Sermon preached by The Reverend Dr. Harold T. Lewis

SERMON PREACHED BY THE REVEREND DR. HAROLD T. LEWIS, RECTOR CALVARY EPISCOPAL CHURCH, PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA AT A REQUIEM MASS FOR ALL FAITHFUL DEPARTED
FRIDAY 3 NOVEMBER 2006



"Come ye blessed of my Father, inherit the Kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world." (Mt. 25:34)


For the past several months, Claudette and I have engaged in a little ritual almost every Tuesday. Tuesday is the day that The Living Church usually arrives in the mail, and while I take exception to that publication's editorial policy, it does provide me, on its back pages, with news of the comings and goings of the reverend clergy ---- their ordinations, their new positions, their suspensions and depositions from the ministry, their retirements, and their deaths. I always read the obituaries first, and every Tuesday, it seems, I call up Claudette and tell her that Father So-and-So has died. More than likely, he was a clergyman who was a parish priest in one of the dioceses in which we have served, or a bishop or a seminary professor, or some other cleric who has touched our lives along the way. At first, we express incredulity. How can he be dead? But we only ask that because in our minds that person is frozen in time at the age at which we knew him. Then we do the math. If Father So-and-So was well into middle age or even older when we met him thirty years ago, it means that he would indeed be an octogenarian or even a nonagenarian by now. Then I look in the mirror, and remind myself that I'm no spring chicken. God willing, I shall be 60 on the 21st of February --- and the fact that my birthday will fall on Ash Wednesday means that I shall face a liturgical crisis of great magnitude ---- but on the other hand, what better day to be told "Thou art dust and to dust shalt thou return?"

Now Madison Avenue, hawking its lotions and potions, tries to convince us that 60 is the new 40, but there is one major difference between a 60-year-old and a 40- year-old. The 60-year-old knows that more years lie behind than lie ahead. This is called facing one's mortality, and as long as it does not reach the level of obsession, it is a healthy exercise. This is why the Psalmist asks the Lord "Teach us to number our days that we may gain a heart of wisdom" [90:2]. This is why the Burial Office reminds us "In the midst of life we are in death." This is why the proper preface for funerals contains the words "for to thy faithful people, O Lord, life is changed, not ended." Being mortal simply means that unlike the immortal God Whom we worship and adore, we will someday die. Death is the natural, inevitable consequence of life, not some unexpected, surprise occurrence. As a pastor, I have discovered that older people, especially the so-called terminally ill, (of course, strictly speaking, we are all terminal, from the moment we draw our first breath) are often attuned to such a reality. It's the younger people around them who are more likely to be into denial, and while the dying parent, coming to grips with death, is reciting Paul's words, "I have fought the good fight, I have finished the course, I have kept the faith" [II Tim. 4:7] their children are saying "Don't be silly; you'll outlive all of us!" or "You'll be back to your old self in no time!" What is wrong with this picture?

OK. What if we accept the inevitability of death? The next question is: What about life beyond the grave? What awaits us after we breathe our last? As you know, I am a great believer in the theology of hymnody. And one of the favorite pastimes of hymn writers was to wax poetic about what heaven would be like. We love to belt out "Jerusalem the golden, with milk and honey blest" and "O what their joy and their glory must be those endless Sabbaths the blessed ones see." Or one of my favorites (which, by definition is no longer in the Hymnal) which describes heaven as a joyous family reunion: O then what raptured greetings On Canaan's happy shore, Where knitting severed friendships up, Where partings are no more. Then eyes with joy shall sparkle, That brimmed with tears of late, Orphans no longer fatherless, Nor widows desolate. [The Hymnal 1940, 590]

But such is not the only theology of life after death that the church has embraced. Listen to the translation of the Dies Irae from tonight's Requiem: "Day of wrath! O day of mourning!/See fulfilled the prophets' warning;/Heaven and earth in ashes burning." Or the Confutatis: "While the wicked are confounded,/Doomed to flames of woe unbounded,/Call me with thy saints surrounded." Indeed, the church long taught that that the human soul, defiled by sin, was damned, relegated to what we have come to know as "fire and brimstone." (Of course, our brothers and sisters on the other side of the Tiber had a more elaborate eschatological system, including a place to atone for sins, Purgatory, and until recently, a place for those innocent but unbaptized, called Limbo.) The purpose of the requiem mass, actually, was to ask God in his mercy to release souls from eternal damnation. This is why the Offertory verse tonight reads: ""O Lord Jesus Christ, King of glory/Free the souls of the departed from infernal torment,/And from the deep pit."

