Sunday
March 14
Love Outlasts Death
By Marsh Chapel
Service in Commemoration of Lives Lost in COVID
Click here to hear the full service
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Frontispiece
For a full year, we have been worshipping in diaspora, our sanctuary empty. We have by grace and the work of WBUR and many others continued to broadcast our service around the globe, come 11am on Sunday. For the sustained efforts of those at every turn who make this service possible and available, we are endlessly grateful. Today we turn our minds and hearts to those who have died in this last year, near and far, and, especially, to their loved ones, perhaps including you, who bear the losses to this day. If you have lost someone this COVID year, our sermon and liturgy today here are meant especially for you.
One of the great challenges and difficulties of the last year is found here. Across the country and indeed around the world, we have not been able fully to gather, to assemble, to worship in person, at the hour of death. We have lost loved ones without the ability or capacity to face the losses in full in the full company of the church, the church militant, even as we give over our loved ones to God and to the church triumphant. Later on, later this year, some of this we will again be able to do, even as, in the breach, to some small measure, at gravesides and in small circles, we have done so a bit in the last year. But we should be frank, candid with one another, and with ourselves, that this particular labor of love is an unfinished labor, just now.
We have not yet been able to grieve, in church, the loss of our loved ones. We have not yet been able to remember in public, in full, in sermon, in eulogy, the manifold gifts and graces of their lives. We have not been able to share the acceptance together of their deaths, by singing them home, singing them on to that greater light and farther shore. We have not been able, as the body of Christ, the fellowship of love, the assembly of believers, to join our voices in real time, in affirmation, in affirmation that love outlasts death. Today, we make a start, or a further step, in grieving, remembering, accepting and affirming. There will be more, many more, times and occasions, with which to continue the work, in the months ahead. And it is work, good and honest work. Mourning is work. It takes time, energy, attention, focus, investment, prayer and love. Conclusively, to mourn means for you to need to do something in mourning.
As a son, you may have buried my mother. As a brother, you may have remembered and eulogized your siblings’ mother. As a pastor, you may have given over parishioners, sisters and brothers in Christ, one by one. In a University community, you may have faced and mourned the losses of students, faculty, staff, alumni, relatives and others of the University community. As an itinerant Methodist preacher, you may have had to sing alone ‘Blessed be the Tie that binds’, rather than, by custom, gathering around the casket of a fellow preacher, to sing the hymn with others in ministry. As an American, you may have wept at the stories of those taken, young and old, rich and poor, black and white, conservative and liberal. And, as a child of God, you may have lamented without ever fully grasping the depth or breadth of such lament, the deaths of others, other children of the living God. And I may have, too.
Wherever you are, whoever you are, in your time of loss, in your year of mourning, this morning as we face our mourning, we feel for you, we are sorry for your bereavement, we reach out with invisible hands to hold you in an invisible embrace, and listen with invisible ears as you utter your prayers of lament. Whatever else may be, at least hear this, you are not alone, you are not alone, you are not alone.
Ring the bells that still can ring, forget your perfect offering, there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in. (L Cohen)
So, this morning, in this liturgical sermon, in this homiletical liturgy, we call you forward to join together: To grieve. To remember. To accept. To affirm.
To Grieve
We call you forward to grieve.
Jesus meets us today in love and with love. His appearance, in word and music, utterance and hymn, takes the form of honest grief, honesty about grief, good grief.
Out of all manner and mixture of feelings, grief, usually unnamed and unspoken, can bring us to worship. We do not come usually or specifically to church to grieve, unless, perhaps in attendance at funeral or memorial services. We do not say, slipping into the pew, today I am here to grieve, in grief, grieving. Grief is bigger, miles higher and longer than that, beyond depiction, beyond description. Yet alongside us, walking alongside us, come Sunday, it may be, paces grief, our grief.
