Joining in Singing the Music of the Spheres

A Reflection for VI Easter       All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, N.C. 

May 10, 2015                           Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Acts 10:44-48 Psalm 98 1 John 5:1-6 John 15:9-17

Joining in Singing the Music of the Spheres

The lesson from the Book of Acts for today is the ending of an episode in the life of the early church in which the people realized that God was not calling them not to be a tightly-knit group of believers who agreed on everything. Rather, they were to go outside their comfort area and encounter people who were different from them and discover that the same Holy Spirit binds them to these strangers. They were not to sing the same old songs but to learn to sing God’s new song.

“Sing to the Lord a New Song” is the opening line of Psalm 98. I just had a hard time getting past that line. The Psalm is a celebration of how the musicians and nature are all singing the same song, as the horn, lyre, lute, and voices join the hills and rivers in this New Song as old as creation. It was one of the reasons Steve and I chose the opening hymn, “Earth and All Stars”, which has the refrain “He (the LORD) has done marvelous things and I too will praise him (The Lord) with a new song.” The hymn was written by Herbert Brokering and the music composed by David Johnson. Brokering was a Lutheran pastor and poet who wrote more than a hundred hymns. He wrote this one in 1964 for the 90^th Anniversary of St. Olaf College where Johnson was the head of the Music department. Brokering viewed each part of the multifaceted university as a distinct entity able to praise God by its work. The Psalm celebrates the sharing of the same song by the musicians and nature, and Brokering expands on all things in nature as part of God’s music, from snowstorms in the winter, flowers and trees in the spring and summer, and rustling dry leaves in the fall. He hears the musical instruments blending with loud boiling test tubes and athletes and hammers and lectures and the prayers as all part of the great symphony of creation. 

 

The Hymn was included in the 1982 Hymnal, and it was the first time that hymn was exposed to Episcopalians who hate new things and who “loved” the old 1940 Hymnal. One of my Professors at Seminary was the head of the committee who put together the Hymnal, and this piece resonated with me because it reminded me of how a university is supposed to work - working together as we respect the building of a common good, a community of learning. By definition a college is a gathering together of colleagues to teach a discipline, and a university is a gathering of a number of colleges to create a whole, a universe of learning. I felt that I had been part of a community of learning when I taught at a college before I went to seminary where the relatively small Psychology, Sociology, and Social Work Departments would work together to create options to expand learning opportunities for our students rather than building our own reputations. 

 

My first posting after ordination was as a chaplain at a University, and it was a disappointment to me to see how the individual departments were so obsessed with going deeper in their separate areas and forgetting the nature of a university. The church I was working with had a bunch of academic types, but they were so busy getting research grants to keep their programs together and publishing paper after paper - many times variations of the same theme - in order to get tenure. It was part of my job to minister to the graduate students, junior faculty, and research fellows and their families being ground up in the maul of the “publish or perish” machine that regimented the undergraduates who took lots of classes but never got to the education of the whole person. The University was trying to move from being a very good regional university to being a top-tier University with a national reputation for tough, top-notch scholarship. People working so hard, so busy at being busy, so intent on competing with each other to climb the greasy pole of academe, they could not hear the music of the spheres. Milton wrote:

Aristotle ... imputed this symphony of the heavens ... this music of the spheres to Pythagorus. ... But Pythagoras alone of mortals is said to have heard this harmony ... If our hearts were as pure, as chaste, as snowy as Pythagoras' was, our ears would resound and be filled with that supremely lovely music of the wheeling stars. Then indeed all things would seem to return to the age of gold. Then we should be immune to pain, and we should enjoy the blessing of a peace that the gods themselves might envy.

Being out of sync with the fact that we are called to sing God’s creation song is not difficult in such an environment. However, this noise is not confined to institutions of higher learning but is symptomatic of the larger society. In an interview a few months ago, Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann opined

We in the United States live in a deathly social context that’s marked by consumerism and militarism and the loss of the common good. That ideological system causes us to be very afraid, to regard other people as competitors, or as threats, or as rivals. It causes us to think of the world in very frightened and privatistic forms. The gospel (however) very much wants us to think in terms of a neighborhood, in terms of being in solidarity with other people, in sharing our resources, and of living out beyond ourselves. The gospel contradicts the dominant values of our system, which encourages self-protection and self-sufficiency at the loss of the common good. The church is in some ways a reflection of those dominant values.

