Preached on Sunday, November 2, 2025, All Souls’ Day, for the Requiem Eucharist at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral, Little Rock.

“Out of the depths have I called to you, O LORD; LORD, hear my voice.” (Psalm 130:1a)

Anyone who has experienced grief will know something of what we hear from the Psalmist tonight. “Out of the depths have I called to you, O LORD.” Anyone who has experienced grief will know this Psalm to be true. Grief takes us to a deep place within ourselves: of course, sadness for what we have lost; regret for what might have been; guilt for something we did or didn’t do; anger at the unfairness of death; fear of our own mortality; or some combination of it all. Indeed, grief takes us to the depths of our souls.

And we Christians believe that all this is normal. We Christians don’t hide our grief, nor do we deny all that grief stirs up in the depths of our souls. Grief is normal for Christians because, when we grieve, we are acknowledging the goodness of that which we’ve lost. We recognize that God has given us someone and something good, and that good thing is no longer with us as it once was. And so, “out of the depths,” we grieve.

But herein lies the Chrsitian difference. What makes Christian grief different is that we Christians put our grief somewhere. “Out of the depths have I called to you, O LORD.” We do not cry into the void; we cry to the God Who hears, the God Who has entered our suffering, the God Who wept at the tomb of his friend. Our sorrow is not meaningless; it is placed before God, and He receives it as His own. As the Anglican theologian John Webster once wrote, when we Christians grieve, “our sorrow is no longer a howl of anguish but a lament, directed not to a void, but to God” [1].

And so it is for us tonight. We do not howl into a void, but we offer up our grief to God. Tonight, our pain becomes prayer, and prayer opens us again to expectation—the expectation that God will do for us and for those whom we love far more than we can imagine. What we’re doing here tonight is placing our grief where it belongs: in the arms of an Almighty God. We gather tonight to name before Him those whom we love but see no longer, expecting that God holds them even now in His mercy.

And so, it is good for us to be together tonight. It is good for us to let Mozart and orchestra and choir take our grief by the hand. It is good to place our grief here, in the presence of the One Who redeems even death itself. For to Him we cry, and in Him we find blessing. Out of the depths, there is mercy. Out of grief, there is comfort. Out of death, there is life. Amen.

[1] John Webster, “Dolent Gaudenteque: Sorrow in the Christian Life,” 20.