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Monday, Sept 06
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Sunday, November 15, 2009
Pentecost XXIV
Rev. Loren Halvorson
Is the end the beginning?
(Sermon read by Dan O'Loughlin)
When the daily news is a cacophony of bad news: corruption, conflict, crises and confusion, do we need texts about catastrophes, despair, and death? When things are so bad should we not put the best possible face on them? Should not the church year conclude with the Hallelujah chorus, fireworks, and a big celebration? Do we come to church to be depressed?
This may be a Sunday when preachers are tempted to look for happier texts, texts that are easier to swallow, texts that help us escape painful realities, texts that entertain instead of engage, texts that help us forget rather than force us to remember. There are entire industries designed to help us escape. During the last days of the Roman Empire, citizens were herded into the coliseums to be entertained by violence. These were gory battles fought between humans and beasts while the empire was crumbling from corruption within and destroyed by barbarians from without.
But perhaps we do need today’s texts. We need our cages rattled, our false securities revealed, our agendas challenged, our insanity exposed- to reverse our ways, to change, to repent. When breathing and you get to the end of exhaling, you need to reverse direction and inhale. The seasons of the year also teach us: after months of productivity, winter, a rest, a retreat, a 180 degree turn is needed to right the imbalance.
But beyond this symmetry of life lies an even deeper mystery. In darkness the hope that seems hidden is exposed. There is the mystery that an end can be a beginning; the point of breakdown can be the point of breaking-open. In the mystic tradition this is called “the dark night of the soul”.
When we look into the role that darkness plays in the shaping of the human soul we get a glimpse of something quite unusual going on. It is a complete reversal of the way we imagine things to be. Ends become beginnings; no’s are transformed into yes’s; despair into delight, death into life. If we refuse the bad news, we may just miss the good news about ourselves, our generation, our nation.
The comfort that Scripture brings is packaged in bad news. Hope is hidden in helplessness; joy in judgment, promise in paradox. Death, from the viewpoint of the Christian faith, does not lead to termination but leads to transformation. Doctors have told my father-in-law that cancer will soon end his life. Ironically, this very news has generated new life. My wife’s parents have decided to make the most of the time that is left by celebrating friendships, inviting old acquaintances over for “Third Cups of Tea”, and living more fully and intentionally. They do not want to escape reality but to experience the deeper reality of a richer life, which includes pain and loss. God’s grace is a mischievous and surprising matter. It is not at all what we expect. This is the question that surfaces to the top: is the secret in learning how to live, learning how to die?
Is this what Jesus meant when he said that we find our life by losing it? Life begins with the last chapter. In the story of our life it is okay to read the last chapter first. Truth-telling is a terror to the ego. When we are at the end of the line we see where we need to go. The gospel has a way of upsetting properly ordered things. Of course this doesn’t make sense until we view life from the end, for that is the starting point. Confession precedes profession. No precedes yes, but it is not the final word. Yes is the ultimate word and the ultimate word trumps the penultimate word. The end of the story defines the story itself. That is why we keep these stories that we read today of the end of life in the lectionary.
Life begins with pain. The valley of the shadow of death can be a birth cannel. The dark night of the soul is the womb where life begins again and again. Interestingly, the Hebrew word for compassion also means womb. Our God is a womb-bearing God who creates out excruciating pain. It is found in the manger, it is found on the cross. This mid-wifering God creates new life out of great suffering. This is something that many souls know, souls that have anguished and languished in the night hours.
There is a German book whose title can be translated as “In the night you visited me” which itself is taken the 17th psalm. This book contains the letters from people on death row in Nazi prisons due to their opposition to fascism. My father-in-law finds that now as he struggles with his own imminent death from cancer, he can better understand. God has visited him in the night and he knows that the pain of death is the threshold for a new and unimagined life.
There is an old story of two monks who debated for years what heaven would be like. They made a covenant that whoever died first would seek to communicate back to his friend on earth what heaven is really like. They were not sure how this could be communicated so they devised a code of two Latin words. Funditus was the Latin code word to say heaven was all that they expected. Alitus was the other word meaning totally different from what they expected. After one of the monks died the other waited daily for an answer whether it would be funditus, what they expected, or alitus, totally different. One day in the garden he heard a small voice that sounded like his friend saying “funditus alitus, funditus alitus”. “It is what I expected, totally other.”
Oh, it’s a surprise alright, a big one. Hope drives out all fear. This is why God approaches humans, as Jesus did after his resurrection, with the preemptive-strike words, “Do not be afraid”. Fear is trumped by faith. The opposite of faith is not doubt but certitude. The certitude proclaimed loudly on the air waves today by bloggers are driven by fear. We need not fear these dreaded texts at the end of the church year for embedded in them is the promise of a new creation where “all things are made new”, an incomprehensible yes hidden in the harsh no. Here lies the answer to the debate that has haunted Lutherans about how the law is related to the Gospel, how the God of judgment can at the same time be the God of grace.
The word, confession, has this double and paradoxical meaning: repentance of sins and the confidence of forgiveness. This truth has transformed many a dark night of death into the brilliant morning of resurrection, turned the anguish of feeling forsaken on a cross to the unrestrained joy of an empty tomb. Death does not destroy life, but paradoxically gives birth to it. The purpose of these frightening and irksome texts at the end of the liturgical year is to convey this seemingly contradictory truth. We do not need to avoid them, gloss over them. We can plunge right into them and unpackage the incredible hope that is there. Do not be afraid of the death that totally takes your breath away, for it brings everything you hoped for . . . and more.
I end with a poem my father wrote three weeks ago. It is entitled, “God spoke to me”. By Loren Ellis Halvorson
God spoke to me the other day,
A woman’s voice, God’s not just a “he”
It was a surprising experience,
Sounded just like my wife, Ruthie.
Later God said “I love you”
This time in a masculine voice
I’d swear was our oldest son,
It seems that God can make that choice.
God kissed me the other day,
Right on the lips intimately;
And you know what it really felt like?
Like my great granddaughter Lucy.
God did promise to live right here in us,
Which is not very far away;
You know the neat thing about that?
Is you can be with God every day.
“Got some time next week?” I asked
It’s fun talking with the deity.
“Got all the time in the world” said God
“How about an eternity?”
Amen.
LEH 9/28/09
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