We don’t go all out with the skull facepaints like
they do in Mexico, but it is becoming more prevalent even in Canada. And that might not be a bad thing. When we think about death rituals here
compared to places like Europe or South America, or even New Orleans, they are
very different. We no longer wash or dressing
the body at home. And we’ve also tried
to make it invisible. One time
we were in the hospital where a family member had passed away, and the hospital
staff came up to us and asked to remove the body before other patients started
to wake up. They didn’t want to upset
the other patients. Fair enough, but if
it’s being done to hide the reality of death, is that healthy for our society?
A chaplain who served in Afghanistan with the Canadian
Armed Forces came home to Edmonton to find that there was a new trend of
roadside shrines. Suddenly whenever a
tragedy happened there would be a mound of teddy bears in front of a store or a
street corner where strangers would congregate, overwhelmed with grief for someone
they had never met. It was almost like
the news story had cracked open a bubble of unexpressed grief that needed to be
poured out in a public way. Dealing with
death is not easy.
Ministers, even in the United Church, get called to do
exorcisms and house purifications.
That’s not a part of our theology.
But it can be a way of giving voice to grief that doesn’t have any other
way out. We are not comfortable with
that kind of ‘woo woo’. Going to the
other extreme is not healthy either.
That’s materialism, when people only believe in what they can touch.
That mindset can lead to people competing for the most stuff, the most money,
the most of whatever they can control.
It is not what we are called to as a people wanting to be Jesus
followers.
Jesus was struggling to communicate a middle way. He talked to the Sadducees about their
beliefs of the afterlife and used scripture to defend his belief. God is the God of the present, of the living,
and still the God of past leaders of the Hebrew people. He also challenged them to think outside
their stereotyped assumptions that the dead live in identical ways to the
living, with the same interests, concerns, entanglements and struggles. Nothing further could be what Jesus thought
life after death was. It wasn’t a
continuation of life on earth, but a transformation that was beyond description
or definition or perfect knowledge. And
certainly, life after death could not be understood through a materialist
viewpoint.
But rather than going into further detail, he then
turned to the question that the Pharisees posed. What is more important than whether the dead
are gone forever or live on in eternity?
What is important is not the woo woo, or the stories of things that go
bump in the night. No, for Jesus, the
debate on the afterlife is worth only a passing comment. He recited the ancient prayer that all devout
Jews are to recite, “Hear Oh Israel” and that the laws of their faith could be
summed up in love. This was not new
knowledge for anyone. There are over 600
commandments that observant Jews needed to follow, and there were many debates
on how to do that. If we hold the
sabbath to be holy and that we are not to do any work or travel, we still need
to milk our cows or they will suffer.
Love is the over-arching principle that governs how those commandments
are put into practice.
It all comes down to relationship with the Holy, and
with each other. That can be hard, or
seem like the ultimate in woo woo, and in our world where bombs are falling and
people’s birth certificates are used as weapons against them, when shooters
walk into bowling alleys, it is hard to remember to hold onto a relationship
with something we can’t see, hear or touch.
Whether we believe like the Sadducees that we end when our lives end, or
like the Pharisees that we continue on, Jesus wants us to focus on building a
relationship with God. That relationship
is to be centered on love. When we love
God so deeply, it spills out onto our relationships with each other.
Some people are not ready for that. Their grief is real and raw and
all-consuming. Their relationship with
God, if they have one at all, may be one of resentment, of anger, of fear or
even rage. God can handle that anguish
and negativity. In fact many people find
that expressing their anger to God is an important part of their grief journey.
It is still a relationship with the
divine. Like our psalm this morning, the
scriptures are full of people pouring out their anger and suffering, their pain
and fear to God. When we remember that even Jesus suffered and died, God must
have grieved too. But God pulled hope
and love out of that tragic time, and we hear so many stories in this place of
how God still pulls hope and love out of tragedy. Grief is hard, but the good news is that God
is with us, in life, in death and in life beyond death. We are not alone, God is with us. Thanks be to God!
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