This the full service as from my text although I did add and subtract in some places.
Welcome: Fr. Ray Dobson
Opening Hymn: Praise My Soul
Praise, my soul, the King of heaven; To His feet thy tribute bring; Ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven, Who like thee His praise should sing?
Praise Him, praise Him x 2, praise the everlasting King.
Praise Him for His grace and favour To our forbears in distress; Praise Him, still the same forever, Slow to chide and swift to bless:
Praise Him, praise Him x 2, glorious in His faithfulness.
Father-like He tends and spares us; Well our feeble frame He knows; In His hands He gently bears us, Rescues us from all our foes:
Praise Him, praise Him x 2, widely as His mercy flows.
Frail as summer’s flow’r we flourish; Blows the wind and it is gone; But, while mortals rise and perish, God endures unchanging on:
Praise Him, praise Him x 2 , praise the high eternal One.
Angels in the height, adore Him; Ye behold Him face to face; Sun and moon, bow down before Him; Dwellers all in time and space,
Praise Him, praise Him x2, praise with us the God of grace
There are names in the cemetery outside that some of us cannot read without seeing a face.
A name on a stone—
like Rentner, Playter, Moles, Leavell, McKee, Widdowson, Barton. Stalker, Richens, Miller, Sidford, Klinck and so many more—
and suddenly we can hear a laugh.
We remember a place at the kitchen table, a familiar expression, a pair of hands:
hands that worked the land, prepared meals, held children, or reached for ours when words were no longer possible.
Some names bring a smile. Some still bring tears. Often, they bring both.
And there are names here that none of us now recognises— people whose stories have slipped beyond the reach of our remembering.
Yet not one of them is unknown to God. That is a good place for us to begin today.
We have gathered for this Christ Church Batteau Cemetery Memorial Service to remember those who have died,
to give thanks for their lives, to commend them to God’s mercy, and to hear again the hope of the Church in the face of death.
We also gather to be alongside one another.
Grief can be a very lonely business…Today we make room for it together.
Although we are meeting inside this church building, the cemetery and the people whose lives it records remain at the heart of our gathering.
Our prayers can also hold those buried elsewhere, and those whose resting places we can’t visit or do not know.
This building itself holds many memories.
For some, being here brings gratitude and gladness; for others, perhaps an ache as well.
This is where important things happened: promises were made, people were baptized, the Scriptures were heard, and people were carried through sorrow by the prayers of others.
We need not pretend that changes in the life of a familiar parish are easy. And neigher must we settle every feeling today.
We can acknowledge any hurt while giving thanks for the good given and received here.
The faith, kindness, and service nurtured here remain part of the continuing life of the parish of: Holy Trinity Clearview.
For surely we still have work to do in our lives today and in whatever days God grants us.
Over these 27 years, I have shared much of life with many of you: baptisms and beginnings; hospital rooms and anxious waiting;…
the burial of grandparents and parents, husbands and wives, sons and daughters…
Some deaths came after many years. Others arrived suddenly, leaving us struggling even to take in what had happened.
When I look around today, I see people whose stories I have been privileged to share.
And I know there are chapters in those stories that only you and God fully know.
We bring all of that with us today: our gratitude, our sorrow, our memories, and our hope.
For those willing may we pray: Loving God, Giver of Hope and Renewer of all, make Your presence known among us.
Enable us to be courageous in our remembering, honest in any sorrow, and open in love and compassion toward one another.
Help us not so much to seek an end to our sorrows as the patience and grace to mourn and grieve as we have need.
Enable us also to remember with gratitude and joy the lives of those we have loved and who no longer bodily walk beside us.
Grant that cherished memories may bring comfort, that love may continue to strengthen us, and that Your peace may dwell within our hearts.
Amen.
Psalm: 121 Unto the Hill Around Do I Lift Up Sandon
Unto the hills around do I lift up my longing eyes; O whence for me shall my salvation come, from whence arise?
From God the Lord doth come my certain aid, From God the Lord, who heav’n and earth has made.
He will not suffer that thy foot be moved safe shall you be No careless slumber shall His eyelids close, Who keepeth thee.
