A
Reflection for V Lent All Saints’
Episcopal Church, Southern Shores, NC April 2, 2017 Thomas E. Wilson, Rector
Walking With Jesus: Within Me
I had a friend come up to me last month and ask,
“Tom why do we pray for the dead? Let’s face it, they are dead; it is not like
they are going to change their lives.”
Every question is a good question. I said: “I think
there are two reasons; the first is that we give thanks to God for these people
that God has placed in our lives and for all the wonderful things they taught
us about living.”
We then talked about some people who had made real
differences in our lives and how they helped us to love. It is why we call this
place “All Saints” because of ALL the
people who have showed us how to love; if we added them all up and wrote their
names on our sign, we would get in trouble with the Town of Southern Shores
because we would be violating the town’s “size of sign” ordinances. Those
people who have died are still alive in us. I know that the spirits of some of
the people in this church who have died are still in this place. There is a
line in the Eucharistic Prayer just before the Sanctus, the “Holy, Holy, Holy”,
where we say, “Therefore joining with all the angels and archangels and all the
company of heaven . . .”; there are days
when, in my spirit, I swear I can still hear Jack Mann bellowing out the
Sanctus, and Lillian Oswald singing sweetly in the choir. Don’t get me started;
we don’t have time to list all the people I see in my spirit joining me. We count
the number of people here and, living or dead, the place is crowded. There is a
line from C.S. Lewis’ book The Great
Divorce describing Heaven and the Sacred: “There
is no other day. All days are present now. This moment contains all moments.”
Yet there is another dimension as well as to why we
pray for the dead. Sometimes people have
hurt us and we carry the emotional scars. We pray to forgive them as part of
our healing. We don’t forgive in order to get them off the hook and get them
out of the hell to which we wish we could consign them, but we forgive so we
don’t need to carry all that resentment which is poisoning our spirit.
Most of us learned about a God who kept a book of
sins where people who have done some good deeds get an admission ticket to the
“Pearly Gates Penthouses”, while those who have done bad things get drop-kicked
down into the dark, windowless basement rooms next to the furnace or the septic
tank. That is the fear-based concept of rewards and punishments after death.
The original idea
of an afterlife in the Jewish tradition was some sort of muddy, sleepy existence
after death; people did not return from death, and it was up to God to
determine what would happen next. There was a valley outside of Jerusalem
called “Gehenna” which had been used by the Canaanites as a shrine to the God
Moloch who demanded child sacrifice - children were thrown into the fire to
appease that God. The Jews viewed that place, Gehenna, as cursed because of
some of their leaders may have followed that practice. With the people’s
exposure to the Persians in exile and the Greeks who conquered them, there
developed the idea of rewards and punishments, supporting an idea of justice in
which people get what they deserve. Gehenna, with its lurid and shameful past,
was seen as a place for those who deserved to be cursed. We see this shift in
John the Baptizer and Jesus, who used figurative language to bring out
emotional content to help people to make a decision for this life - “Do you
want to live with God in a return to a Paradise or be totally cut off in what
would seem to be a God-forsaken place?” The church picked up this call to
conversion and ran with it by making it literal, with help from poets like
Dante and artists like Hieronymus Bosch.
I believe that God is a respecter of persons and
allows people to make decisions to live a life and die a death that is
consistent with wanting to be with God or telling God to get lost. Frederick
Buechner wrote in Whistling In The Dark
about the way God is perceived when dealing with sin:
“God is described as cursing them then, but in view of
his actions at the end of the story and right on through the end of the New
Testament, it seems less a matter of vindictively inflicting them with the
consequences than of honestly confronting them with the consequences. Because
of who they are and what they have done, this is the result.”