Now, I think the church, in her ministry to the dead and bereaved, is right to have shifted its theology of doom to a theology of the Resurrection. I think it is right that our funeral services have as their purpose the celebration of the life of an individual, and are not some purification exercise for the departed. But I wonder if the pendulum has swung so far over as to make heaven a foregone conclusion. I wonder if our emphasis on our Lord as merciful savior has allowed us to forget that he also can also be a demanding judge. I wonder if our new way of looking at things has planted in our minds the idea that what we do on earth has no consequences. Tonight's Gospel, I think, provides us with a reality check.

It is not a particularly pretty picture. It is a depiction of the Last Judgment which has inspired countless works of art including Michelangelo's dabblings on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. It is a description of the Second Coming, to which we give weekly lip service in the Creed. But no matter how we look at it, it portrays a very clear distinction between the good guys and the bad guys. The good guys are the sheep, ad dextram Patris (on the right hand of God, the place of honor) and the bad guys are the goats, ad sinistram Patris, at his left, the place of dishonor. Sheep are more valuable, and less smelly than goats, and goats, besides, lacking a thick woolen coat, are "high maintenance," and have to be kept warm at night. The sheep, declares the King, will inherit the Kingdom, while the goats will be cast into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.

But their respective fates are not arbitrarily determined. They are intrinsically connected to acts of mercy ---- feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting the sick and caring for the prisoner. Those who did such deeds, ministering to the "least, the lost and the last" --- and ministering to them is like ministering to the Lord himself, we are told --- inherit the Kingdom; those who refuse to do so do not. We see here no mention of golden streets, crystal fountains or pearly gates. Instead we see Jesus identifying with the world's outcasts, standing in the shoes of the powerless, the weak, the defenseless, the hated, and the tortured. This should not surprise us, since Jesus, lest we forget, began his life as a refugee and ended it as a condemned criminal.

Kellogg's, the cereal people, have an ad which invites us to "enjoy Kellogg's Corn Flakes again for the first time." I look at the Bible in the same way. I read passages which I have read for years, and they speak to me in new and different ways, allowing me to appreciate them again, as it were, for the first time. What tonight's Gospel says to me is that at the heart of the Christian Gospel is ministering to others in Christ's name --- and not just ministering to them but alleviating their suffering --- not an entirely new thought, granted, given the fact that Jesus began his ministry at Nazareth expostulating on that very theme --- binding up the brokenhearted, restoring of sight to the blind, releasing from prison those who are bound [Lk. 4:18]. But in making such actions virtual prerequisites for inheriting the Kingdom, Jesus isn't threatening us with them; he is not showing us a way to die, but a way to live.

I haven't recommended a movie from the pulpit for a long time, but let me do so tonight. It's an English comedy of the macabre sort --- I guess in pre PC days we would call it "black comedy" --- called "Keeping Mum" in which the inimitable Rowan Atkinson plays a rather clueless English vicar who thanks to Maggie Smith improves his homiletical skills. He delivers an address before a group of colleagues and he ends his talk by saying "God, because he is God, is mysterious. Live with it."

The Christian religion, my friends, is a mystery because it doesn't conform to our quid quo pro, tit for tat way of looking at the world. The Christian faith is not a celestial insurance policy, whose premiums are doing good works, saying nice things, being good to your neighbor, and paying your pledge, in order to get into heaven. The Christian faith is its own reward. We do such good works, hopefully, not to please a Santa Claus God who keeps score of whether we've been naughty or nice. We do such things because it is our bounden duty and service as members of the Church militant here in earth. The Kingdom is now; the church is a vision of that Kingdom here on earth. Conversely, any of us who, amidst the changes and chances of this mortal life, have been visited by depression and despair or degradation know that we don't have to wait to be consigned to a fiery pit to know what hell is.

So we gather tonight to give thanks for those who have gone before us, who, in the words of the great bidding prayer, "rejoice with us but upon another shore and in another light." We pray that these "choice vessels of thy grace" may so inspire us that we imitate their holy example, not simply so that we may be found worthy to join them, but that we might be able to bring some semblance of God's Kingdom here on earth.

Let us pray:

O Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, we pray thee to set thy passion, cross, and death, between thy judgment and our souls, now and in the hour of our death. Give mercy and grace to the living, pardon and rest to the dead, to thy holy Church peace and concord, and to us sinners everlasting life and glory; who with the Father and the Holy Spirit livest and reignest, one God, now and for ever. AMEN. [BCP p. 489]