching, is not something we can set aside, even in the context of the universal and free offer of salvation in Jesus Christ. A great living theologian wrote this about it: “Christ . . . descends into hell and suffers . . . but he does not, for all that, treat man as an immature being deprived in the final analysis of any responsibility for his own destiny. Heaven reposes upon freedom, and so leaves to the damned the right to will their own damnation. The specificity of Christianity is shown in this conviction of the greatness of man. Human life is fully serious.” (J. Ratzinger, Eschatology, p. 216) Next Sunday is Christmas. It’s easy to forget, in all the sentimentality of the season, mangers and mistletoe, that we rejoice at Christmas because God has done something utterly serious, even catastrophic, for our sake. The world in its present form will not survive the impact of this salvation; our own lives, though we are saved, will be utterly changed. Come, Lord Jesus, and make perfect our will.