A sermon given at the Darlington School, Rome, GA and the Urban Outrteach Ministry, Chattanooga, TN on September 29 and 30.
The sermon at Darlington School was a memorial service for students, graduates and staff who had died in the past year. The school has a wide breadth of nationalities and creeds, therefore I chose to emphasize in this sermon elements that are more ecumenical but still encompass the Christian message.
Old
Testament Reading: Job 14:7-10, 14-22
New Testament reading: Mark 16:1-8
Today I would like us to think about our departed friends and
family. We would normally do this on All
Saints Day, the day when some churches even read the names (necrology) of those who have
passed away.
Presbyterians frown upon eulogies that only celebrate the historical life of a
person as a loss, because there is life after death. We call the funeral service the “Celebration
of the life and witness” to the Resurrection of the person who has died.
If you do a little study you will find that almost every religious
tradition believes in some form of resurrection and after life. Ancient
Egyptian religion did, the three religions rooted in the life and faith of Abraham,
Buddhism clearly do, and I could list more. Even wiccans have an explanation of what transpires
beyond death.
Christian denominations and other religious traditions diverge on the challenges of getting there, and what happens
next. However, except for the most hardened atheist, the question of life after death is
very real.
Job's lament in our reading captures human anxiety about death in a very
touching way. You can find similar views
in the Psalms and in Quoheleth (Ecclesiastes) and Proverbs, but Chapter 14 of
Job captures the anxiety in a most heroic manner. I commend to you the entire
chapter, or the whole book, and a visit to the library for some good
commentaries to help you interpret it. There are some sections who translation is challenging.
Job has observed the fallen, dried out tree stump. Seemingly dead, after
hard rain green shoots sprout from it in a display of newfound life. The
metaphor is magnificent. It reminds me of a large Hackberry tree in my yard when i was remodeling my home.
Though it was a good shade tree it was in the way of a new driveway. We cut it
down and I dug out the stump but with every spring rain more and more new
shoots appeared from its roots across the yard.
For Job, all his worldly experience of human death allowed him only to
grieve and perhaps half-heartedly hope there may be life after death. He says, (10,
14a) “But mortals die, where are they? If mortals die, will they live again?”
Job's history is critical to his story and our story. He was not a Hebrew, but had lived a fully
righteous life, outdoing even the most righteous Hebrew. When his children
traveled or had a party or dinner, Job prayed for their safety and wisdom.
Everything was going Job’s way until God and Satan made a little wager
about the strength of Job’s faith. Then Job's life began a frightening and
inexplicable slide towards his end.
Miseries befell him: all his children were killed; All his crops and
animals were lost; He was afflicted with a terrible skin disease and could only
sit on the ground and scrape the sores with a piece of broken pottery; his wife
said, “Why don’t you just go ahead and die?”
Yes, Job had a serious worry about what happens after death. If he could
live again, it seemed to Job that only death can end his present.
He concludes however that against all
hope death is a finality that prevails against life itself (21,22): Their
children come to honor the dead and the dead do not know it. The dead are
brought low, and their children pass them by unnoticed. His conclusion is based
on the fact that no one who has felt death's embrace has
returned with news of the other side. Job story is one answer to the skeptic’s
unanswerable question of what lies on the other side.
If we fast forward some hundreds of year to Roman-occupied Palestine, our Christian tradition knows one person did return. But even here questions loom in our Gospel
stories of what happened.
A large majority of biblical scholars conclude Mark was the first written
Gospel and from the earliest recovered manuscripts it is evident that it ends
with our last verse (8), leaving us a magnificent heroic story with more questions
than answers about death.
Mark does not begin with a choir of angels announcing the birth of
Emmanuel, or Mary’s pregnancy as proof Jesus was born a man. Mark begins with a
frightening mad man eating grasshoppers and wild honey who dressed in camel
hair, lives and preaches in the desert wilderness, baptizing people in the
Jordan River and proclaiming the coming of One who will baptize with the Holy
Spirit.
Suddenly a man from Nazareth called Jesus appears and is baptized to a
heavenly proclamation that “You are my beloved son in whom I am well pleased.”
Immediately he is driven out into the same wilderness returning after forty
days to a synagogue where he immediately begins preaching
a sermon
lost to antiquity. We only know he cast out an unclean spirit that exclaimed, “Have you come to destroy us?
I know who you are, the Holy One of God.”
It ends with his death, deserted by everyone but the women who remained
faithful to him in good times and bad, anointed his feet at great cost, cooked,
offered him water, begged for unmerited mercy, and in the end, stood solitary
sentries to his death.
Three days after his death the women went to the tomb with spices to
anoint the body as their last gift.
To their surprise and fear, the tomb was open and a man dressed in
white was inside saying, “Do not be
alarmed. (!) the man you seek has been raised. He is not here. Go and meet him
in Galilee as he told you. The women fled in terror and amazement, telling no
one for they were afraid.” That is the end of the Gospel of Mark, the crux of
Christian Faith: some amazed women almost petrified by fear
of this young man and his command.