Behold, He sleepeth not, He slumbereth ne’er, Who keepeth Israel in His holy care.
Jehovah is Himself thy keeper true, thy changeless shade; Jehovah thy defense on thy right hand Himself hath made.
And thee no sun by day shall ever smite; No moon shall harm thee in the silent night.
From every evil shall He keep thy soul, from every sin; Jehovah shall preserve thy going out, thy coming in.
Above thee, watching, He whom we adore Shall keep thee henceforth, yea, for evermore.
Scripture Reading: 1 Corinthians 15:12–26
Gospel: Luke 20:27–38
Reflection: Fr. Ray Dobson
We live in a time when a death may take place in hospital and no shared gathering follows—
no occasion when family and friends stand together, speak the person’s name, pray, and acknowledge what has happened.
There are even cremated remains left unclaimed in funeral homes, awaiting a resting place.
We speak of this with compassion.
Poverty, broken relationships, the absence of close family, or overwhelming grief may all play a part.
We can’t know another family’s whole story from the arrangements they made.
Nonetheless a human life deserves reverence, and those who mourn deserve companionship.
A simple gathering, a prayer, and the speaking of a name can be profound acts of love.
If you missed such an opportunity when someone died, you may bring that grief here today.
There is no expiry date on a prayer of thanksgiving, or on asking someone to help you remember.
Our remembering matters, but the hope of the Church takes us further.
Our loved ones’ future doesn’t depend on how clearly, we can remember them.
That matters… because our memories are fragile…. One day we may struggle to recall a voice we once knew instantly.
A photograph may preserve a face more clearly than our minds can.
Illness may take from someone names they have spoken lovingly for a lifetime.
God’s faithfulness does not weaken when our memory weakens.
We are held by more than our ability to hold on….
In the Gospel, people who deny the resurrection offer Jesus a complicated case about a woman married, in succession, to 7 brothers.
Who gets the girl?….Whose wife will she be in the resurrection?
They assume that resurrection must simply extend our present arrangements for ever!
But Jesus opens a larger horizon: the Life of the resurrection is transformed Life, no longer governed by death.
Then Jesus speaks of Moses and the burning bush. And God with us declares Himself to be the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
These men had died long before Moses stood before the bush, yet God still names them as His own!
Jesus says that God is not God of the dead, but of the living, for to Him all of them are alive!
Faith does not ask us to deny the empty chair or pretend that we can still telephone someone who has died.
But their whole existence can’t be enclosed in the past tense!
They’ve not become merely an old photograph or a story that will disappear when the last person who remembers is gone…..
Death does not place anyone beyond God’s knowledge or reach!
We are not given a complete map of eternity.
We are given Jesus Christ, crucified and risen, and His promise of resurrection.
St Paul makes the foundation of that hope unmistakable. He doesn’t say that resurrection is a comforting idea that helps us cope here.
He says if Christ has not been raised, our faith is futile and those who have died in Christ have perished.
Then comes his great declaration of God’s Truth: But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep!
Firstfruits are the beginning of the harvest.
What has happened in Christ…is the beginning of what God promises to those who belong to Him.
That’s why the Church confesses the resurrection of the dead and the Life of the age to come…. This hope includes the body.
These bodies that have worked, suffered, embraced, and loved matter to God.
The risen Christ promises the renewal of the whole person.
So a cemetery is a place not only of burial, but of waiting and expectation.
The graves will not hold their occupants for ever.
Christ will raise the dead.
Those lost at sea, those whose graves are unknown, and those whose bodies have become dust or ashes
are no more beyond His power than anyone else. St Monica the mother of St Augustine understood this.
As she approached death, she told her sons not to trouble themselves about where her body would be buried.
She asked only that they remember her before God.
No place, she had learned, is far from God; and no grave can hide one of His children from the Creator who will raise the dead.
St Paul calls death the last enemy to be destroyed. An enemy. That word gives us permission to be honest.
Death interrupts conversations, sleep, breaks familiar patterns, and takes away the daily presence of someone we love.
A child’s death is not made understandable by a few religious phrases…
A sudden accident does not become good because we find something uplifting to say about it…
The Church does not proclaim that death is harmless.
