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SERMON PREACHED BY THE REV’D ALLAN B. WARREN III AT THE CHURCH OF THE ADVENT, Death is all around us and always has been. It is a fact. It is one of the only absolutely certain facts about you and me. Even so, but modern American culture does its best to ignore it. Funeral customs are designed to pretend that whatever happened is not that bad, and the dead are often treated with a respect and a luxury which they never knew in life. And then there are the euphemisms: here in New England, for instance, people do not die, they pass. Death is all around us, but we try our best not to acknowledge it. Other cultures and other ages have been very different. People in the Renaissance were fascinated by death. You may have seen tombs in European churches on which the person buried is depicted both in life and in death. Above - clothed and surrounded by symbols of rank and grandeur; below - a skeleton; remembered in both states, life and death. John Donne - the great Elizabethan poet and preacher - had his portrait painted wearing his shroud; he wanted to see what he would look like when he was dead. Another Elizabethan, Sir Thomas Browne - a medical doctor and a very civilized man - wrote a treatise which he titled Urne Burial. In it, among other similar things, he described in considerable detail the physical processes which take place when a body rots in a grave or is cremated on a pyre. He had it printed privately and gave copies to his friends. Again, death was a subject of great interest and curiosity in the Renaissance. Small wonder. War, political turmoil, public executions, plagues and epidemics - these were commonplace at the time. And also, in those days people usually died in their homes surrounded by their families and friends, not in a hospital connected to a machine, and the hearse bearing the body of someone in the neighborhood was, therefore, a familiar sight. Death was very present then, and unlike today, it was not removed from life. People saw it and experienced it and they thought about it deeply and with fascination. Morbid? I think not. Realistic. And let’s be honest: the subject, though not a pleasant one, is indeed fascinating, for death is something mysterious, uncanny, and strange. Like life, it is something we only partly understand. It should be no surprise that the dead have always been treated with a kind of respect - a mixture of awe and dread, the focus of complicated rituals and taboos. If you’ve ever been with the body of someone who has died, you know how unsettling a thing it is. There, before you, is the person whom you knew. And yet, now dead, it is manifestly not the person. The body in death both is and is not who it was. Something is gone. Something has been lost. One knew the person who had been only through that body - through its touch, its speech, its warmth and movement. But in a moment - and one can see that happen - all that ceases. The person one knew is gone. “The sensible warm motion,” as Shakespeare has it, becomes “a kneaded clod.” (Measure for Measure, Act III, Scene 1.) What you knew seems to remain before you. The person whom you knew is absolutely not there. Something/someone is gone. Something/someone has been lost. What is left is that disturbing half-reality which is a body in death. Bereft itself, it seems. Left behind. The principal mourner at its own funeral, for it - poor body - has lost the most. And there is, I think, always something tragic and something wrong about a body in death. No matter how much we may tell ourselves that death is “natural,” a part of life, it still remains something alien, threatening, tragic, and wrong. One of the most poignant and expressive images of this is the depiction of the Deposition from the Cross. We are shown a man being taken down dead from a cross, a gibbet, a scaffold. The body has lost its beauty; it is grey and flaccid. The body has lost its animation; it is motionless and limp. The body has lost its integrity and strength. It no longer resists gravity. It must be held and supported. This is an image of utter defeat. The body has lost the battle and, in losing, has lost itself. There is something of this about every death and every image of death. Sarpedon - slain on the plains of Troy - painted on an urn 3000 years ago. Marat - dead in his bath. It doesn’t have to be the Christ taken down from his Cross. It doesn’t have to be someone good and worth mourning. The tragedy is still there. Even the most peaceful death at a ripe old age is no different. The body does not want to die. Even in age, when perhaps it is time, the physical and bodily reality - the loss, the absence - seems to cry out that this is not natural. Something is wrong. This is defeat. Something is lost. Someone is gone. * * * * *
At the beginning of the sixth century BC, the prophet Ezekiel was granted a vision by the God of Israel. Ezekiel was an exile in Babylon, deported there from his homeland with others by Babylon’s king. His wife had died, and he was alone. He was a priest, but he had no temple and no altar. He was a prophet, but no one would listen to him. He was a patriot, but his country, his beloved city, had been destroyed. And as we heard in the lesson, the hand of the Lord came upon Ezekiel. In a vision, he found himself in the plain of a valley, and the plain was full of bones, dry bones. Six hundred years later, in a village just outside Jerusalem, a man succumbed to an illness and died. The Gospel for today told the story. He died and his body was placed in a cave and lay in that tomb for four days. Dead. Really dead. In both of these accounts Scripture dwells on the details of death. Ezekiel’s valley was full of bones - dry, parched by the sun, as lifeless as the sand on which they lay and the stones around them. Lazarus had been in the tomb four days. Martha, his sister, warns his friend Jesus as he approaches, “Lord, by this time there will be a stench.” Ezekiel was a man in a hopeless situation, granted a vision totally without hope: dry, parched bones. Lazarus was equally hopeless and without possibility - a rotting body in a tomb. He had suffered the ancient tragedy and defeat of death. But, as Scripture tells us, in both cases God acts. Ezekiel is commanded to call out to the bones in the name of God. “And as I prophesied,” he tells us, “there was a noise, and behold, a rattling, and the bones came together, bone to its bone. And as I looked there were sinews on them ...” And then flesh, and skin, and finally the breath of life. In the Gospel Jesus calls out with a loud voice into that foul and hopeless tomb, “Lazarus! Come out!” “And the dead man came out,” St John records, all wrapped up, wearing his shroud. And Jesus said to those around him, “Loose him. Unbind him. Let him go!” My brothers and sisters, that is how God acts. Like that. Where things are without hope; where things are dead, and spent; at times when all the possibilities have been exhausted, and there is only defeat, tragedy, and despair; even there, at those times, God acts to bring life. Where there is no possibility God creates possibility and he acts to bring life. Bone comes to bone. Lazarus stands up in his shroud. Parched bones? The corruption of the tomb? These are no match for God. * * * * * I have to stop myself. I’m getting close to Easter, and we’re still in Lent. But it’s hard not to think of Easter when Lazarus is stepping out of his tomb, and Ezekiel’s bones are rattling together and stretching their newfound sinews. That sounds like Easter to me. But let’s get back to Lent. Lazarus was raised and came out of his tomb. The Gospel today stops there, but if you keep on reading you will find that St John suggests that it is because of the raising of Lazarus that the Pharisees and the chief priests sought to have Jesus put to death. For a number of reasons this strange detail from John doesn’t make good sense. It doesn’t seem to fit the facts. But perhaps something other than plain fact is at work here. Perhaps John is hinting at a connection of another kind - something deeper. Jesus stares into the dark and fearful tomb, and he calls Lazarus back into life out of the nothingness of that tomb. That same Jesus will call all humanity out of the nothingness of death, corruption, sin and despair ... but not before he himself has visited, has inhabited the tomb. This is the connection. St John is telling us that in the economy of God, Jesus must invade the territory which death and sin had claimed, and there he must exercise his sovereignty. To raise humanity he himself must die. In calling Lazarus back to life, an anticipation of redemption, Jesus sets in motion those things which will lead to his death and lead to our life. This is the mystery which we ponder in Lent: that God who is sovereign, God who acts and creates, that God, to win our hearts and to free us from all that is against us, would submit himself to all that is against him. Listen to St Paul: Amen. |