2018.11.4 All Souls Service: Facing
Death with Life
When
we breathe in, we breathe in the same air as the ancestors. The same molecules that filled the lungs of
the known and the millions unknown through the ages.
On
Friday night I went to see kind of a strange show – it was a German band that
back in the nineties was so obsessed with Cormac McCarthy’s novel Suttree, set
in Knoxville, that they made a kind of pilgrimage to East Tennessee in 1997. They came to the place that McCarthy wrote
about so well, to soak it in, to take pictures of downtown Knoxville, which
back in the mid-nineties was mostly bedraggled and boarded up and ghostly. And then they wrote a whole song cycle about
it back in Germany. Kinda strange.
Well,
they came back to Knoxville on Friday night and played their music, while old
film footage and photographs of East Tennessee from the 1950s, played on a
screen behind them. It was kind of
dream-like, seeing grainy black and white images of places that were at once
familiar and at the same time totally different. I left thinking about how everything changes
always, every world passes away eventually, but traces are left.
Like
the impression of a place made through a novel travels across the world.
The
skeletons of buildings that once were vibrant, stood empty a long time waiting
to be transformed back to life again.
The
anonymous lives of those captured on film surely left their mark, on their own
small world at least– family, community, church, business.
When
we breathe in, we breathe in the same molecules as the ancestors.
When
we dream, we might be visited by spirits.
The
poet Wendell Berry writes:
Nightmares of
the age invade/my days and darken them,
But sometimes
my sleep is lighted/by a better dream.
One night, as
if in justice perhaps or mercy,/ or by some kindness of this world,/ I dreamed
of my father.
Long ago he
would play the piano, lively songs/ of World War II, rocking on the
bench,/sometimes singing, as he played.
And then a lasting
sorrow came, / and no more piano music after that.
In my dream
my father was again/ playing the piano.
He was beautiful.
He was
smiling. He was playing
An elated
improvisation on a tune/neither of us had known in the old time.
The notes
shone singly as they gathered brightly together, “Daddy,” I said,
“you could
play anywhere!” He smiled
At his
thought’s music, and played on.
Now,
my own father wasn’t a piano player, but he had other gifts, and I’ve been wishing
he might make a dream visit during these nightmares of the age we face today. To share some sort of wisdom, encouragement. Or
at least one of his corny jokes to lighten my mood. I wonder often, What would he have to say
about the latest headline?
And
sometimes I think back to my great-grandmothers, and I wonder what would Laura Marsh,
who raised 7 children on a farm in Kentucky,
What would she have to say about this age? One thing I know she’d say: Go Vote. She was one of the ones who worked for women
to have the right to vote.
And
I bet Anna Ellis, who raised her kids over in Spring City, TN, would say the
same. And Margaret Bogle and Inez Bell. If you haven’t already voted, go vote on
Tuesday, OK? On orders of my
great-grandmothers.
Or
what about my great-grandfather Harry who emigrated to the west coast of this country from New
Zealand of all places, in the early 1900’s to go to Bible College and ended up
serving a little church in Harlan, KY, during the coalmine wars? What would he
have to say about this age, and the dream of America, and who it is for?
And
what about America’s spiritual ancestors?
Wouldn’t it be amazing if we could wake up from our national nightmares
with a visitation from spirits who could help us have a better dream? Spirits who could help us improvise a
different tune, a new tune no one knew in the old times, a lively, hopeful,
dancing tune? Who hasn’t, of late, wished for a Martin Luther King, Jr. --
someone who can speak with moral authority and poetry and move us together
through pain but towards healing and the dreamed of promised land?
But
instead, it’s been a couple of weeks of once again confronting the lasting
sorrow that comes with death.
We
have seen the lasting sorrow of the private grief of the loved ones of the 11
killed during worship at Tree of Life synagogue just a little over a week
ago.
Daniel Stein,
71; Joyce Feinberg, 75; Richard Gottfried, 65; Rose Mallinger,
97; Jerry Rabinowitz, 66; brothers Cecil Rosenthal, 59, and David
Rosenthal 54; husband and wife Bernice Simon, 84 and Sylvan Simon,
86; Melvin Wax, 88; and Irving Younger, 69.
