Saturday, April 19, 2014

Baptized into Christ's Death.



A Homily For Easter Eve                                           All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, NC  April 19, 2014                                                                 Thomas E. Wilson, Rector
Exodus 14:10-31; 15:20-21 [Israel's deliverance at the Red Sea]                  Ezekiel 36:24-28 [A new heart and a new spirit]   Zephaniah 3:14-20 [The gathering of God's people]             Romans 6:3-11            Matthew 28:1-10
Paul in the Epistle reading from Romans for today tells us that “we have been baptized into Christ’s death”. That is heavy stuff. In the early church Baptism was a time when the person being held under to water tasted death. They changed their name to a name by which they would be known in this underground organization dedicated to following a ruler other than Caesar in their life. To be a Christian meant to die to the world and enter a new kind of reality. Later on, the church no longer continued as a criminal enterprise but became part of the prevailing culture. The institution gained a great deal of prestige in this world, but it was at a cost of, at times, losing it soul.

The central message of the Gospel is that we have to go through death - not around it, not over it, but through the void. Jesus did not want to die; he spent hours praying, sweating blood, to hold on to life because it is precious. There are so many things that are lovely that we want to hold on to, to cling to. Who would we be if we are dead? What would we have if we lose everything that defines us?

Thirty two years ago I did my chaplaincy training at the University Hospital at Chapel Hill, and I was assigned to a floor in which patients were dying on a regular basis. I had given up smoking my pipe when I went to seminary the year before because I would not be able to afford the kind of pipe tobacco I enjoyed. In the meantime I smoked other people’s cigarettes, and so it seemed a cruel joke to have me on this wing, thinking that at times I was dying for a smoke, and I might indeed have set myself up for dying because of my smoking, Since I was going to be around people who were dying, one of the first assignments given to me by my mentors was to write a reflection on my own death; to enter into a prayerful meditation on what it would be like to die. Most of us want to continue the denial of our own death. We want to be fat, dumb, and happy until our last thought, which would be, “Hey, what was that?” In his book The Denial of Death, Ernest Becker says: "... the idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity--activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny for man."

At the end of that summer, I stopped smoking for good but I continued to work on meditating about my death. I find I have to keep doing it in order to grow deeper in my faith, to die to myself. To steal and paraphrase from the opening paragraph of Melville’s Moby Dick:
It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation (of my soul). Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off- then, I account it high time to get to sea (into the depths of my soul) as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball.

The death of self is the only way we can come to the true self, the deeper self, the connection with the divine, without the constant ego thought “What is in it for me?” Kathleen Dowling Singh, in an article “Living in the Light of Death”  and quoted by Richard Rohr  in his mediation for Maundy Thursday, said: “Surrendering the exclusivity of self-reference—in love, for love, arms wide open on the cross—he (Jesus) emerged into Christ consciousness, transcending the smallness of self, obliterating the separation self imposes.”

But we want to hold on so that we don’t have to face the void. In the lessons for the Easter Eve Vigil, the theme of entering into the unknown keeps coming up. The Hebrew children have to walk into the Valley of Death as the waters of the sea form a wall on the right and the left. In the Ezekiel passage the people of the exile have to give up the old heart and spirit of self , to die to the old self in order to receive the new heart and spirit, to be born into a new life of being fully connected to God. In the Gospel Lesson from Matthew the women want to hold onto the feet of the Risen Lord and worship him. They want to hold on to that moment, to say Jesus’ death was just a blip on their radar, but he seems to be back like the good old days.  It is the idea of petrifying that moment, making sure it does not change. But Jesus is not a resuscitation – he did not go up to the gate and came back - but a resurrection.  He went through death and came out the other side. He tells these women whom he loves that they have to let him go and to be open to the unknown future., as they have to be open to the new future. They have to die to the past, however good is was, however strong the nostalgia is, die to the past in order to be alive to the real present, and to the future, of new life.

That is the struggle of the church, for we want to hold on, to safely and permanently set in stone, to petrify, to set in amber forever, but it is only when we are able to let go, when we are open to the places we cannot control, and go into the void of the unknown, the mystery of the unknowable, that we are able to live into eternal and abundant life.

On this Easter Eve, we gather in the dark, entering again into the death of Christ in order to trust in a new light.  We go through the valley of the shadow of death, rising with Christ, saying: “Hallelujah, Christ is Risen! The Lord is Risen Indeed, Hallelujah!”

No comments:

Post a Comment