Recently, at our mid-week healing Eucharist, I was asked to pray for two people who were sitting vigil with relatives who were dying. I was moved to pray beyond those specifics for all of us as we approach and come in contact with death, our own, as well as others. So many people fear death for one reason or another. For Christians, the source of the fear seems to be the unknown, the mystery of what lies beyond life as we know it here and now. For others, like the Sadducees in our gospel today, who don’t believe in life after death, perhaps it is the finality of it all. Jesus, however, tells us, ”for to [God] all . . . are alive,” not just those we see as living, but also those we think of as dead. What we see as finite, God sees as infinite. In the Episcopal Church, we pray what we believe (lex orendi, lex credendi). Regarding eternal life, for example, in one of the “Prayers for the Departed” in the Burial Services (p.101), we pray: “. . . life is eternal; and love is immortal; and death is only a horizon; and a horizon is nothing save the limit of our sight.” Nothing save the limit of our sight! That is all—there’s nothing to fear! Elsewhere (p.121) ”we pray that having opened to him/her the gates of larger life, you will receive him/her more and more into your joyful service.” A gate is an opening, a threshold, here opened by God inviting us to move on, to see and enjoy the “larger life” beyond the “horizon” and live into God’s “joyful service.” What that service will be we don’t yet know, but since it will be joyful, we can trust that we have nothing to fear. Another prayer for the departed (p.123) gives us a clue about the work that awaits us when we pray for “our comrade in Christ, who . . . continuing to live the truth in love, may grow up into him in all things, which is the Head, even Christ.” That prayer speaks to me of sanctification, of our continuing transformation into the imago Dei that God created us to be. Death is not the end, nor even a beginning as I have pictured it, rather it seems to be a milestone on the way. The good news is all are alive! Those we have known and loved who have moved on before us, the great cloud of witnesses (Heb.12:1) who have pointed the way for us are alive in God, as we are and shall be.