One of the things I like about our choir is that Steve Blackstock keeps working with the members of the choir about how they are to sing together; yes they have different parts, but the parts are not independent, competing sections but complementary constituents of a whole. They are not here to perform and have us “ooh and aah” at how good they are, but to lead us by showing how we can come together to sing the music of the cosmos of God. The choir does its work when it shares a “common good” of praise.

We are here as a church not to compete against the Methodists or Baptists or Roman Catholics or Presbyterians or Lutherans but to join them in one song to create a common good – to join with them in singing with the Lord the music of the spheres.

God is love Reflection

A Reflection for V Easter                                           All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, N.C.   

May 3, 2015                                                                  Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Acts 8:26-40               Psalm 22:24-30                       1 John 4:7-21              John 15:1-8

In today’s epistle lesson, the writer of the first letter of John wrote that God is love. At the Bible Study this week as we looked at the lessons for today, I asked each person to tell me about love. We got all sorts of responses, and mainly the respondents kept giving me examples and talking about how they wished that they could love like God loves. In the end they decided that the definition of love was a bit like Justice Potter Stewart’s statement in the 1964 U.S. Supreme Court opinion where he wrote that he could not define hard core pornography but “I know it when I see it.” 

Who is God and what is love? Aristotle posited that God was the “unmoved mover” which was developed by Thomas Aquinas as the standard definition of God in Christian faith. James Boice, a very popular 20^th Century conservative Evangelical preacher, proclaimed the exalted image of God as:  (1) creator of the universe standing over time and reigning over creation, (2) omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent, (3) accountable to no one, acting with complete freedom from all external influences.

Yet, in tension with this view of God is the view put forward by the writer of John’s epistles, “God is love”. C. S Lewis wrote:

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.

 

To define love is as fruitless a task as trying to define the indefinable of God; human words are just not capable of making a dent. The author of the Epistle uses the Greek word “Ginosko” which means “know”, but not in the way we “know” facts, but in the way we come to an understanding through experience and even in the way the word is used to mean intimate relationships. This kind of knowing is not book-knowledge but wisdom by living life fully aware in relationship. Last week I quoted from Teilhard de Chardin who defined matter as “spirit moving slowly enough to be seen”; in the same way, for me, God and love are not static nouns but verbs speeding by which slow down and caress us - and we almost always know it in hindsight when we are able to catch the fading action and say something like “Oh yes, now I know that is God, that is love.”  

Prose does not work, but maybe we can use poetry, like from the 2^nd verse of the Leonard Cohen song Suzanne:

And Jesus was a sailor
When he walked upon the water
And he spent a long time watching
From his lonely wooden tower
And when he knew for certain
Only drowning men could see him
He said "All men will be sailors then
Until the sea shall free them"
But he himself was broken
Long before the sky would open
Forsaken, almost human
He sank beneath your wisdom like a stone
And you want to travel with him
And you want to travel blind
And you think maybe you'll trust him
For he's touched your perfect body with his mind.

St. Clare, who loved St. Francis of Assisi, said:

We become what we love and who we love shapes what we become. If we love things, we become a thing. If we love nothing, we become nothing. Imitation is not a literal mimicking of Christ, rather it means becoming the image of the beloved, an image disclosed through transformation. This means we are to become vessels of God´s compassionate love for others.

If the writer of 1^st John is correct, and God is love, and then how we “know”, understand, love is how we can attempt to understand God. This week we have had a couple exercises in the national news on how we attempt to understand love. There was a riot in Baltimore caused yet again by the official use of violence that was perceived by many residents as being part of the legacy of racism in this country. In that riot a mother saw her only son preparing to participate in the violent response to the violence. She charged into him and dragged him out of the line of danger. She used violence to keep her son from being violent and from what she thought was dangerous activity that might subject him up to a violent response. I don’t agree that violence is a way to teach non-violence, but she loved her son so much that she decided to risk his approval of her and, at least in this way, lived into the prayer of St. Francis to “not so much seek to be loved as to love.” Love is sometimes saying no. I would have preferred if she had hugged him, but I understand her fear. It is usually fear that drives us to violence, and as the writer of 1^st John suggests, that “perfect love drives out fear”. If only we believed that, for one of the ways we try to justify violence is to focus in on the “wrath of God” as a metaphor to excuse our own actions. Jesus commanded the sword to be put away when he was being arrested.