Grief is a kind of sacrament. It has a mysterious cast and quality to it, something well afar from our own control, like the grace given us in the Gospel, in that way. Nor is it enough for the preacher to utter the word ‘grief’ for us to greet grief ourselves, of a Sunday morning, on personal terms. Here is where memory may come in. The memory of a partially remembered verse, or homily, weeks later, may trigger something that then allows you to say to yourself, Well my goodness, that is what this is, this mid-winter something alongside me: it is my grief. You don’t have to count Citizen Kane your favorite or only favorite film to recognize the cavernous, celestial, capacious range of grief. Grief takes years.
Robert Hass says: the movement of grief has something in it of the desert’s bareness and of its distances. the movement of grief has something in it of the desert’s bareness and of its distances.
Here is our affirmation, in grief, our affirmation in mourning:
It is enough that faith knows
That Jesus stands by me
Who patiently draws near His passion
And leads me too along the arduous path
And prepares for me my resting place
It is enough that faith knows
That Jesus stands by me
Who patiently draws near His passion
And leads me too along the arduous path
And prepares for me my resting place
Let Us Ring the Bells of Grief
To Remember
We call you forward to remember.
“It is no small matter whether one habit or the other is inculcated in us from early childhood; on the contrary, it makes a considerable difference, or, rather, all the difference.” (repeat). (Jonathan Edwards).
Remember, real religion involves religious affections. Give some consideration this morning to your own religious affections. Your experience. Your dispositions, inclinations, predilections, and affections. Remember.
Just before our gospel reading today, Nicodemus, thrice mentioned in John, has departed. You remember his interview with Jesus. He asks about being born from above. He asks about resurrection life. He asks about spirit. In the nighttime interview, Jesus answers him: You must be born anew. Your religion, your religious affection, counts on this. Our gospel today takes the same theme further.
God is love. Or Love is God. Eternal life is trust in God who is love. The doorway to eternal life is trust. The doorway to eternal life is trust. We learn this in our experience. This trust is a gift, God’s gift. With open hands we receive the gift of God. We do not achieve or earn or create this trust. It is given to us. The gift comes wrapped, belief and trust and faith and knowledge come gift wrapped in meaning, belonging, empowerment—in the beloved community.
To make sure the hearer and reader of his gospel get the full measure of his point, the author of John uses a great old word, judgment. KRISIS in Greek. You hear our own word, CRISIS, there. Until John, more or less, judgment was reserved for the end of time, the eschaton, the apocalypse. John, as is resonantly clear here, says something different. Judgment is not at the end of time. Judgment is now. Judgment does not await the arrival of the Son of Man on the clouds of heaven, or the millennial reign, or wars and rumors of wars, or signs of the times. No. The critical moment is now. John has replaced speculation with spirit. John has replaced eschaton with eternal life. John has replaced Armageddon with the artistry of every day. John has courageously left behind that to which most of the rest of the New Testament still clings. John has replaced then with now. What courage! The upshot of this change, as recorded in our Scripture today, is the near apotheosis of experience. And as an ineffable mystery, (you) shall learn in (your) own experience, Who He is (Schweitzer).
In other words, the ancient near eastern apocalyptic, of heaven and end of time judgment, still present in various religious traditions, as we have tragic and sorrowful occasion to see in our own time and struggles with violence, is replaced. In your experience. This is the judgment. The light has come into the world.
As my grandmother used to ask, ‘Are you walking in the light?’
Likewise, we notice that the letter to the Ephesians, written by a student of Paul, makes a complementary affirmation. By grace you are saved through faith (he writes this twice, or an editor has added a second rendering). The phrase, both in its repetition and in its cadence, seems clearly to be a prized inheritance for the Ephesians. God is loving you into love and freeing you into freedom. God first loved us. You are not made whole by your doing. You are God’s beloved, and so, by being loved, by divine love, you are made whole, made healthy, made well, ‘perfected’. Both in our successes and in our failures, we truly depend upon a daily, weekly hearing of this promise and warning. In our experience, we are given to trust God. Our response in actions will then forever be overshadowed by real love, by God’s love.
Let us ring the bells of remembrance
To Accept
We call you forward to acceptance. We pray for a measure of acceptance. We pray for a measure of acceptance.
