All Souls – Ted Hackett
The last time I preached I referenced the Big Bang as the origin of the Universe and Black Matter and the James Webb telescope.
A couple of people referred to it as a “physics lesson”…
Well, I am risking doing it again.
I am not a physicist…though Astrophysics has fascinated me since grade school…
And…I got an A in High School calculus…an achievement, since I wasn’t really very mathematical!
What I have been fascinated with lately is something called “Quantum Entanglement”.
This is something that physicists have known about for years…but no one knew what to do with it…so they largely ignored it.
Some of you may know about it.
In my limited understanding…if in a laboratory you examine two particles which are bound together…as often occurs in the natural order of things and then bombard them with microwave photons…
They split apart…
If then the lab moves one of the split-offs, and puts a lead barrier up between the particles and then moves them apart a big distance, they act like they were still bonded together.
If one moves, the other moves instantly…in spite of being split apart.
How do they “know…this happens faster than the speed of light!
Einstein called it: “Spooky action at a distance”…
And initially simply did not believe it.
Some physicists think there is something like a space-time superfluid we don’t know about. which allows for instant waves.
Others think we will never know.
When I was a kid, my Uncle Louie…
Those of you who have heard me preach over the past years know about Uncle Louie…
A bachelor, ex-basketball player who was a trickster with a sly sense of humor whom I adored…
In spite of the fact that he complicated my toilet training by convincing me that there were alligators in the city sewers which sometimes appeared in commodes!
Louie adored his mother and continued to live with her all his life…
She took care of him…and he took care of her.
When he was only fifty-something…
Louis died…complications from his heavy drinking…
My grandmother was bereft…
She felt abandoned and lonely…
She refused the offers of her two remaining sons to move in with them….that old apartment was home…and it had been home to Louie, and she was staying there!
My father and his brother knew better than to argue with her!
But she was still distraught…
She used to prowl the apartment at night…
She would go in his room and look at the art on the walls…
She would sit in the front sunroom overlooking the night street…
And she would talk to him…
And she became convinced that in some way …he was with her!
He was there.
My parents worried that she was hallucinating…
They asked about visions and such…
Being Irish as she was, the idea of Ghosts was familiar…but she denied it…
“I’m not seeing things…I’ve no truck with ghosts!”…she swore emphatically…
Louie was…just…there!
She knew it!
Now it’s easy to explain psychologically…
a distraught old woman…
Grieving and abandoned…
Finding comfort in delusion…
But I remember my father…though skeptical…still not quite accepting that it was a simple psychological phenomenon…
Maybe it was a leftover from hearing Irish folk beliefs so much of his young life…Banshees and all that…
But he did not give up his impression that there was something there…
That she and Louie were…somehow…
in touch…
Molly said Louie reassured her they would see each other again…
And, she said, to her surprise…
He was not in Purgatory…
as he probably deserved!
My mother…who was a physician…
Did not object…
She had married into an Irish family!
But if you ruled out delusions and hallucinations…
What could be going on?
Our experience…at least since the 18th century, is that those who have died don’t come back…Jesus being the exception…
We just don’t believe it can happen!
We can’t quite get our arms around the dead living somehow on just the other side of a kind of screen but being close to us.
Which is exactly what Christians believed for sixteen hundred years.
It’s just not possible we think.
But…
Think of those two sub-atomic particles…
Welded together and then blown apart…
Moved so that distance and a lead barrier separates them…
Still, somehow, seeming to communicate…instantly…
Faster than the speed of light!
I can’t get my arms around that…
And neither can a lot of physicists!
I am not suggesting that souls are sub-atomic particles
I am not even suggesting that this is an analogy…
I am suggesting that we don’t understand all about how barriers and distance work…
So why should we understand how the membrane-like barrier between us and those we love who have passed on through it, might allow communication between us?
After all…distance and a lead wall can’t stop communication between to particles that were bonded together.
And what, after all, is what we call the “Communion of Saints?
It is all who are bonded together in Christ…
Our Lord…who died and rose again…
Still himself, but now transformed
Transformed so that he lives forever
Lives, so that those who are united to him by our very humanity…
All of us who are part of God’s creation…will be re-born to live together in love.
For in Christ nothing…
Nothing shall be lost!
And in the meantime we are told…as Paul says:…
“ I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord!”
So even death cannot separate us from those on the other side of that barrier…
And so we light candles…
Yes in their memory…
But also in communion with them…
And so we offer our love in the form of bread and wine…
And we receive Communion…
Communion in Christ’s Body and Blood.
And we are in Christ…
And as we pray for those on the other side of that temporary barrier…that thin membrane…
We know they are with us…
In those memories which are a promise of being together again…
For nothing can separate us…
Nothing…
So let us remember, give thanks
And know they are with us…
And we with them… Bonded forever in Christ’s love!