Another example of our attempt to understand love is the argument before the U.S. Supreme Court this week on the issue of same-gender marriage. My own view is that it is a question of how we really define marriage. For instance, in Dare County and in North Carolina when I fill out a marriage license, I send it to the Register of Deeds, and that makes sense if you understand that for most of the history of marriage until probably the middle of the 19^th and early 20^th  century, marriage was a transfer of property from the father of the bride to the husband of the bride. English Common Law ruled that “the man and woman become one” and that one is the husband.  When the justices asked about “traditional” marriage, they should be looking at ALL the traditi         on.  In the Prayer Book with which I was raised, the Marriage ceremony had the mandatory question, “Who giveth this woman to be married to this man?” In the 1979 revision it is an option to ask, “Who presents this woman to be married to this man?”  In our heritage, if marriage is a contract, a legal contract by the state, certified by the state, then it does seem to be discrimination by a state to deny access to a contract. Contracts are not based on love but awareness that there is an exchange of goods and services between the party of the first part and the party of the second part. In that way it fits the usual definition of love in popular culture, which is that love is a cathexis, an emotional and mental investment, in a person, thing, or idea for the perceived benefit of the person doing the investment. One of the other Supremes, Diana Ross, sang about that kind of love all the time: “Baby love, my Baby love, I need you, oh how I need you.” It will be interesting to see how the other nine “Supremes” rule if marriage is about getting needs met. The state usually holds that contracts are null and void if there is an inequitable exchange of goods and services, or return on the investment, or the property was misrepresented, and the state calls that a divorce.

However, one of the arguments used is that marriage is a “sacred institution.” I am always thankful for the Bill of Rights which keeps the government out of the role of defining what is sacred; I am more than a little leery of the government telling me what God looks like. I see marriage as sacred, so that when we are able to see what love looks like between two people, we get a glimpse of what God looks like. Jesus and Paul saw even in the inequality of marriage in their time that God’s love could be made manifest as the couple followed Christ and respected, honored, forgave, and sacrificed themselves to each other.  I see God as graceful, who gives a covenant of love rather than a contract of obligations, and therefore see the couple in a marriage as being “ministers” of the sacrament – their ministry is to love each other and show us what God looks like in daily life. I cannot do magic and make a marriage sacred - I can only pray that the couple will empty themselves out of their own agendas so that they will be able to forgive, find hope, and love. If sacred marriage is the willingness to be humble ministers who understand the need for a power greater than themselves to help them keep their vows of mutual commitment to love, I have a hard time seeing what gender has to do with it. When Pat and I got married, no one in the government of Virginia quizzed us about whether our decision not to have children would make our marriage less sacred.

 All agree the Supreme Court will be making an historical statement, but time will tell if this case will be another Brown vs. the Board of Education” or another “Dred Scott” decision. However, the most important decision is the one we make each day in making a decision to love as God loves today.

Names that smell like sheep

A Reflection for IV Easter                                             All Saints’ Episcopal, Southern Shores, NC April 26, 2015                                                                   Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Acts 4:5-12          Psalm 23       1 John 3:16-24        John 10:11-18

Let us pray: Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be always acceptable to you, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer. In the name of Jesus we pray.   Amen.

That prayer ends with “in the name of Jesus”; so what am I trying to say when I say “in the name of Jesus”? Is it a magic formula or what?

When I do confirmation classes, I usually ask people about their names; what do the names mean to them? Sometimes they answer that their name means they are different from someone else. Sometimes they wish they had a different name because it has become a burden - a version of the old that old Johnny Cash song with lyrics by Shel Silverstein, “A Boy Named Sue”.

So - what does your name mean to you? Think about that for a minute.  Anyone want to share?

