The liturgies we get to celebrate in these four weeks of November are amazing. It’s like the Church gave us an early Christmas! Let’s start off this month with the Collect for the Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed.
Listen kindly to our prayers, O Lord, and, as our faith in your Son, raised from the dead, is deepened, so may our hope of resurrection for your departed servants also find new strength. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever.
Today we ask God to listen kindly. Perhaps asking God to listen kindly is for our benefit more than His. We often hear that God is good, and God is love. However, God is also kind. Love, good, and kind aren’t just what God does, they are an example of the attributes of God. He doesn’t decide to be kind, He is kindness.
The person we focus on in our prayer is Jesus, raised from the dead. Can you imagine the conversations going around town on that Easter?“Do you know that guy that they hanged and buried on Saturday?”“Yes, why?”“They say the stone in front of the tomb was gone, someone saw him walking around and they say that he even showed up at a meeting when his followers all got together.”“Impossible.”
That’s probably what we would have said. Almost two thousand years later, what is it that makes us believe that Jesus really was raised from the dead and that He offers us the same eternal life?
The answer is not empty hope, the answer is faith. I love the connection between faith and hope in this prayer: When faith is deepened, hope is strengthened.
How do we deepen our faith? We meditate on God’s faithfulness. When Moses prayed for the plagues against the Egyptians, and he saw what God could do, he had exponential growth of faith in God. He was going to need that faith when they faced the Red Sea. When he held out his staff to part the sea, he had more than hope that God would save them, Moses knew that God would provide.
Moses’ faith grew because God was faithful. Moses’ hope for the Promised Land was strengthened because God was and is faithful. Faithful is not what He does, it’s who He is.
Today, we remember the souls who have gone before us, all the faithful departed. They were faithful because they believed what God said. We know from the lives of the Saints that their faith was so deep and their hope was so strong that they had the assurance of living in the Resurrection of Jesus.
We are called to be those saints, not just deepening our faith so we can enjoy eternal life with Christ, but in every area of our lives. With deeper faith comes stronger hope, and as Paul tells us in Romans 5, “Hope does not disappoint.”
There is an old hymn that will help us strengthen our hope because it reminds us of God’s faithfulness:
Great is thy faithfulness, Great is thy faithfulness,
Morning by morning new mercies I see.
All I have needed thy hand hast provided;
Great is thy faithfulness, Lord unto me.