| Note: No sermon is quite the same when you read it. You miss the inflections, the expression that you gain in the hearing. The words below are only a close approximation of the sermon, taken from handwritten notes. Nevertheless, the words (as best as can be deciphered!) are shared with you here. The Webmeister |
Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost The first being I loved who died was a dog named Roberta. I loved her with all my conscious heart, mind and soul. She was mine. I'm sure my mother and father who helped feed her saw it in a larger stewardship perspective as they fed her or paid vet bills, but she was my responsibility. I found her dead at the doorway of my room one morning. Now I do not recall this story as a mushy little Jimmy story in a maudlin syrupy sermon. I am aware that you can get another dog (indeed my parents did) at the SPCA. And I am also painfully aware that you cannot get another mother or father or child or siblings from the SPCA or the Greensheet. But to me (in that moment) it was as cataclysmic a loss as I have ever known since. She was dead, gone to a place where my voice could not reach, beyond any power I possessed to call her back. I remember feeling anger in the heart of my hurt, anger and powerlessness. Since then I've come to an uneasy truce with death. Death is certainly a close companion in my world. And while I am not spiritually advanced enough to see death as my "sister", as St. Francis of Assisi did; nevertheless, I have slowly come to understand that death is not my enemy. Indeed death is only the symptom or symbol of what I truly fear. What I fear is separation, being abandoned, being lost, being alone. It's like the childhood visions that brought tears to your eyes when you were little and imagined something terrible had happened to your parents. The fear in the pit of the stomach was for yourself, for being alone, separated and powerless. The special collect or prayer for All Saints Sunday begins: Almighty God, you have knit together your elect in one communion and fellowship in the mystical body of your son Christ our Lord... "knit together..." I think of my grandmother knitting together two separate balls of yarn into one garment. The image is of God as a patient old woman (like my grandmother), knitting together into one fabric all the different strands of our lives. One communion and fellowship One fellowship — what about the dead? The Marriage Service has a final prayer to God on behalf of the couple that the priest prays: "Grant that the bonds of our common humanity, by which all your children are united to one another, and the living to the dead..." Do we truly have the courage to live into the empirically incomprehensible notion that death is not the end of our fellowship? That as St. Paul says in Corinthians, "what is mortal shall be swallowed up not by death but by life"? The great Illusionist and master of escape, Harry Houdini told his wife before his death, of a ruptured appendix, that if it were humanly possible he, of all people, would find a way to escape from the blank walls of death and communicate with her. This human desire to "escape" death is as popular now as always, witness all the TV shows that have actors who can supposedly hear and see the dead. From a human point of view death does seem like a final separation, a sundering of relationship greater than a voyage across the widest ocean. But for us who try to follow Jesus, we are asked to follow another path, another road. Jesus, on the night before he was crucified, said to his disciples as he shared a simple last Passover meal, these words according to John. "In my Father's house there are many resting places, if it were not so I would have told you because I am now going there to prepare a place for you and I shall come again and take you to myself so that where I am, there you may be also." The followers of Jesus then, in that room, and now in this room are asked to consider believing his words that he will never be separated from us nor us from one another. Can you believe this? If you can how should it change our lives with one another here and now? Many have said it is we who believe in the Resurrection of our Lord Jesus who are under the spell of some mass delusion? This was believed in the ancient Jewish and Pagan world. It is believed now. Are we people who are not strong enough psychologically to give up our denial of reality, who need to believe in life after death because we cannot accept letting go of our brief moment of consciousness? You know, somehow I don't think it's quite that simple. I really don't think I believe in the Resurrection because I am weaker psychologically or emotionally than the average person or that someone else's lack of belief signifies greater strength. The Danish Theologian and father of Existential Philosophy, Soren Kierkegaard, spoke of 3 levels of personal growth. The first is a life devoted to your own pleasure and enjoyment. This is a life that basically avoids responsibility and lives for immediate gratification. In other words, being a teenager. This is a basic tenet of the prevailing world culture of consumerism. The problem is there is not meaning or permanence to life outside yourself. The second stage is when you begin to take on personal ethical responsibility for the people and institutions around you. But this also can only lead you so far. It leads you into conflict and ultimately fails to give a permanent sense of meaning or peace. You can see this in this last week of frantic campaign charge and counter charge before next Tuesday's elections in which ultimate truths are touted as salvation and if any of the charges made were true every candidate ought to be in prison. World issues from immigration to abortion to economics to being a Democrat or Republican or Libertarian, none of it will bring you ultimate meaning or peace. The last stage Kierkegaard spoke of was an odd one because it was irrational. You cannot reach this stage through any philosophical or conventional religious training because in the end, religions can become like political parties. He called it a "leap of faith". This is not something that happens simply because you grow up in a culture or a religious system. It is the idea that your faith is only one generation old. It is something you must do. It is a choice you must make and no one can make it for you. And to use Kierkegaard's own words, it is with great "fear and trembling" as a flawed mortal creature that I have dared to trust my Lord Jesus and make a "leap of faith" into seeing all life as a fellowship, to imagining that I am never alone, cut off, abandoned to death, that I am connected to the living and the dead in "the mystical body of Jesus." And this "leap of faith" into a world in which we believe in life after death makes us more, rather than less concerned with all life here and now. It like the words of Teresa, a young woman who mourns for the death of her dog in the beautiful book by Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. She says: "Genesis says that God gave man dominion over all animals, we can also construe it to mean that He merely entrusted them to man's care. Man was not the planet's master, merely his administrator, and therefore ultimately responsible for his administration. ...Man is the master and proprietor says Descartes, whereas the beast is only an automiton , an animated machine. …when an animal laments, it is not a lament: it is merely the rasp of a poorly functioning mechanism. When a wagon wheel grates, the wagon is not in pain; it simply needs oiling. Thus we have no reason to grieve for a dog." If I lived into this post enlightenment idea of life being compartmentalized and disconnected I would not have grieved for my dog Roberta when she died. I thank God I found again the connection with all of life that I had as a child, the connection spoken of in Genesis. Today is a day on which we remember and celebrate that we are never alone. Today we honor the faithful dead who have sung in our world and now we believe continue to sing a glorious song that continues to echo in our hearts and history right down to All Saints Sunday, 2006. And we also celebrate the vast difference this "leap of faith" gives us. If we are never alone then we must be responsible for one another and for what God has given us. An account of our stewardship will one day be asked of us. God will want to know - NO! Let me say it another way. God wants to know now how we have cared for the life that passes through our hands. Today is a day to celebrate ultimate peace and meaning, now! Let us with gladness present the offerings of our life and labor to the Lord. Let us keep the feast. Amen The Reverend James T. Tucker November 5, 2006 *Past sermons may be found here. |
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