 I have no idea why my father named me Thomas, but over the years I have come to know that Thomas means “twin”, and I find that at times I am the twin of the Thomas in John’s Gospel.  I pledge to be there like Thomas promised Jesus, but when the excrement hits the fan, I start to wonder if I need more proof. 

I know why I was given my middle name, Everitt; my father admired his father, Everitt Wyche Wilson, and he wanted his son  to grow up to be a man of honor and vision. Whenever I do something honorable or have vision, it is not me but the Spirit, the personality of Everitt Wyche Wilson and William Everitt Wilson that lives in me that gives me the strength to do it. Whenever I fall short, I do not live into the name that was given to me at my birth, the real self I was created to be. Still working on that.

The name of Jesus is the Greek form of the Hebrew Yehoshuah or Joshua, which means God (YHWH) delivers, or saves, or will deliver or save. The original Joshua was the follower of Moses who took the people out of the wilderness and into the Promised Land. The name was very popular since Israel was always surrounded by enemies and the people longed for someone who could deliver them from those who threatened them and bring wholeness and Shalom, peace, to their lives.  So when Peter says that the man born lame was healed, delivered, saved, from being a cripple and brought to wholeness by the name of Jesus, he is making a pun on the Jesus name.

Like my middle name Everitt, names carry personality as well. The early followers of Jesus had a mystical union with the Risen Lord. Jesus was not up in heaven but inside their very selves. In the Book of John when Jesus breathes his Spirit onto the disciples, they take that Spirit into their very lives and Jesus the Christ lives within them. They acknowledge in this story that it was not Peter and John who healed the man born lame but it was the living personality of Jesus in them that was able to deliver, save, redeem, make whole, and heal this man. When they live into the name of Jesus, they live into who they are at the core of their being and are able to bring about healing, deliverance, making whole.

There is a fondness for the phrase “In the name of Jesus” in some parts of the healing ministry in the wider church, and it seems to be used as a magic formula.  But whenever the ministers of the Healing Team in this church come forward to offer prayers of healing, they do not come out of their own power, but out of the humility of emptying themselves out of their own agendas so that they live into that mystical union with Jesus living in them and in the space between us. Their prayers ask for wholeness, peace, saving in the name of Jesus.

The writer of the Epistle lesson for today in 1^st John talks about being able to lay down one’s life for another and helping a brother or sister in need, thus living into the name of Jesus. The writer uses the phrase “believing in the name of Jesus” because, for the author and for me, belief is not a mental exercise but a commitment to live the Spirit of the Risen Christ in our lives on a daily basis.

We see this redeemer, savior, helper, bringer into wholeness and peace in the Psalm for today where God, in the metaphor of the Shepherd, is the one walking with the sheep, saving, protecting, making whole in the community gathered around the union with God. That metaphor of the Shepherd is reinterpreted when the Gospel writer of John remembers Jesus saying he is the living metaphor of the Shepherd, he is the one who held the smelly sheep in his arms becoming like what Dr.  Lynn Anderson wrote in 1996, “A shepherd who smells like the sheep”.

Pope Francis in his Maundy Thursday Homily in 2013 a month after he was installed urged his clergy to be out among the people who need them;

“The priest who seldom goes out of himself … misses out on the best of our people, on what can stir the depths of his priestly heart. … This is precisely the reason why some priests grow dissatisfied, lose heart and become in a sense collectors of antiquities or novelties — instead of being shepherds living with ‘the smell of the sheep.’ This is what I am asking you — be shepherds with the smell of sheep.” 

John’s community does not write John’s Gospel to do a biography but, as the ending of the Thomas story suggests: 

Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus said to him, “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book.  But these are written so that you may continue to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.

I think that Thomas lived into his name, the twin, that moment when he allowed himself to go into the wounds of Jesus and into the compassion of Jesus to become the twin of Jesus, as he entered into mystical union with his true being.  All those who follow Jesus are called to go and become shepherds who will smell like the sheep. Jesus did not spend much time talking about going to church, or about life after death but about life in union with him in daily life.. I think he assumed that he was helping us live for today and that since God always redeems, saves, makes whole, then God’s love, which does not end, will continue to do that in this life and in the next.