The Church proclaims that Christ has entered death and risen victorious, and that death’s destruction will be completed….
We still weep while we await that fulfilment.
Remember Jesus at the grave of His friend Lazarus.
Jesus knew what He was about to do for humankind, yet He still wept.
His tears and His power to give Life stood together. So may our tears and our faith.
If you find yourself weeping today, you have not failed to believe.
If an old grief catches you unexpectedly, you have not somehow gone backwards.
Love and sorrow can still meet in the same heart…
Psalm 121 declares that our help comes from the Lord, and that He keeps our going out and our coming in, now and for ever!
This is not a promise that faithful people will never suffer.
The families represented in this cemetery know otherwise…
This is a promise that God’s keeping reaches further than the dangers of this age.
We may pass through suffering and death; we do not pass beyond His power to keep us.
The God who neither slumbers nor sleeps does not cease to be faithful when we can no longer keep watch.
This brings us to the deeper meaning of remembering.
When Scripture speaks of God remembering, this means more than God calling an old fact to mind.
God remembers His covenant by acting faithfully toward His people.
On the cross, the penitent thief asks Jesus, “Remember me when You come into Your kingdom.”
He is asking to be received—to be included in the mercy of this King.
And Jesus promises him Paradise with Himself that very day!
In the Eastern Church, the prayer Memory eternal expresses this hope for the departed: that they may be held in God’s everlasting remembrance and Life.
Our own remembering participates, in a small and human way, in that faithful love.
We give thanks, we pray, and we commend those we love to the One whose mercy is greater than our understanding.
This is why the Church speaks of the communion of saints.
Through Christ we belong to a fellowship that death can’t finally dismantle.
Those who have died in Him remain His.
We may still name them in prayer, asking God to grant them rest, Light, and peace, and to bring us with them to the fullness of His Kingdom.
Yet, remembrance also has something to ask of the living!
There is unfinished love in remembering a generous person while refusing generosity ourselves….
or praising someone’s hospitality while leaving a lonely neighbour entirely alone.
If we are grateful for the love we received, we CAN allow this to bear fruit in the love we give.
Many of you know what such love looks like.
Someone arrives with food, washes the dishes without being asked, stays after everyone else has gone, or remembers the anniversary the rest of the world has forgotten!
Much of the ministry associated with this place and at Holy trinity Clearview has taken that form:
patient, practical work through which people were and are cared for and the Church’s Life sustained.
Today’s recognition of faithful service for two of God’s servants lets us speak our gratitude while we can —and invites us to continue that work of love.
Remembrance is not always straightforward.
Some of us remember hurt as well as kindness.
There may be words we regret, apologies we never heard, and relationships that death left painfully unresolved.
We don’t have to manufacture a perfect past.
We may bring the truth to God: our gratitude, anger, sorrow, and whatever we can’t yet untangle.
We may ask Him to heal what remains wounded and help us not to pass that hurt to someone else.
And we can use the time still given to us.
Tell the story a younger person has never heard.
( Ben Leavell’s great grandboys in the cemetey this very morning learning why there is a tank carved on the headstone and that I knew him for near 20 years)
Write a name on the back of a photograph.
Visit someone who may be wondering whether anybody remembers them.
Say thank you while the person can hear it. Make the apology you can honestly make.
And receive love, too this is a weakness many have issues with!
When grief or weakness leaves you with little to give, let someone sit beside you!
Communion includes allowing ourselves to be cared for!
Before we leave today, bring one name quietly before God.
Someone you miss. Someone for whom you are thankful.
Someone whose memory is still difficult to bear.
And perhaps remember someone who has no one left to speak their name. Pause.…….
Lord, receive those we love into Your mercy. Grant them rest and peace.
Heal what is wounded in us, and teach us to love with the time You give us.
We will leave this gathering with memories, and perhaps with tears.
May we also leave with hope, and with one act of love we are ready to offer.
The names on the stones outside bear witness to lives we have shared.
They also turn our eyes toward the promise of Christ: the resurrection of the dead and the Life of the age to come.
We remember those we love before the God who remembers us all.
