Hebrew Scripture Reading: Wisdom of Solomon 3:1-9
…The souls of the righteous are in the hand of God,
and no torment will ever touch them.
2In the eyes of the foolish they seemed to have died,
and their departure was thought to be a disaster
3and their going from us to be their destruction,
but they are at peace.
4 For though in the sight of others they were punished,
their hope is full of immortality.
5 Having been disciplined a little, they will receive great good,
because God tested them and found them worthy of {Godself;
6like gold in the furnace God tried them,
and like a sacrificial burnt offering God accepted them.
7In the time of their visitation they will shine forth
and will run like sparks through the stubble.
8 They will govern nations and rule over peoples,
and the Sovereign God will reign over them forever.
9 Those who trust in God will understand truth,
and the faithful will abide with God in love,
because grace and mercy are upon God’s holy ones,
and God watches over the elect.
Epistle Reading: Revelation 21:1-5
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. 2 And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. 3 And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying,
“See, the home of God is among mortals.
God will dwell with them; they will be God’s peoples,
and God will be with them and will be their God;
God will wipe every tear from their eyes.
Death will be no more;
mourning and crying and pain will be no more,
for the first things have passed away.”
5 And the one who was seated on the throne said, “See, I am making all things new.”
Sermon
- The Wisdom of Solomon is not in our Protestant bibles;
- It’s in the Apocrypha, a collection of books that Catholics and Orthodox churches use that Protestants decided not to include in our Canon.
- This particular poem about those who have died paints a poetic outline of the afterlife; but it also addresses some of our attitudes about death and grief
- When we grieve, it’s because we have lost someone or something we love and value; and we are sad about that loss.
- It’s about that unfamiliar feeling of going on without that person we were used to having in our lives.
- I still sometimes stop and think in disbelief about my parents and sister: He’s dead now. She’s gone now. I’m not going to see them again.
- So grief is about us, our loss, our emotions; it is perfectly natural and normal and necessary to bathe ourselves in the sorrow of losing those we love.
- Human relationships are God’s greatest gift to us and we should grieve!
- It’s about that unfamiliar feeling of going on without that person we were used to having in our lives.
- But the writer of the Wisdom poem is not focused on our grief:
- Instead, they write about what happens to the dead themselves
- Wisdom doesn’t see death as a failure, a tragedy, a mistake or a punishment, the way we sometimes do
- Wisdom imagines something beyond our own personal loss:
- The dead are in the hands of God
- They are entrusted to a worthy caregiver
- They are released from torment, disaster and destruction
- They have peace, immortal hopefulness
- They are worthy and accepted; their death is a reward, not a curse
- And Wisdom even imagines that the dead have certain powers alongside God
- They are able to “govern and rule over people” even as God reigns over them
- And they “shine like sparks in the stubble” (I think this refers to the way corn or wheat stubble will spark when burned after harvest)
- This poem might resonate with anyone who has ever felt, after a loved one died, that they were somehow still mystically present, not just in memory but in some visceral way you can’t explain.
- We don’t all feel this, but some of us do
- Some of us wonder if our beloved dead can tap on God’s shoulder and have a little influence on how things turn out in the world, like guardian angels
- Some of us think of the dead as still being the same people we remember when they were alive;
- Others think of the dead as becoming one with a big, universal Spirit or cosmic power, no longer individual souls
- There are some who think we all just disappear into nothingness; even the bible says we all “turn to dust”.
- None of us knows for sure who we become in death,
- But in the Christian Church we have rituals that help us process and grow through our grief toward faith in something we call resurrection
- Something bigger than just coping with our own emotions and personal loss,
- There also comes the awareness that the people we loved intimately were valuable to the world beyond just us;
- The reach of their lives extended far beyond just us and continues to ripple through every life they touched.
- And after they die, we locate them in a new place, in the realm of God, a place we are connected to spiritually by an invisible thread
- We may not know HOW they exist, but we have faith that they continue to live in the resurrection.
- In old, European churches, its common for the church building to be surrounded on all sides by the graves of its dead members, so that you literally have to walk through the communion of saints as you enter the church
- In Mexican tradition, Dia de Los Muertos (which was last Friday) is celebrated by families taking picnics out to the graveyard and celebrating among the tombstones.
- Here at Lyndale, you have a memorial garden with a marker that includes names of those who have died recently, but also invokes the memory that many members have come and gone before you and have made their mark on the ministry they passed on to you.
- A couple weeks ago, my friends from seminary, Marty and Sean, met me for lunch and we went out to the Lakewood Cemetery to visit the gravesites of Marty’s ancestors.
- We had learned that one of Marty’s relatives was William King, a prominent Minneapolis civic leader, newspaper editor and farm owner who gave the land for that entire cemetery and who named the Lyndale neighborhood for his father.
- We also had learned that one of your former pastors, Charles Emerson Burton, married into the King family, and we thought we might find his grave there
- (We didn’t find it; looks like he was buried in another state, but we found his wife’s and son’s graves!)
- Anyway, it was a beautiful fall day, and there was something mystical and sweet about walking among the tombstones with my old friends finding old connections.
- Cemeteries remind us that life is short, and that we may not be as important in history as we want to imagine;
- But also, they remind us that we are part of a great parade of souls, every one of them precious and remembered by God, even if maybe forgotten in history.
- We as Christians grieve like everyone else grieves;
- But we can maintain hope that, even though our loss is huge, our hope is bigger.
- We can learn from the gifts and mistakes made by our ancestors
- We can try to embody the best of who they were and take over the roles they once filled in our families and communities
- (like when Kathy brings flowers to church the way Ellie used to)
- You might consider this year how you can emulate the generous faithfulness of Doug Malchow
- or the exuberant, community-building spirit of Jess Carter
- And think of other people you have lost: what did they leave you with that can be picked up and carried forward?
- You can add the qualities of the saints to your own character as you try to help God make “all things new”
- and help build a world where all crying and mourning will someday cease and all will be one.
- Today, we will sing and light candles and remember the dead, trusting that they are no longer tormented or punished, but are accepted and rewarded with immortal hope!
- We cannot touch them, but they still belong to us,
- even as they belong to God and to the world they graced for the time they were given.
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