One of my favorite C. S. Lewis’ books is The Great Divorce, in which he presents
an allegory of how people make choices between heaven and Hell. In the book,
dead people live in muddy hovels with a constantly overcast sky, but there is a
bus leaving every day to take a free trip to heaven. Many go but few remain
because some don’t approve of heaven. Some want religion instead of Christ. An
observer notes:
“There
have been men before … who got so interested in proving the existence of God
that they came to care nothing for God himself… as if the good Lord had nothing
to do but to exist. There have been some who were so preoccupied with spreading
Christianity that they never gave a thought to Christ.”
Some want to condemn others, some are more comfortable
being right that they never loved or cared. Lewis notes:
“There are only two kinds of
people in the end: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and
those to whom God says, in the end, "Thy will be done." All that are
in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that
seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To
those who knock it is opened.”
Yet I believe
that God does not give up. In Lewis’ allegory, he put forth the concept that
God continues to send the bus each day. The lesson from Ezekiel for today tells
of how God sends the word of love even to the dry bones to call them back. The
Psalmist has the singer calling from the Pit, the depths of death itself, and
God answers with love.
I base my understanding of death on Isaiah’s hearing
of God’s song to the exiles in the 55th chapter:
For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven,
and do not return there until they have watered the earth,
making it bring forth and sprout,
giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater.
and do not return there until they have watered the earth,
making it bring forth and sprout,
giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater.
so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth;
it shall not return to me empty,
but it shall accomplish that which I purpose,
and succeed in the thing for which I sent it.
but it shall accomplish that which I purpose,
and succeed in the thing for which I sent it.
For you shall go out in joy,
and be led back in peace;
the mountains and the hills before you
shall burst into song,
and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.
and be led back in peace;
the mountains and the hills before you
shall burst into song,
and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.
I think we tend to see death as a sending off of a
person into exile. But death is not the
end, it is the gate of full return. God sings the song of welcoming return to
be fully joined in the river of energy that is God. That Song of God to the
exiles is the song that Jesus is singing in the lesson from John’s Gospel for
today. He calls for Lazarus to come back to the presence of God, for even the
dead hear the song of God as John had written six chapter earlier:
Very truly, I tell you, anyone
who hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life, and does not
come under judgment, but has passed from death to life. 'Very truly, I tell
you, the hour is coming, and is now here, when the dead will hear the voice of
the Son of God, and those who hear will live.
I was heavily
influenced by the Linn family. Matthew and Dennis were Jesuits, and Dennis left the
order to marry Shelia. They have led many retreats over the decades, which Pat
and I attended, and wrote books like Good Goats: Healing our Image of God, where they posit that there
is a hell but it is empty because God continually calls us, and God’s word will not
return empty until it accomplishes that which God purposes.
The purpose of my
life is not just to see how God through Jesus is only walking with me, before
me, behind me, in my strength and in my weakness, but also within me, so deep
within me that as Paul says in the 8th chapter of Romans, “For I am
convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, 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.”
I pray for the
dead not because I believe that my prayers have a special efficacy to be like
the sellers of indulgences claimed, but because of the Jesus that is in within
me, walking with me, calling out to the dead, the dead of life and the dead of
Spirit. My heart makes a choice to leave
the Hells of my own making and, walking with Jesus, joins Jesus’ words of love
for all of God’s children, in this world and the next, that all might come into
the arms of love for all eternity. I remind myself that each day I need to say
again to God, “Thy will be done.”
Walking
With Jesus: Within Me
Out
of darkness, depths where no light shines,
thought
myself safe where I’d not be reminded
of
all past choices made and eye turned blinded,
hoping
that they’d not be seen out of sightlines.
But
there they were; grinding away at my peace.
How
could I pretend that they were not visible,
my
evasions half believed only by the gullible,
seeming
like a hell which won’t ever cease?
“Come
forth, out of that where you needn’t be,
allowing
me to be within you so that your eyes
will
be my vision, my victories will be your tries
even
if you fail, for I am your brother you see
in
the hearts of all those who in life you meet
and
in my forgiving loving peace you’ll greet.”