Each week when we come here and take the bread and wine, we remember, we  re -member, enter into again, that mystical union as we are taking the body of Christ, the name of Jesus, into our lives. 

A Reflection for The Third Sunday of Easter- April 19, 2015

A Reflection for Easter III                                         All Saints’ Church, Southern Shores, NC   

 April 19, 2015                                                           Thomas E. Wilson, Rector

Acts 3:12-19               Psalm 4                        1 John 3:1-7                Luke 24:36b-48
Coming Back Home

Bill and Sharon Capps 1969

First of all I want to say that I’m sorry for missing last week’s service; I would have preferred to stay with you, but I went to Roanoke, Virginia to the church home of a longtime friend of Pat’s and mine. Pat knew her for forty years and I for almost 31 years. Sharon’s funeral service had been held on Saturday afternoon. Sharon had visited us and come to church here in the Outer Banks a couple times, but the last time Pat and I were in that church was six years ago, also during Easter week, when her husband, Bill, was buried after he died on Maundy Thursday. Bill’s funeral had been on Easter Monday at 10:00 in the morning, and Sharon died last week at 10:10 AM Easter Monday, and after being apart in life but never in spirit for six years, they were finally reunited. Bill had been the church’s organist and Sharon, who had been a music teacher, was the director of the choir, and OH the outpouring of song as they followed Sharon’s written instructions - she had revised the order of service four times in the past six years. The tables were put up after the overflow crowd was cleared out of the Parish Hall to go out to the columbarium to place Sharon’s ashes next to Bill’s. The tables were groaning with the offerings of love from parishioners for all of us who knew and loved Bill and Sharon. Pat and I wanted to hug their grown children and to comfort another longtime friend of ours, Susan, the Rector of that church. Holy Week is exhausting and burying a friend is hard, and the combination is very hard. To top that off, Susan’s husband, Michael, had heart bypass surgery during Holy Week. 

 I am also sorry that I missed the service here this last week because I hear Pastor Al Douglass, the Lutheran replacement, was a very good preacher and a fine presider of the services. I hate it when that happens - I prefer replacements that leave the congregation longing for my return. I tend to have a competitive streak within me, and I was confronted with that side of myself last Sunday. Since I had already written a sermon for All Saints’, I suggested to Susan at dinner on Saturday night with her and Michael that I could fill in for her on Sunday morning.  Actually the dinner had been provided by those same loving parishioners who had more than enough love for Susan and Michael. She thanked me and said that a retired Episcopal Priest who helps out there had already volunteered. Well, I also knew this priest from the time I was first ordained. Thirty years ago when I was very arrogant - I still am, but even more so then - I had occasion to hear him preach, and while he was much beloved in the Diocese, in his church, and by fellow clergy, I sniffed in derision at the altar of my ego at how much better I was than he.  I have come to realize that the Risen Lord is in the space between my ego and another person, and I don’t need to keep proving my worth to the One who loves us both.

On Sunday morning at 8:00, I arrived a few minutes late and settled into one of the back pews. They were doing Rite One. I groaned to myself because I am so used to the cadences of Rite Two and even to our variations, but I was prepared to smile tolerantly at the coming sermon. My smugness evaporated as the service was comforting and the Preacher was right on target. The truth is that we can only fully feast at God's table when we send our own egos out to lunch.

As in the Gospel lesson for today from Luke, the Risen Lord was there with us as we gathered together and ate and drank, along with Bill and Sharon. So it had been all week long. The Risen Lord was here when we at this church did Bob Strickland’s service as we acknowledged each other’s wounds of loss and as we knew Bob’s presence on the other side of the Altar. We gathered to pray together and sing lustily, and then the Hospitality crew coordinated a wonderful time of fellowship in the Parish Hall where we hugged, mourned, and celebrated

In the Acts of the Apostles lesson for today, Peter says to the people who were either silent or complicit when Jesus was crucified, "And now, friends, I know that you acted in ignorance”. He is telling them that what they were doing to this man Jesus was because they were ignorant of the reality that this stranger from Galilee was really God. All acts of silence or complicity in the face of injustice, cruelty, and violence are not just against fellow humans but, because of our self-centered ignorance, they are also against God. 

