Dry Bones

Graveyard Vespers

30 October 2019 C

Reading: The Valley of the Dry Bones

Homily:

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

We are no strangers to tombs.

Death baffled the early Christians—first and foremost Jesus’ death, of course. After such high expectations, after such messianic furor, to have the Son of Man, Incarnate God, the Heir of David’s Royal Line, ignominiously put to death upon a Cross was beyond shocking. It was shattering, to Peter and to Judas alike.

Only on the Third Day, in the Light of the Resurrection, did things start to become clear. Only then could they see meaning, could they find purpose, in Jesus’ death. Upon that Cross He descended into Hades, bound the devil, harrowed hell, and rose again to Heaven with all the ransomed dead resplendent in His train. Thus did defeat before the eyes of the Roman world become God’s greatest triumph, trampling down death by death, filling hell up to bursting with the Breath and Life and self-giving Love of our God made flesh in Jesus Christ our Lord.

This was radical stuff, of course. The sort of thing that could get a person killed. And so those early Christians knew martyrdom, as the full power of state-sanctioned violence came down like a hammer upon the people of the Prince of Peace. Church could get you killed, you and all you loved. But we came to believe that those who died for Truth, those who died for Love, were themselves joined in some real and mystical way to Christ’s own death on the Cross, and thus to Christ’s own Resurrection. Death became, in the hearts and souls of Christians, the doorway to everlasting Life.

And so the remains of the martyrs—the remains of the saints—were gathered up from the crosses and colosseums and reverenced as holy relics, pieces of people who were not dead, who lived now in Christ and would rise again from the earth on that day when the world is at long last remade. The bones of the martyrs were the Body of Christ, and so became sacred; for here in death did God meet us as the victim of our violence, taking all of our rage and fear and hate into His Body, into Himself, and drowning them in the infinite ocean of His Love poured out for the world from the Cross.

In those early centuries, when faith remained punishable by death, urban Christians met in the safest place they could find: in the catacombs beneath their cities, amongst the bones of the dead. And they celebrated the Eucharist atop the tombs of saints, rejoicing that as Christ had died and now lives, as the martyrs died to rise in Him, so too shall we one day join our brothers and sisters whose spirits rejoice in the Risen Lord even as their bones lie mouldering in the earth, awaiting the Resurrection of the dead.

By the time Christianity was legalized, literally coming up from underground, we’d gotten used to celebrating with bones. We still buried our dead in our sanctuaries, with altars erected atop the bones of the bishops. When we ran out of room, we inhumed them as close to the living as we could, surrounding our churches and chapels with graves. Death, once the enemy of God—once the chasm torn through the fabric of Creation—has been defeated, has been tamed, so that now she serves to remind us of our earthly finitude, of our dependency upon God, and of our eventual mortality which will in time come due. Thus she beckons us out from this vale of tears into the true Life which is to come.

So do not think us morbid when we meet amongst the graves. We are simply communing with our forebears in the faith. For as Christ has died, and they have died, so we shall die as well. And as Christ is Risen, so shall we arise. Death is no longer something to be feared, though we shall never love her as we love the gift of Life. Just let her do her job, in the time which now remains: reminding us that all things weak and wicked, all things cruel and cold, shall pass away as shadows that evaporate in the sun—while life, true Life, raises us forever up from glory unto glory, and can never die again.

Thanks be to Christ, who has conquered death and hell, and freed us from the fears of our ancient fallen foes.

A happy Hallowtide indeed, to all you blessed souls.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.