It is an Easter story with no concrete evidence of the resurrection
save the word of this young man who tells every one to go meet Jesus in
Galilee.
Neither The young man’s words or the absence of the body offer any proof
of resurrection, any one could have stolen the body. The women made no
rational, objective discovery of his fate, but the Greek texts indicate they felt a more
sublime and subjective fear or revelation that they were in God’s presence hearing this
message of the gift of resurrection and a daunting command, “Go tell the
others.”
Faithful Christians argue about what this resurrection means, sometimes in
a most unchristian way. Are we swept up into heaven? Are we consigned to some
temporary way station where we are refined to face God? Do we remain in some
dark-state asleep waiting for the final appearance of the Kingdom of God and
our resurrection?
Our non-Christian friends may believe something entirely different about
this afterlife, but…
I suggest to you all that regardless of our different beliefs, these two
stories about Job and Jesus present to us an undeniable revelation about our
future (your future) and the dead whose lives we acknowledge today.
We gather to celebrate the life of friends and family who have died. For
many of us their memories are so real and painful they are heart wrenching.
Some pray for the dead now as Job prayed for his children when they were alive.
Others rejoice in their good fortune in life according to the promise in Mark.
We do not know where they are. We do not know if they hear and know us
right now. Many of us expect one day to see them again but some remember Job's
question. "After mortals die and
are laid low; where are they now?" Do we pass by their grave unnoticed? Job had no answer. Mark doesn't give an answer. I
cannot tell you. No one can.
What I can do is offer you this
reflection. Mark's story of the Good News lives beyond the time of the women at
the tomb. Christianity and the women's story has persisted and is found in
every corner of the world today.
Job’s story survived the ages. We know the
story of his love and dedication to God and his family. We know all about his
cruel and inexplicable suffering. We hear his anger at God, and his questions
to God that show he never doubted God was there. Job doubted only that he would
live after death.
What I tell you is Job answered his own
question, if not for himself, for us. Job has persisted across the ages in his
story. We know Job, we hear and understand his doubts and complaints against
our Maker. In that sense he is with us today.
At the very minimum we can say the same
about Jesus, the women who tended to him and his followers and Job.
They have persisted across the ages in an
oral and written tradition palpably real to believers. They offer moral and
ethical lessons for everyone living today. Some lessons are challenging, some
people do not accept them. But undeniably these people live today in their history even
for the skeptics.
You realize these stories pose a question
and a challenge... “What will the future say of us?”
I propose to you all that the history of
those we remember today challenge and caution us to build our own history.
That future history will be the measure
of us.
When we are young, the passion of life
burns in our veins. Only the wise young person gauges their hope of life
against the span of our years amid that passion. We are preoccupied by a comely
acquaintance, money or friends. It all flows through our fingers until only a
cool spirit lingers.
As we near that final divide when our
years are closer to that theoretical 120 than our birth, the question of what
lies beyond the grave takes on a certain clarity. Job's worry is perennial, it
never goes away.
Worry overtakes us; perhaps we develop an
acute fear, or maybe just curiosity of what lies beyond the grave.
Grandparents will not live to know the
third generation of grandchildren and beyond, but those grandchildren will know
their grandparents by the deeds of
history, by story passed on and received.
These friends we remember today who have
passed on are precious memories. They are a present reality of hope, comfort,
motivation, error and knowledge for us.
They shape us for how we shall deal with
the good and the bad.
The way to ensure we answer Job's question
in the affirmative is to leave a good mark for the future to use as the true
measure of our lives.
I'll close with a poem I wrote a couple years ago about this very subject.
For A Little While - Precious
Memories
I had a father for just a little while.
He was here long enough to feel his
smile;
He was here long enough to live and learn
so much about life and to feel love and pain.
His were old memories burnt into the synapses of his brain.
I imagine them to be the seashore sun that blonds hair
and bronzes the skin to dark cracked leather
on those who tarry on the shore,
season after season.
Yes, our time together seemed long
enough,
Irrationally I thought it would never end.
There would always be time enough for the
questions.
The
ones that come upon us unaware,
the real questions that
we hold for so long.
I was so convinced, so headstrong to think
I'll understand and not have to ask how he
managed his.
They are the same questions I have, you see.
The questions about pain, love and life,
About finding…no, about holding faith when
things go so wrong,
about hanging on when they go so right I'm
liable to walk away
forgetting the dreams anon.
I am left with no solace to comfort me save my lament.
Why, oh why did I let him leave with his
dreams;
What were the dreams; those
fulfilled and even those unanswered?
Why did time leave me searching this way now,
hoping a part of him remains in me with the
same dreams?
Time has left me with precious memories of the
living past.
As dusk nears I find he
is living within my own memory
as I
fathom the future and the chimera of dreams for answers
to questions he too had wondered and
left unvoiced.
copyright Henry Paris 2013
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