“Unbind him, and let him go,” Jesus orders Lazarus’ family
after he raises his friend from the grave. We assume that the family obeys,
freeing Lazarus’ arms and legs and face from the stinking burial cloths as they
welcome him back into the world of the living.
“Unbind him, and let him go,” Jesus
always whispers gravely to me, as I sit down to write a funeral homily. As a
writer, I can imagine what it might be like to write fiction, freely to create
my own world of characters, each with their own personality, their own quirks,
their own way of acting in the world. I don’t think that such a task would be
nearly as meaningful for me, though, as the parish priest’s privilege of
getting to know the true hearts and souls of real human beings, characters of God’s creation, and attempting to
distill with words, some approximation of the essence of a person’s soul in a funeral homily. The funeral homily is a kind of unbinding: an
unwrapping from hospital smells, funeral parlors, and images of lifelessness; a
removal of the trappings of death so that the individual stands before us just
as she is standing in God’s living presence, on the other side of that horizon
that falls away so steeply from our view.
In thinking about All Saints’ Day,
and having just buried Aleece (on Friday,) this process of unbinding has been
on my mind as I have remembered our St. Thomas saints. Listen to a brief litany
of just a few of the saints who have entered into God's presence from this parish in the past
18 months:
“Aleece would take my hand firmly in hers, and
pulling forward toward me, she would look directly into my eyes before speaking
her greeting. Most people mutter a hasty hello or stick out a half-hearted hand
in welcome, but Aleece pulled you into her heart with her handshake.”
“In her long years of illness and of
patient waiting, Darlene was given the grace to embody God’s steadfast love,
God’s ever-faithful loving-kindness.”
“Fred took on the world with gusto,
with his boisterous jokes and hearty laugh after church, his generosity, and
his ability to read Holy Scripture and coach others with authority and
self-assurance.”
“Jerry’s wise
eyes brimmed with a deep understanding of human joy and sorrow, and his wry
smile offered a tacit acknowledgment of life’s absurdities. In Jerry’s
presence, you knew that you were safe and accepted just as you were.”
“Joe faced death with a determination
to leave this world in the honorable, upright way in which he had lived his
life. Just like he got up early every Sunday morning, put on his suit, and came
to worship, he wanted to be ready when God called him to heaven.”
“What I will always remember when I
think of Martie is the loving twinkle in her eyes. It was not really a
mischievous twinkle, although that might have been part of it, but it was
rather a kind twinkle, a sparkling of her soul.”
“If Daryl had been standing near the
self-important disciples who were turning away the little children as they came
curiously sidling up to Jesus, he would have been the one motioning to the
children with a nod and a wink to stand behind him until he could get Jesus’
attention and smuggle them over to him. I can picture Daryl now in a
comfortable shirt and with a giant mug of sweet tea, sitting on a stump and
listening intently to Jesus’ words while quietly engaging the children around
him, the children that nobody else was paying any attention to.”
Can you see them with us again now,
our beloved saints? Here with us, in all of their sometimes maddening yet
always magnificent individuality? Here with us and yet free from the bonds of
death? In unbinding our saints, all that I have are words to cut a small sliver
into their deep and eternal holiness, pulling it away from their death, and
then calling your attention to it. Rowan Williams writes that holiness is not
some kind of human characteristic along with others, such as “she was short,
fair-haired, overweight, and holy.” Notice that I did not use the word “holy” itself
in any of my funeral descriptions. To be holy, however, is to let God’s
presence shine through us, like light shines through a window. One can be good
without necessarily being holy, and one can be terribly flawed and yet act as an
essential bearer of God’s light.[1]
As our little Preschool children sing to one another every week in chapel: “I
see the love of God in you, the light of Christ come shining through. And I am
blessed to be with you, O holy child of God.”[2]
To be holy, to be a “saint” if you will, is to stand consistently and
courageously in a place where God’s light is going to come through, to stand in
relationship with others while standing in relationship with God.[3]
And as we all know, God’s persistent, unstoppable light will seep through any
crack that it can find.
It is all about connecting, isn’t it?
God’s light shining through human beings; God binding Godself to the world in
the form of Jesus; the dead unbound from death and the living unbound from the
sin that sucks away our life; the saints in heaven present with the saints on
earth. “See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them as their
God; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them,” writes the
author of the book of Revelation. All Saints’ Day is our celebration of the
connectedness of Christ’s Body in heaven with Christ’s Body on earth, the
connectedness of the living and the dead in Christ. All of this All Saints’
theological talk can sound so abstract, so implausible, until we put it in these terms
of individual relationships, relationships with people with whom we have
experienced a love that is stronger than death. All of the images of
heavenly cities paved in gold and of throne rooms ringed with cherubim and
seraphim are word-pictures rather than factual statements, word-pictures like
the ones that I use to talk about the twinkle in Martie’s eyes or the wisdom in
Jerry’s smile. They too are words that create images stronger than fiction,
images that connect, images that show what it is to unbind what is living from what is dead.
My daughter, who spent six months in
Peru, wrote in a blog post several years ago that she never really understood
our Episcopal All Saints’ Day in this country until she spent it with her host family in Chijnaja. There, high in
the Andes mountains, families would prepare all of their departed loved ones’
favorite foods and gather, not in the church, but in the cemetery. Then, beside
the graves of friends and family, they would drink lots of beer, pray, play,
celebrate, and then share all of the food with one another. The Peruvian Christians seem
to understand that, in order to remain in relationship with heaven, they must
feed one another on earth. They seem to understand the eternal and timeless
nature of relationship in God. After all, only God in Jesus Christ was able to
discard his own burial cloths in the darkness of the tomb. The rest of us, like
Lazarus, need a community to unbind us.
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