The Limits of Death

Hallowtide Cemetery Vespers

A Reading from the Canticle of the Creatures:

Praised be You, my Lord,

through those who give pardon for Your love,

and bear infirmity and tribulation.

Blessed are those who endure in peace

for by You, Most High, shall they be crowned.

Praised be You, my Lord, through our Sister Bodily Death,

from whom no one living can escape.

Woe to those who die in mortal sin.

Blessed are those whom death will find in Your most holy will,

for the second death shall do them no harm.

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

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

Have a care for my poor benighted children. With one parent a presbyter, and the other an undertaker, our dinner conversations tend to lean toward the recently deceased. Our daughters find this morbid, yet for my wife and myself it is simply our usual avocations. We aren’t trying to be macabre. We just deal a lot with death.

The backend of my grandparents’ property abutted an old Pennsylvania Dutch cemetery. Here I would regularly walk with family, seeing how far back the dates could go—1700s, 1600s—attempting to read the names and years, to glean other bits of information. Graveyards for me were never frightening places. Instead they imbued me with a sense of serenity. Here was my history. Here were my forebears at rest. Here lay the remains of those whose questions had been answered, for answers do await beyond the veil.

The dead were at peace in the Lord. Someday, I would join them. I knew this from a very early age.

Philosophy, wrote Plato, is nothing other than our preparation for death. And this he held as neither threat nor lament. True wisdom, divine wisdom, keeps its eye beyond this life, to the transcendent; to the Good, the True, and the Beautiful; to God. This does not divorce us from the world, but reminds us that there are higher things, which ought to be our lodestone, our North Star. We have only so much time here below, so make the best of it. Love, and learn, and serve your neighbor, for none of us are getting out alive.

Most of spirituality is learning to let go. We must recognize that so very much of what we value here below is already passing away. Nothing mortal is permanent. We are always in flux. And this liberates us, to be calm, to be generous, to be compassionate. All of us are pilgrims, walking each other home. So focus on what matters. Focus on those things that already exceed the world: goodness, truth, and beauty; faith, hope, and love. Enjoy the ride. Embrace the changes. Stand up for each other. And always be grateful.

These are the lessons of the grave. These are the bounds set upon us by our death. And to place our trust in what is good in spite of these limitations—that’s faith.

Christians, of course, have rather a lot to say about death. The preëminent symbol of our faith is a cross, after all. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is built over Jesus’ tomb. We believe, in Jesus Christ, that God becomes a Man: the Creator entering Creation; the finite containing the infinite. And this Jesus loved us so very much that He forgave us even as we murdered Him, even as we hurled Him down to the deepest pits of hell.

And there He has conquered! There is now nowhere we can go, where Christ has not led the way. If we fly up into Heaven, He’s there. If we fall down into Hades, He’s there. He preceded us into death in order to shatter the grip of the grave. He filled up death to bursting with His Spirit and His Blood. We as Christians do not believe that God made death. But in Christ He does remake it. He transforms the grave, resurrects it, as the womb of our rebirth—such that even death is now redeemed. She has shown us her true face, and she is Change.

We come here this evening to remember those who have gone before us and are at rest. Moreover, we come to reaffirm that they are neither dead nor gone; that their true life has only just begun; and that they are, in a sense, more real now than we have ever been. If nothing else, one must admire the Christian defiance of death: to assert that the tomb has no dominion over love; that we are still theirs, and they are still ours, together in the risen life of Jesus Christ our Lord.

When we gather at the altar rail, they kneel there beside us: my father, my grandparents, my sister; my friends who perished much too soon. Their stories have not ended. Death negates nothing of the lives that they have lived. Rather, life negates death. Life outlives death. Someday, all of this mess of chaos and destruction here below will be resurrected, will be made right, in such a way to redeem the past, and to make sense of the whole.

Death is not the end. It has never been the end. “Praised be You, O Lord,” wrote St Francis of Assisi, “through our Sister Bodily Death, from whom no-one living can escape.” In Christ, death is not to be feared. In Christ, we can welcome her as our sister at the end. She remains for us the last frontier, the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns—until that day when Jesus comes with all the saints triumphant.

My brothers and my sisters, we who have been baptized into Christ have already died the death that matters. We were joined by Baptism to Jesus’ death, already died for us, that we need never fear death again; and to Jesus’ own eternal life, already here begun. So live now, with whatever time we each have left within this world, free from fear, free from anxiety, free from the shackles of the loamy earth of the grave. You have been resurrected! You are the Body of Jesus Christ sent out to save to the world.

And every saint who’s ever been, and all who’ll ever be, are right here beside you, before you and behind you. And they will welcome each of us home, when our pilgrimage is done.

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

Pertinent Links

RDG Stout

Blog: https://rdgstout.blogspot.com/

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X: https://twitter.com/RDGStout

St Peter’s Lutheran

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Website: https://www.stpetersnymills.org/

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Nidaros Lutheran

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YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@nidaroschurch6026