Sot Chapel, May 12 1999

I. Joe got the keys to the ethical henhouse, Becky got propers with no OT lesson. So the Requiem gets assigned to the person most likely to be on the list next year — though not just yet, thanks be to God and the good report a week ago. Don’t know whether the Dean thought this would be good for me, you, or both, but here goes.

II. As Samuel Johnson said, nothing quite so focuses the mind as the prospect of being hanged in the morning. Which is to say, there is no way I can stay away from some personal testimony today, hiding behind wit and clever exegesis.

It was an ancient practice in Christian spiritual discipline to contemplate Death, being dead. Ignatius Loyola, Francis deSales, many great spiritual masters. Much we would consider morbid, like John Donne sleeping in his shroud, but I reread his famous sermon “Death’s Duel” in preparation for today and I would rather have his morbidness than the denial we call cheerful realism.

What have we to do with the dead or they with us? What have we to do with death? What can I tell you after two years of living so close to these questions? Of having had my mind so focused?

I wish I could report to you fantastic life after life experiences and all that, but the truth is modern anesthesia does not leave room for much of anything. One moment you are there, then you are out without having even felt drowsy, and then you are back again, with luck. No dreams, no sense of time passing, nothing. No, whatever I learned was all in the ordinary bits of getting ready.

So the things I did learn are very simple — live as if you might die but will possibly live. Make your will, living will, durable power of attorney, do whatever needs doing to make your loved ones as secure as possible, pay all the bills, turn in your grades or the equivalent — whatever no one else can do if you don’t make it, and go for it. I also, given my beliefs, wanted pastoral support for Barbara, who had the harder time –she was awake, after all — and for me, whatever the eventuality.

And plan your funeral. You really owe that to yourself and your loved ones, and it will probably be good for you. My plans put a new spin on an old exercise for me. Occasionally, especially on Good Friday, I visit the Sister’s cemetery out at the convent. I like praying before that large crucifix in the presence of those dead saints, two of whom were dear friends, and another of whom, an associate, was a student. This year, the experience had a new dimension, since Barbara and I have received permission to have our ashes interred on the associates’ side of that cemetery. It was the only place we could agree on. So it is now like visiting a future home. Now don’t go thinking Bob has gotten morbid and is giving up. I promise you this is what a positive attitude looks like.

III. We have fine lessons today — Isaiah’s great vision of eschatological hope in which death and mourning will be banished from Mt. Zion; the conclusion of Paul’s wrestling with what the heck a resurrection body is anyway; Jesus’ clear statement in John’s Gospel of his power over death because he is Lord of life.

Real texts — Col 3, and The Kontakion for the Dead we just sang as the sequence — one of the things I really want at my funeral.

IV. The Kontakion

The antiphon — Rest eternal — where sorrow and sighing are no more– recalls the hope of Isaiah. But for me the guts is the verse in the middle:

[Read it] No pie in the sky by and by there, no ghostly, vacuous immortal soul, no reincarnation, no riding off into the sunset, no phony angel drek. Created, mortal, dust, grave. These are the realities. Yet even at the grave we make our song — Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia.

Is this an act of empty defiance? Dust shouting to dust, “make it not so? ” Whistling in the wind among the tombs? If it were any song but “Alleluia,” It would be. But “Alleluia” at the grave has two meanings — first –Yea though he slay me, yet will I praise him. That’s the challenge to God. But deeper, of course, is that it is the Easter cry. We have nothing, if not the risen Christ. No hope for us or for these remembered dead, however beloved. And for God’s sake don’t ever lay on yourself or others the horrible burden of believing that they somehow live on in our memory and love. As C.S. Lewis discovered and recorded in A Grief Observed, that is precisely what they do not do, so that our memory becomes ever more out of touch with the reality by which they always corrected our idea of them. No, no burdened loving memory, no metaphysical spooks, no Eastern philosophies, no, please, angelologies (that’s a different sermon — dead human beings do not become angels, ever, under any circumstances, and I promise to come back and haunt any student of mine who reads goopy poetry to the contrary at a funeral.) No. Only Alleluia, a song we sing at the grave only because one tomb was found unexpectedly empty.

Sidebar — There is a lot of discussion in this community on just what that means, and you are entitled to know what I think, though getting this right is not a precondition for singing Alleluia at the grave, exactly. The resurrection of Jesus was not a resuscitation of his corpse, they would have recognized that and he would have had to die again. Plus, they have trouble recognizing him and he walks through closed doors. But he also eats, and is clearly no ghost, as they knew what that was like, too. Nor was it some kind of hallucination or mass subjective experience of renewed faith unconnected to his human flesh. It was the first and so far only instance (depending on how you interpret what happened to Elijah, Enoch, and the BVM) of a new kind of objective event whose details we do not know, which is why Paul has such a tussle with what it means. For the record, ordained scientists John Polkinghorne and Arthur Peacocke have shown convincingly that nothing in this account violates our current best understanding of the natural world. End of sidebar. The point is, if you are going to shout Alleluia at God from the grave, you’d better mean it.

V. Now for Colossians. Paul, or whomever, I still think Paul, says the one thing which has comforted me most since I first heard Lloyd George Patterson preach a sermon on it my Junior year in seminary: “for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God,” We stand and defiantly sing Alleluia at the grave because we are already dead. We are a bunch of ghosts, of corpses walking around. And that would be the truth of our present as surely as “to dust you shall return” is the truth of our future, were it not for the deeper truth of that Alleluia. We live in a culture which denies and covers all that up, where people often die in sterile houses of healing, far from home and loved ones, with a funeral practice designed to comfort the bereaved with everything but the truth. The dead are dead, and that’s that, save that “Alleluia.”

But that Alleluia is no idle shaking of the fist at heaven in some futile act of defiance. It is not even an act of blind faith in the theory Jesus’s resurrection. The prayer book graveside service speaks of the sure and certain hope of resurrection to eternal life. Sure and certain. Got that? Because of the resurrection of Jesus as an historical fact, and also because through faith and baptism we are already dead and our life is hid with Christ in God, now. And so I am sure, as was Paul, that nothing, not neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord

What have we to do with the dead, and they with us? We are all dust, we are all dead, and like them, our life is already hid with Christ in God, or we are nowhere. I do not know the details anymore than Paul, but in the grammar of eternity the Alleluia we sing at the grave to remind God of that one empty tomb harmonizes with the one they sing endlessly before the throne in the midst of the crystal sea, casting down their golden crowns at the supper of the lamb in the new Jerusalem.

Give rest, O Christ, to your servants . . . .

You only are immortal. . . .

Yet even at the grave we make our song, Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia.