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Sunday 9 November 2025 Third Sunday before Advent, Thirty-second in Ordinary time, Proper 27
The Democracy of the Dead
Luke 20:27-38
Context: a multi-generational congregation from various social, economic, and educational backgrounds
Aim: to help our people grasp the great value of belonging to a living tradition of Christian worship that stretches all across history, and even into the throne room of Heaven
G. K. Chesterton, that gifted philosopher-theologian, once wrote, ‘Democrats object to men being disqualified by accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.’
If this is true anywhere in all of God’s creation, then surely it’s the Church! For we know that there is no such thing as a dead Christian: it simply doesn’t exist! Saint Paul is reluctant even to dignify death by mentioning it; instead, he prefers to describe how our sisters and brothers in Christ have ‘fallen asleep.’
Christ reminds his questioners of a truth that remains vital for his disciples today: ‘He is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for to him all are alive.’
The ‘communion of saints’ we affirm in the Creed is not a purely historical body, consigned to textbooks and headstones. It is a living, vital part of the Church today. Our sisters and brothers who have crossed their finish line and received the victor’s crown from the hands of our Lord, they remain a part of the Church, members of the same body of Christ to which we belong.
There are not two churches – one for those who happen to have a pulse and another for those who don’t. There is one Church which, for now, worships in two locations: Heaven and Earth. But those who belong to the Church Triumphant, who worship already around the throne of God, in some essential way remain a part of us.
The author to the Hebrews says, ‘We are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses.’ In some way that we are perhaps incapable of fully understanding, those glorified saints are still with us, still journeying alongside us, still teaching us and encouraging us and assuring us that they made it, and so will we.
But this cosmic unity of Christ’s Church, the essential oneness of his Bride, requires humility. I grew up in a culture that implied (and oftentimes outright stated) that the true Church was birthed in 1517. In many of our congregations, we could be forgiven for assuming the true Church was birthed in the 1990s.
And yet recent months have seen reports of the enormous surge in young people embracing not just the cutting edge of Christian worship, but the Great Tradition that stretches all the way back to the first centuries of the faith.
In the wreckage of the failed experiment that is postmodernism, young people are recognising the inestimable value of foundations that run deep; the beauty of liturgies that have been prayed by generations of the faithful; the rituals and practices and disciplines of Christianity that have endured simply because they have been proven over and over again to be active means of grace whereby our Lord draws us closer and closer to himself.
Sir Isaac Newton famously said that he could see further than others because he stood on the shoulders of giants. How much more is this true for the people of God? Every single sister and brother who has ever taken up their cross to follow Jesus without turning back continues to testify to us today that they sprinted over their finish line with no regrets, except perhaps the desire that they had given him more.
Every single saint of God, from Abraham to us, surrounds us and confesses the matchless beauty of Jesus Christ. Every believer remains a living, active member of the Church of God, whether they worship around the world or around the Throne. And we have their assurance and encouragement that they counted up the great cost of following Jesus, and they know that he is worth it.
May we have the humility to learn from them, and the courage to walk that same path of discipleship – because although following Jesus always means the way of the cross, the finish line is just up ahead, and the great Victor awaits us with the crown.
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