In
the Jewish tradition there is a practice of never leaving the body alone after
a death. For those 11 in Pittsburgh,
there has always been someone present with them, praying over them,
accompanying them. Life, Life present in the face of Death. And now comes a period of the faithful community
accompanying the mourners, in very specific ways. Life,
present in the face of Death.
The
grief is private, and it is also very public. And by that I mean, the private
grief can be echoed and held by a larger body of Life. The mourners recite the Mourners Kaddish
during worship each week for a year, the community remembering along with them,
they are not alone in their grief.
As
you and I have experienced our own griefs and losses, we may feel with open-hearted
empathy the grief of those families and friends in Pittsburgh.
And
even beyond that sense of human-to-human empathy, there is the grief and sorrow
we feel when we see, once again, the effects of deep-seated hatred of “the
other.” It moves us, and we recall other
sorrows in our national story.
In
this last week I listened to the service held at our National Cathedral in
Washington, DC, as the remains of Matthew Shepard were laid to rest there, 20
years after his death. Bishop Gene
Robinson, the first openly gay Bishop consecrated in the Episcopal church, gave
an emotional homily. He said he was
there not just for Mathew, but also to celebrate Mathew’s parents. He said, they could have so easily gone home
and simply grieved the loss of their son privately. But instead they shared
their grief with the world, they shared their son with the world. And they
turned his Death into Life. They faced the most horrific thing any parent could
face and they turned it into Life. I
have no doubt that the work of Mathew’s parents and the Mathew Shepard
foundation has literally saved the lives of LGBT people. Facing death with Life.
It
is not so different from the story of Reb Leizer we heard from Sheri this
morning – turning the experience of unimaginable loss into new life. Reb Leizer continued to play the music of his
people so that the children of others might be found and reunited with their
heritage, if not their families.
Facing
death with Life.
Who
among us has not felt that lasting sorrow upon the death of a loved one, or
will one day?
No
one.
Yet,
as Unitarian minister Phillip Hewett wrote: “We know that no branch is utterly
severed from the Tree of Life that sustains us all.”
The
sorrow that we cannot hold alone, we hold in common. Let us not be alone in our
mourning.
I
invite us today to breathe in the breath of the ancestors. To dance with them, to dream with them. Worlds pass away and still something remains.
We
breathe in the breath of not just the ancestors of our own families, but also
Mathew Shepard, and the suffragettes, and those from the Tree of Life Temple,
and Reb Leizer, and Martin Luther King, Jr., and so many others whose names and
stories can wake us up to the music of this life, and can open us up to what is
truly important, and can keep us moving, keep us dancing, keep us rising up,
keep us living in our hope not just our despair.
I
don’t want to rest in peace. And I’m not sure I want the ancestors to rest in
peace either. I want them to keep
speaking to us, to keep troubling us, to keep asking us questions about how we
shall live bravely and lovingly and powerfully in the face of Death. So may we weave the past into the present, so
may we weave the sorrows and joy, the promise and the pain, the spirit of Life
and Love.
Amen.
Closing
prayer:
Spirit
of Sustaining Love that connects us in life and in death,
Be
with us all in our times of grief and sadness.
Help
us to remember that we enter into this world in mystery and we leave it in
mystery, and yet we are not alone.
Help
us to find peace, reassurance, and comfort in the remembering here today.
Help
us to live lives that weave Joy and Sorrow together into one fabric of Love.
We
give thanks for the lives that have touched our own, all those named today, and
those held silently in our hearts.
Let
us know our connectedness with All Souls across time and distance.
Give
us the courage to follow in the spirit of ancestors we admire, creators of the
world we want to leave our children.
May
we find faith that even in death, love remains, and hope endures.
As
we are blessed, may we be a blessing to one another. Amen.
Singing Refrain:
All this Joy, All this Sorrow
All this promise, all this pain
Such is life, such is being
Such is spirit, such is love. (John
Denver)
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