Homily preached at the funeral of Angela Bond, Croydon Minster 14th October 2025. Mother of a young child, Angela worshipped weekly at the Minster and worked in the parish office for 4 years. She died last month.
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A funeral is a time
when we come together to remember, give thanks for and commend to God a person
we have known and loved.
We are doing that today
for Angela.
And we entrust her on a
journey, begun in this life and continuing now to the very heart of God, in the
hope and confidence that she is led by the hand of Jesus Christ – the way, the
truth and the life - to the place prepared for her, as our gospel reading
promises.
The promise and hope is
offered to us that death is the birth into a new life, a life we glimpse
through acts of faith and hope and love, and revealed uniquely in the life,
teaching and resurrection of Jesus Christ, through whom we are promised a
heavenly dwelling place.
In the introduction to
the service booklet I have written a few words saying what a funeral is and,
hopefully, helping us reflect on some of the feelings we have here today.
The horrible reality is
that we are here because someone we love, Angela, a child of God, made in God’s
image and likeness, has died and we can no longer share our lives with her on
earth.
A
funeral is a time of remembering, of giving thanks, of grieving and of giving
and receiving comfort. It is also a time of healing and reconciliation.
When
we come to our prayers shortly that is a good moment to whisper before God,
things said and done that are now regretted, or things we failed to say or do
for which we seek forgiveness too.
A
funeral is never an easy experience, especially when the person who has died is
one so relatively young, like Angela.
Here
we are faced with our own mortality, that none of us will live for ever, and we
are presented with the challenge of how to live our lives well and to the full.
Do go back to those
words, and the words of our readings, for they seek to proclaim also something
very important about today.
That
proclamation we read in the scriptures is that ‘many waters cannot quench love,
neither can floods drown it’ (Song of Songs 8.6).
For
Christians this love is the love of God, embodied in Jesus Christ; the floods
of death could not drown his love, which endures because of his resurrection
from the dead.
Angela shared that
hope.
Sunday by Sunday she
was here in this church, as along with Alex, she brought their daughter to learn what faith is and to know the enduring love
of God: what a gift to give to a daughter.
Angela
is, as we know, both a mother and daughter, and I can’t help but reflect on that
picture above the desk she worked at for four years in our church office.
It’s
a detail of Philippo Lippi’s Madonna and Child. There is a glorious,
golden background but in Mary’s face we see the tenderness of a mother and the
sadness the will overwhelm her as she stands at the foot to the cross watching
as her son dies, seeing his pain and mourning her loss.
May
Our Lady of Sorrows, pray for Angela, for Hilda, for her daughter.
Finally, given Angela’s
love of, commitment to and involvement in theatre, a quote from Shakespeare is
not out of place.
In Hamlet Ophelia is distributing herbs to others and says, ‘there’s
rosemary, that's for remembrance; pray, love, remember.’
Today we have remembered Angela.
Though separated now, we
still love her – mother, daughter,
sister, cousin, friend, colleague – knowing that many waters cannot quench
God’s love for her.
And we pray for her, that she may rest in peace
– healed and forgiven – to be perfected in God’s image, before we commend her
finally to God’s mercy.
Rest eternal, grant to your
servant, O Lord,
and
let light perpetual shine upon her.
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