When I was three, four, and five years old, our maid in Salvador would try to drum it in my head that all my acts of selfishness and meanness had a much larger dimension. She would say, “Oh, Tomasito - Nino, you are such a good child, but when you do something like this, you are driving a nail into the hands of Jesus.”

As I grew up, I dismissed her admonition as superstitious gibberish. Yet, as I have walked deeper in my faith, I realize she was telling me the truth - that when I pursue my own selfish agendas, ignoring the harm to others, or remain silent and complicit in the face of injustice, cruelty, and violence, with my ego as the center of my world, then there is not a dime’s worth of difference between me and the people that Peter is addressing. One of the most sobering moments of the Palm Sunday and Good Friday liturgies is the identification with the crowd calling for the death of Jesus that the congregation is invited into when they read the lines of the crowd. Also in the Good Friday liturgy, when we pound the nails into the cross, we hear the sound of our hammers and nails, feel the of vibration of the hammer each time it strikes the nail, and those sounds and sensations blend with the echoes of the hammer and nails of two thousand years ago. 

In the movie version of the John Steinbeck novel Grapes of Wrath, the hunted hero, the Jesus archetype, Tom Joad, played by Henry Fonda gives a final speech:

"I'll be all around in the dark. I'll be ever'-where - wherever you can look. Wherever there's a fight so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there. I'll be in the way guys yell when they're mad - I'll be in the way kids laugh when they're hungry an' they know supper's ready. An' when the people are eatin' the stuff they raise, and livin' in the houses they build - I'll be there, too."

On the other side, our church thought we did the service and reception out for love for Bob and Ellen, and the Roanoke church thought they did the service and reception out of love for Bill and Sharon, and both are partly true. But on a deeper level we did it for the glory of God from which all of love flows. Jesus said, “If you do this to the least of these, you do it to me.” The Risen Lord is always is the space between us and all acts of love are acts of love for God.  Every service we attend, every reception we help put together, every meal in which we partake, there is a guest who is also the real host.

This is the Easter Season which follows Lent. In the forty days of Lent, we focused in on our individual and corporate sin, but now in the fifty days of Easter, let us work on how we can best share that God-given love with this broken world.

April Tomes for Newsletter

Tom's Tomes for April
In the last couple months we have had a lot of deaths and I mourn them as I see how the deaths have ripped families apart and me as well. Ben Jonson, a contemporary of Shakespeare, chided those who mourned with this rhyme: “He that fears death, or mourns it, in the just,/Shews of the Resurrection little trust.” 

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin 20th Century Jesuit Paleontologist and Mystic opined: “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.” Going through the human experience means that we will go through all that it means to be human; pain and joy, sadness and ecstasy, love and alienation, fear and courage, defeat and victory, faith and doubt, life and death – all that flesh is heir to. When the Christ poured out Godself and became Jesus; he suffered and enjoyed all that it meant to be human. 

However, as Spiritual beings we cannot stop being; we only change. The teachings of Jesus help me to live to the fullest IN this human life to make the world a better placein which our children's children can live and move and have their being. We face that God's love is infinite and since Divine love does not die, so also we will live in that infinite love. I do not know what that life will look like in that new stage of spiritual existence and the Bible only used symbols to hint at the indescribable but it seems to me meaningless speculation to nail down literal descriptions of streets of Gold when poetry is my best guide. 

I turn to George Herbert's The Dawning:

Awake, sad heart, whom sorrow ever drowns;/ Take up thine eyes, which feed on earth;/ Unfold thy forehead, gathered into frowns; /Thy Saviour comes, and with Him mirth: /Awake, awake, / And with a thankful heart His comforts take. /But thou dost still lament, and pine, and cry, /And feel His death, but not His victory. / Arise, sad heart ; if thou dost not withstand, /Christ's resurrection thine may be ; /Do not by hanging down break from the hand /Which, as it riseth, raiseth thee: /Arise, Arise; /And with His burial linen drie thine eyes./Christ left His grave-clothes, that we might, when grief /Draws tears or blood, not want a handkerchief. 


Shalom:
tom+