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The
Past is the Present is the Future Gospel:
John 11:32-44
Well he was very squeamish about it all. You wouldn’t think that a bishop would be squeamish about anything. I think it would have been better if we had gone during the day. Cemeteries seem to have such an eerie feeling about them at night. It’s been my tradition on the Eve of All Saints to go to a local cemetery with flowers. I go and find an untended grave--perhaps a grave of a poor person--and I clean up the grave area, say prayers, leave the flowers, and write down the name and dates of birth and death of the person to enter into my Book of the Dead at home. Then on All Saints Day, I have a service to remember all those in the book of the dead. So, wanting to spread the great joy, I invited the bishop and his wife to come with me one year. All was fine until we actually got to the graveyard. I had flashlights, and at first, the bishop stepped out of the car with nothing but confidence, but after about two minutes, he was back in the car, and said, “I don’t like graveyards at night! I’ll just stay in the car until you all get back!” Death, the seemingly most cruel realities of life, is frightening, disturbing, and curious to us. It not only causes us the most unspeakable pain and disorientation--it is the ultimate mystery. We do not know what it is like until we experience it. We are left always to experience it completely alone. We have no control over when and how it will occur. We have no way of knowing what it will feel like or where we will end up after it is complete. Oh, we have the Scriptures, and we have testimonies of people who have had near-death experiences, but we know nothing first-hand until the moment death occurs. The most we know about death is what we experience when someone near to us dies. Then we sense a keen physical separation that cannot be mended. This is why we grieve so deeply. We feel powerless to seam together the separation and so our souls are left rent and ragged under the weight of the loss. A separation that cannot be mended. A separation that can’t be seamed together. Or can it? “I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic Church, the
communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the
body and the life everlasting.” Ah, we know these words from
the Apostle’s Creed so well, but little do we realize that the
way of stitching together the ragged edge between life and death is
found in four of those words: ‘the communion of saints.’ The
communion of saints is the belief that there is only a thin space between
life and death, earth and heaven, those who have died and those who
still walk and breathe on this planet. The communion of saints is what
renders death completely powerless. We are accustomed to thinking that
it is the resurrection of Jesus that tells us that death is not our
final end. It is true that because Jesus rose from the dead, we have
the confidence that we, too, will rise from the dead. But, the communion
of saints is what silences the fear, the pain, the mystery of death.
The communion of saints is nothing less than the simple, but profound,
belief that we are not separated from one another – even in death.
In God, the past is the present is the future is all one. Repeat that
with me: The past is the present is the future is all one. A few years back, while I was Canon to the Ordinary in California, I went to Taiwan for a meeting with the Episcopal-Asiamerica Ministry. At a local church where we attended services on one of the Sundays we were there, I was taken by one of the Chinese priests into the sacristry before the service started. There I noticed that they had a columbarium--niches that hold the ashes of those who have been cremated--just like we have here in the courtyard off the Great Hall. But, there was a surprising feature--all the doors to the niches were open. I asked the priest why and was told that it was because of the communion of saints. Every time they have a service, they open the niches so that those who have gone before can participate fully in the community’s service of worship. This may seem odd, but only if we insist on maintaining separation between those who are alive and those who have died. I once celebrated and preached at a service of an attorney at his ranch in Sun Valley, Idaho. As we gathered at the place where the service was to be held, I was surprised and delighted to see that a crowd of deceased family members had arrived before us. No, we were not seeing ghosts, and we had not unknowingly tiptoed into the “Twilight Zone.” John had taken photographs of his deceased kin, had them enlarged, professionally framed, and reverently set in the limbs of the aspen trees, just as they are today. Those relatives had spiritually prepared the place even before we took our seats. Their presence was as palpable as the beating of our own hearts as we prayed. John had believed in the communion of all the saints, and he had made that possibility a reality. This may seem odd, but only if we insist on maintaining separation between those who are alive and those who have died. One way to stop insisting on maintaining that separation is to recognize and acknowledge the fact that while it is true that we are separated by time and space while we are alive, in death we are freed from those limitations. John O’Donohue, a Celtic Roman Catholic priest wrote, “the soul is free to be anywhere it desires. The dead are our nearest neighbors, they are all around us. The only difference is that they are invisible.” Those who have loved deeply and lost the one they loved through death know this--they are afraid to trust it, or to report it out, but at times, they can actually feel, smell, know the presence of their loved one. In those poignant moments, there is no separation and there is the deep knowledge that we are connected completely, fully, eternally with every other human being who has lived, is living, or will live. As William Penn said, “They that love beyond the world cannot be separated by it. Death is but crossing the world, as friends do the seas; they live in one another still.” It is really our intellectual Western minds that have focused on the boundaries between earth and heaven. The ancient understanding of the structure of things was that there was a three-tiered world: the heavenly realm, the landscape, and the underworld, and that there was movement in and out of each. This was grounded in the belief that because of God’s timelessness, nothing is ever lost. Because time was supple, flexible, and never fixed and rigid, there was no reason there could not be movement through time even if one had died. The past is the present is the future is all one. As one night comes to a close and finds its way into the horizon making way for a new day to be born, we can witness that nothing really works in isolation--in a vacuum. Everything is linked in some way to everything else. As scientists find out more and more about quantum physics and the nature of time, it becomes increasingly clear that there are no separations--no real boundaries--everything has its own autonomy but only in relation to everything else. This is a kind of ‘galaxy’ mentality, if you will. But it needn’t stay in the realm of science and astronomy and physics. It is applicable to every aspect of our own daily lives including that dreaded reality called death. In the movie “Matrix Re-Loaded,” the Oracle tells Neo, “I’m interested in the future and the only way to get there is together.” The future for us all is eternal life, and that eternal life is happening even at this very moment. If we believe in the communion of saints, there is no need to struggle, deny, avoid, or rage at death. We can be interested in that eternal life and the way we will realize it fully is to go there together--all of us--those who are alive and those who have died. We are called to be together as one family, to be participants in the resurrection that always happens when we step away from isolation and enter into relationship with one another. Like Jesus’ command after raising Lazarus from the dead, “Unbind him and let him go!”, we have been unbound and let go from our narrow lives in order to live into the greater reality of being inexorably and eternally connected with those who are alive and those who have died. And so here we all are. Sharing the wonder of life in a place that is teeming with life, in the company of God and all the saints, those who have gone before and those who are standing right next to us. Just imagine it. Being together. Being one. When we can stop seeing walls, boundaries, and separations, even in death, we will know we are together--we are one. We will know that in God’s timelessness we are all connected. The past is the present is the future is all one.
Copyright 2003 Calvary Episcopal Church Gospel:
John
11:32-44 |
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