Sermon preached by The Rev. Nathan A. Rugh

SERMON PREACHED BY THE REVEREND NATHAN A. RUGH, CURATE CALVARY EPISCOPAL CHURCH, PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA AT A REQUIEM MASS FOR ALL FAITHFUL DEPARTED FRIDAY 2 NOVEMBER 2007


We live in a culture that places us far away from death. For the majority of people in this culture, death is something that is happening across the world or across the tracks. Death is something that happens in hospitals and hospices and nursing care facilities. Death is something in the newspaper or on the news or it's hyper-stylized and turned into entertainment and distraction. For the majority of folks in our culture, death is happening elsewhere and not here.

And that seems to be the way we like it, for we are a culture that likes to think of itself as life-affirming. We idolize youth for its vibrancy. Our stars are the young and rich and famous. Athletes, actors, models, and musicians become the mirrors in which we like to look to see ourselves. Youth and youth culture are the engines of our economy and our number one cultural export.

Even those who are getting along in years are encouraged to play along. For some unfathomable reason the Trib. PM appears on my doorstep unsolicited every weekday afternoon. And for some equally unfathomable reason Vanna White, of Wheel of Fortune fame, was on the cover yesterday. When my wife saw the picture, she said to me, "It's scary how good Vanna White looks." Which is true. I think she is fifty; she has spent a quarter of a century on Wheel of Fortune and she basically looks like she did when she started. As opposed to being allowed to age normally while continuing her valuable contribution to society by spinning letters, she has been captured by the cultural expectation that people on TV do not age. Vanna White, the same yesterday, today, and forever.

This isn't just a concern for the Vanna Whites of the world. It is a greater cultural issue. If we are not allowed to age then we are not allowed to die. One of the things often said about the previous Pope, John Paul II, towards the end of his life was how bad he looked. One interesting comment that I heard in response to this fact was that by refusing to retire from his office he held age, and disease, and thus death up to a world that did not want to see it. He became a walking reminder of our infirmity and our temporality. He became a reminder to us of death.

For all of our desire to affirm life and to affirm this very life, we have become a culture that too readily denies death. But even when we do not deny it, we strive to admit that unfortunately it is part of the natural order. We may not like it, but plainly it is something we have to accept.

One of the ways we come accept death is through religion. One of the things that religion does is to help us recognize the reality of death. Religion helps us to see that others die and that we too shall die. Religion helps us to make peace with the reality of death. And this is certainly something that is not restricted to Christianity. All of the world's religions have something to say about death, as do more secular forms of faith. If I remember my Plato correctly, in the dialogue of the Phaedo, Socrates is facing his own death by execution and decides to take things into his own hands by drinking hemlock. But before he does so he shares with his friends the reason why he is not upset to die and why rather he is excited. You see, Socrates sees his death as freedom. His soul is immortal, after all, and so when he dies he will cease to be imprisoned by the confines of his body. For, he sees the body as an impediment to pursuit of truth. Socrates makes peace with death.

The composer of this very Requiem was at peace with death. In describing the wonderful music that we are sharing tonight, Fauré said, "It has been said that my Requiem does not express the fear of death and someone has called it a lullaby of death. But it is thus that I see death: as a happy deliverance, an aspiration towards happiness above, rather than as a painful experience". He also said that he felt it was "dominated from beginning to end by a very human feeling of faith in eternal rest".

Religion, and not just Christianity, invites us to make peace with death. As such, we are told that death is normal, and maybe even that death is good, when it is our time.

But I do not believe that the readings that we have heard tonight make peace. Here is where Christianity stands in tension with "religion" and the "secular".

I believe that tonight's readings declare that God is at war with death and that what's more death is an enemy already vanquished. Hear this proclamation - from Isaiah 25:8 "God will swallow up death forever", and from 1 Cor 15:54-55, echoing that passage from Isaiah, "Death has been swallowed up in victory. Where, O death, is your victory?"

As such, we are not meant to see death as a tool of God, for God is not at peace with death. Jesus weeps when he learns that his friend Lazarus has died. Jesus is deeply disturbed by the onset of his coming death in the Garden of Gethsemane. He is a polar opposite to Socrates.

One of Christianity's most startling claims is that death is not natural. For Christianity death and sin invade creation when the door is opened by humanity. And God's response to this invasion is to take up our cause. Furthermore, there is no doctrine of the immortality of the soul in traditional Christianity. We are not meant to see death as freedom and we are not meant to see death as punishment. God does not use death to meet God's ends. God overcomes death, as the source of light and life, by and through the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

This victory has begun in Christ. The overcoming of death has begun in Christ's very own death. This is the paradox. This is the "foolishness" that Paul describes in the 1st chapter of his first letter to the Corinthians. God in Christ assumes death. God fully enters into death and draws it into the divine by that entrance. And by drawing death into the divine life God overcomes death. In Christ, death itself has become an act of life. Death has been swallowed up in vicotry. The resurrection is the pronouncement that victory.

In the Gospel reading tonight, Jesus invites us to hear his words and believe in them as the way of entering into eternal life. But the words point to the man and what Jesus calls us to is the new life already begun in him. He invites us into love as a pathway to knowledge as the pathway to eternal life. He invites us into love before he invites us into "belief". Or rather, when we hear his words we are not accepting propositions about the man, rather we are falling in love with the life that he is and the hope towards which he points. When we trust that Christ is life, we can come to realize that our own deaths are acts of communion with life as they are acts of communion with Christ's death which is the supreme life giving act.

Which is not to say that in Christ the suffering of death is removed, that would be to deny death or to make peace with death. But rather, in Christ, the suffering that is defeat becomes the occasion of victory.

Therefore, we are not called to deny death, nor are we called to make peace with death, but rather we are called to proclaim Christ crucified and that by death and through death, death itself has been defeated. Jesus invites us into the new life that has already begun in him.