And, held in His faithful love, we go on living to the glory of God the Father. Amen.
Offertory Hymn**: We Give Thee but Thine Own Trentham
We give Thee but Thine own,whate’er the gift may be;all that we have is Thine alone, a trust, O Lord, from Thee.
May we Thy bounties thus as stewards true receive, and gladly, as Thou blessest us, to Thee our first fruits give.
To comfort and to bless, to find a balm for woe, to tend the lonely in distress is angels’ work below.
The captive to release, to God the lost to bring, to teach the way of Life and peace, it is a Christlike thing,
And we believe Thy word, though dim our faith may be: whate’er for Thine we do, O Lord, we do it unto Thee.
Reading of the Honour Roll 2025/26: Florence Leavell, Norman Klinck, Paul Richens
Hymn: Amazing Grace New Britain
Amazing grace! How sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me! I once was lost, but now am found, was blind, but now I see.
‘Twas grace that taught my heart to fear, and grace my fears relieved; how precious did that grace appear the hour I first believed!
The Lord has promised good to me, His word my hope secures; He will my shield and portion be as long as life endures.
Through many dangers, toils, and snares I have already come; ‘ tis grace that brought me safe thus far, and grace will lead me home.
When we’ve been there ten thousand years, bright shining as the sun, we’ve no less days to sing God’s praise than when we’d first begun.
Prayer: Nancy
We pray for those whose lives closely touch our own that they may always be in our hearts and bring joy.
We pray with thanks for families, neighbors, teachers, medical and emergency personal, and all those in our community who support the wellbeing of others, especially the sick and the needy.
We pray for those who suffer the loss of family, friends and neighbors that those who love them may comfort them.
Help restore peace and harmony in their hearts.
Let them discover the love of God love through the care and support of others.
We pray for all the leaders of the world that they may make wise choices for all people and that they may lead us to honor one another and serve the common good.
We pray for Your wonderful creation, the Earth, and its streams, trees, mountains and plants and we thank you for those that support and labour for the upkeep of Christ Church Batteau Cemetery .
We pray for those who have died and for the people who miss them.
May all find peace and strength, healing, understanding, growth and wholeness in You.
And now for those willing may we pray together the Lord’s prayer:
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven
Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For Thine is the Kingdom, the power, and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen.
Presentations: Jo Anne Leal and Mildred McInnis
Closing Hymn: For All the Saints Sine Nomine
For all the saints who from their labors rest, who Thee by faith before the world confessed; Thy name, O Jesus, be forever blest. Alleluia, Alleluia!
Thou wast their Rock, their Fortress and their Might; Thou, Lord, their Captain in the well-fought fight; Thou, in the darkness drear, their one true Light. Alleluia, Alleluia!
O blest communion, fellowship divine! We feebly struggle, they in glory shine; yet all are one in Thee, for all are Thine. Alleluia, Alleluia!
And when the strife is fierce, the warfare long, steals on the ear the distant triumph song, and hearts are brave again, and arms are strong. Alleluia, Alleluia!
But then there breaks a still more glorious day: the saints triumphant rise in bright array; the King of glory passes on His way. Alleluia, Alleluia!
From earth’s wide bounds, from ocean’s farthest coast, through gates of pearl streams in the countless host, in praise of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Alleluia, Alleluia!
Benediction and Blessing: Fr. Ray Dobson
Dismissal by Rev. Ray Dobson
In Christ Church Batteau Cemetery: lives are commemorated-deaths are recorded-families are reunited – memories are spoken to life-and love is undisguised.
In Christ Church Batteau Cemetery: Communities’ accord respect, families bestow reverence, historians seek information and our heritage is thereby enriched.
Testimonies of devotion, and remembrance are carved in stone to pay warm tribute to accomplishments and to the life-not death-of a loved one.
Christ Church Batteau Cemetery is a homeland for family memorials tangible reminders of others for the living, a perpetual record of yesterday and a place of peace today.
This cemetery exists because every life is worth remembering–always. (Author unknown adapted)
O God may Your love continue to find those who need You most. Continue to Guide, uphold and bless us as we depart in Your peace, Amen.
(C) FrRayDobson2026
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