Gracious God in whom we are all interrelated, interdependent and one in humanity
Thou whose grace embraces all, and in whom violence to our brothers and sisters is violence unto each of us
We grieve for, remember and honor those whose lives were lost in this last year
Give us grace to accept the reality of these losses
Give us grace to accept
Especially we pray for the communities of faith across the country, and around the globe
In these troubling and tumultuous times when bigotry and prejudice breed inhumanity to one another
In this time of challenge and struggle, of tumult and destruction
May we find our way, Your Way, amid conflict, unrest and violence
Teach us your ways, God of refuge and strength, the ways of love and peace
Make us tender hearted and loving toward one another as your mercy rests upon those whose lives have been deeply altered by death or injury
Though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea, You are our God of refuge and strength, a present help in time of trouble
Let us ring the bells of acceptance.
To Affirm
We call you forward to a moment of affirmation.
We rely in affirmation on the voice of the Apostle, Paul:
To bring about the obedience of faith among all the nations
I am not ashamed of the Gospel. It is the power of God for salvation to all who believe, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith. As it is written, ‘the righteous shall live by faith’
God gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.
Therefore, since we are justified by faith we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ…Suffering produces endurance, and endurance character, and character hope, and hope does not disappoint us because of the love of God shed abroad in our hearts by faith through the Holy Spirit.
Hope that is seen is not hope. Who hopes for what he sees? We hope for what we do not see, and wait for it with patience.
‘What then shall we say to this? If God is for us, who is against us? Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?
Shall tribulation or distress or persecution or famine or nakedness or peril or sword? No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us.
For I am sure that neither death nor life nor angels nor principalities 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.
Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed, by the renewal of your mind.
Let love be genuine. Hate what is evil. Hold fast to what is good. Love one another with mutual affection. Outdo one another in showing honor. Never lag in zeal. Be ardent in spirit. Serve the Lord. Rejoice in your hope. Be patient in tribulation. Be constant in prayer. Contribute to the saints. Practice hospitality.
And, we rely in affirmation upon our own personal creed, whispering or quietly saying, wherever we are today, our shared affirmation, responding, ‘and we do’:
If we believe that life has meaning and purpose
And we do
If we believe that the Giver of Life loves us
And we do
If we believe that divine love lasts
And we do
If we believe that justice, mercy, and humility endure
And we do
If we believe that God so loved the world to give God’s only Son
And we do
If we believe that Jesus is the transcript in time of God in eternity
And we do
If we believe that all God’s children are precious in God’s sight
And we do
If we believe grace and forgiveness are the heart of the universe
And we do
If we believe that God has loved us personally
And we do
If we believe in God
And we do
Then we shall trust God over the valley of the shadow of death
And we do
Then we shall trust that love is stronger than death
And we do
Then we shall trust the mysterious promise of resurrection
And we do
Then we shall trust the faith of Christ, relying on faith alone
And we do
Then we shall trust the enduring worth of personality
And we do
Then we shall trust that just deeds, merciful words are never vain
And we do
Then we shall trust the Giver of Life to give eternal life
And we do
Then we shall trust the source of love to love eternally
And we do
Then we shall trust that we shall rest protected in God’s embrace
And we do
Then we shall trust in God
And we do.
Let us ring the bells of affirmation.
Coda
And let us act as well. In grieving let us reach out by visit or voice to another who knows grief. In remembering let us write out for another generation some central memories of our lost loved ones. In accepting, let us take the silent time of silence we need, in prayer. In affirmation, let us invite another to the faith of Christ through fellowship with His people, attendance in worship at his church, and the commitments of tithing and service that are His salt and light.
And let us act as well. In grieving let us reach out by visit or voice to another who knows grief. In remembering let us write out for another generation some central memories of our lost loved ones. In accepting, let us take the silent time of silence we need, in prayer. In affirmation, let us invite another to the faith of Christ through fellowship with His people, attendance in worship at his church, and the commitments of tithing and service that are His salt and light.
-The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel
