Sunday
April 16
After Ten Years
By Marsh Chapel
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Our shared faith provides a particular kind of memory, a powerful kind of prayer, and a persistent kind of love as hallmarks of Easter morning. Do they mark your life? Do memory, prayer and clothe life for you?
The gospel is resurrection in memory, in prayer, and in love. What empty space, what unoccupied tomb, abides in your life for these three, and the greatest of these—love?
We set forth to do the work of facing grief with grace, failure with faith, hurt with hope, and death with dignity. And thee? Is that work begun, continued, or completed? The Word brings you life, uplift, a lift for living, even into the teeth of death, so you may face, face down, and live down death.
Death makes us mortal. Facing death makes us human. The last enemy destroyed is death. We all, finally, shuffle off this mortal coil… God is at work in the world to make and keep human life human. (J Bennett).
Seek ‘the Living One’, He who is more alive than all life, whose life is the marrow of being alive. Why do you seek the Living One (ton zonta)—a title perhaps, a Person, for sure, an announcement of Christ, crucified and risen. All appearances to the contrary notwithstanding…
‘The marks of the new age are present hidden in the old age. At the juncture of the ages the marks of the resurrection are hidden and revealed in the cross of the disciple’s daily death, and only there…this is what the turn of the ages means, that life is manifested in death’ (JL Martyn, of blessed memory, in 1967, Epistemology at the Turn of the Ages).
We need not over-preach. We still walk by faith not by sight. We still see in a mirror, dimly. We still have this treasure in earthen vessels. We still hope for what we do not see. The resurrection follows, but not replace the cross.
Paul gives no indication that he is familiar with the doctrine of the empty tomb. There is not the remotest reference to it in any of his letters, and his conviction that the resurrection body is not the body of this flesh but a spiritual body waiting for the soul of man in heaven makes it improbable that he would have found it congenial (Gilmour, IB, loc. cit.)
Grace comes with the morning, every morning. So walk with the women, walk with me too, let us walk together through the Gospel in sermon. And if you get done with the sermon before the sermon gets done, if you are finished with it before I am, have no fear, do not worry. Just wait a bit, and I will catch up with you! Some of you will arise inspired, and some of you will awake refreshed, and both outcomes are worthy outcomes!
We do not know what a day will bring. True this is of every day, but truer of some days than others. Focus for a moment on the ‘gravest’ of days you have known. Someday I would like to hear of it.
Patriots’ Day 2013 was such a day, 10 years ago. We learned first hand in this neighborhood about the visitation of death, tragically known again in Brussels and around the globe this week. Spelled D…E…A…T…H. Not your imaginary friend, but an equally omni-present invisible enemy…
That Monday began with brunch and celebration, and ended with terror, and needless slaughter and (humanly speaking) unforgivable horror. Our staff opened the chapel later for the throngs walking, T-less, by. Water, refreshment, prayer, counsel, they gave. One runner came very cold and was shrouded with a clergy gown, all we had to offer, a shepherd’s outfit. What a week. Tuesday brought us to the plaza, come evening, in vigil, to honor and reflect. Wednesday, in this chapel, and also at other hours in other settings, gathered us for ordered worship, prayer, music, liturgy, Eucharist and sermon. Thursday we heard President Obama, on a familiar theme, ‘running the race set before us’. Friday at home we watched televised news. Saturday we listened for the musical succor of Handel’s beautiful Messiah, right here. The Monday next we gathered again for a memorial service, for our deceased BU student, Lu Lingzi.
Death makes us mortal. Facing death makes us human.
You remember death. Your neighbor. Your hourly companion. You spell his or her name D…E…A…T…H. Easter morning is about intimations of life, the Living One outlasting death. Paul: As in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive. Behold: a glimmer of light in the dark, a rumor of life in death, an angel reclining in the tomb.
Memory gives us life.
If there has been ever an age that more needed better memory than ours, I know not what it would have been. Those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it. The past is not dead, it is not even past (Faulkner, whom I have been re-reading this year)
During that week journalists from around the globe contacted us, and others, across the university. Many, perhaps most, called or wrote from Asia. Some needed commentary for radio news or other newscasts. The main newspapers across the country also sent reporters.
On Wednesday, the office took a call from the Philadelphia Enquirer. Could someone meet their man and his photographer at the steps of the chapel, to help convey something of the nightly vigils, services and informal prayers of the week. We picked a mid-afternoon hour. In the April sunlight the interview began. Suddenly the photographer dropped his camera and shouted: Bob. Bob. Bob. His name is Clem Murray, a high school classmate and friend. He and his girlfriend Mimi Sinopoli were the ‘class couple’ because they were the most beautiful couple, a truly stunning twosome. I had seen neither for forty years (1972-2013). I had heard that they married in college. Somehow, he recognized enough of my former self, hidden behind the current condition of my condition, and recognized my name. He let go of the camera for a hug. We finished the interview and photo. I turned then as they were going to ask, ‘So how is Mimi?’ You only know the really awkward moments too late. They come up after you, like alligators out of the Florida swamp. Clem said nothing. He didn’t need to. I could see what he was holding back in his face and eyes. He just shook his head and shook. “Two years ago she died of cancer”. In the midst of life we are in death, every moment. All I could see of her was a white graduation gown, a little cap and tassle. Three decades of marriage, three children, all things bright and beautiful, and then a malignancy unto death. Clem waved goodbye. A kairos, not a chronos moment…
We held, together, a memory of life, that made life, that gave life, that made alive. In the very presence of death. It was a resurrection memory. A living memory takes you out of the present and into a living past. It was a resurrection memory. And perhaps the most powerful personal conversation I have known.
Marcel Proust with his madeleine moment teaches us best: a single minute released from the chronological order of time has re-created in us the human being similarly released…situated outside the scope of time, what could one fear from the future…(these are) resurrections of the past (Proust, RTP, II, 992, 996).
Memory gives us life.
Prayer gives us life.
A week after the Marathon, you may remember, we memorialized our student, Lu Lingzi. This service was held, as had been the memorial for President John Silber the autumn before, in the George Sherman Union. Two thousand attended, with an unknown number around the globe watching and listening by cyber cast. The service proceeded, word and music, after careful attention and planning by musicians and clergy. We heard the Gospel of Mark and the Analects of Confucius. We listened to instrumental and choral music. We grieved, remembered, accepted, and affirmed, together. The family, eighteen or so, and dressed in black, sat in the front row. As the service ended, from the next row, I could see and hear a susurration along the family pew. They then were meant to move to the gathering and greeting room, but no one stood. Further conversation moved up and down the row, in a language I could not of course understand. I feared: have we forgotten a eulogy, or left out a reading, or skipped over an anthem? No. It was something else. After a moment, the family, dressed in black stood as one, moved as one, turned as one, and faced the congregation and the world. A long quiet ensued. Then, as one, they bowed at the waist, and held the bow. To honor the gathering, to honor the moment, to honor the life, to honor Life, they bowed, in silence. It is the most powerful liturgical moment I have ever known. It was a resurrection prayer. And it is perhaps the most powerful liturgical moment I have seen.
‘Different are the languages of prayer, but the tears are all the same’ (A Heschel). We should repeat this three times a day.
Prayer gives us life. Prayer is a mode of existential gratitude.
Love gives us life.
The next Sunday, April 28, turned out to be a nice, warm early spring day. As the sun came up, we looked forward to a day of rest and worship, a chance for a return to normal.
About 1 hour before the Sunday service, our chaplain came in to the office to say, ‘We have another one’. It took me some moment to understand and internalize the fact of another death. She had died tragically in a fire, caught in an upper room. Her mother would be coming up from NYC on the bus later that evening. The police would have informed her of her daughter’s death. Our Dean of Students, Kenn Elmore, and his associate and I planned to meet the bus. That evening we awaited a delayed Greyhound, talking a bit about the week past. We pondered how best to greet the grieving mom. It was decided I would meet the bus, and greet her as she came down the steps, to offer our heart felt condolences, and start the trek over to the hotel. The noise of the terminal, the lateness of the hour, the long weeks of terror and loss, and the approximate presence of death itself settled on us, and gave us that quiet of the soul that sometimes overtakes us.
In the bus rolled. The mother came down the steps carrying a beautifully decorated box, holding it with both hands.
“I want to greet you for the University and express our deepest sympathy and heart felt concern” I said.
She replied, “Where is my daughter? What hospital is she in? Please take me to her, so I can see her and talk with her. I want to go and see her. Where is she? How is she doing? I brought a rice cake. See. In the box. It is her favorite. Rice cake. I know it will make her feel better.”
Honestly, at every phrase I tried to say, with honesty and kindness, that her daughter had in fact died the night before, caught in an awful fire. Apparently she did not understand the police, or they did not speak clearly, or someone else in the family took the call. I tried everything. But she could not understand, or could not hear, until, at last, she looked up and hard and asked, ‘You mean…she…is dead?’ Yes.
There is a phrase in the Christmas gospel about Rachel weeping for her children. That Bus Terminal echoed with the chilling, haunting, painful cries of a mother who rightly could not and would not be consoled, as Rachel could not. The reverberation of her sobbing across that urban nighttime cacophony I can hear still. Nothing I said helped. Nothing I did helped. Nothing I could offer her could she receive. We sat on a bench, the wailing stronger still, the cake and box on the floor, the gathered friends lost in grief. Then she stiffened, her arm in mine becoming taut and cold. Perhaps she was going into shock. Everything I tried—counsel, prayer, listening, scripture, all—was of no avail.
Then from her other side Dean Elmore simply surrounded, enfolded her. He put all of his body and arms all around her, as she wailed and stiffened. He held her. He rocked her. He embraced her. And little by little, sob by sob, she began to relax. And little by little, breath by breath, she began to loosen up. And little by little, held tight, she came through it. Her lament lessened, her limbs loosened. Out up from the tomb she came. A physical unspoken compassion brought her through, from death to life. It was a resurrection love, compassion, embrace, grace, freedom, care, acceptance, mercy, pardon, peace, inclusion. It was a resurrection love. And it is perhaps the most powerful very public, pastoral ministry I have witnessed.
Unamuno: warmth, warmth, warmth; we are dying of cold not of darkness; it is not the night that kills, it is the frost.
Six years, at the time of our dad’s death, Elie Wiesel sent a note. It was love physical, compassionate and personal, and as with all resurrection love it made a difference. It concluded: we have a saying in our tradition, ‘may you be spared another further hardship’.
Love gives us life.
Memory. Prayer. Love.
‘The marks of the new age are present hidden in the old age …this is what the turn of the ages means, that life is manifested in death’ (JL Martyn, Epistemology at the Turn of the Ages).
Easter, this season, is memory, prayer and love, creation, redemption, sanctification, Father, Son, Spirit, life in death. And life in death holds out a promise of something grander still, life after death.
-The Rev. Dr. Robert Allan Hill, Dean of Marsh Chapel
