Rest in Peace

Next Sunday morning, we will be privileged to welcome to our pulpit Jack Rogers, Moderator of the 213th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). Jack Rogers is a Presbyterian theologian, and a distinguished one. He knows the theological history of our tradition about as well as anyone, and has taught in a variety of settings in the church, including two seminaries, for nearly 40 years. 

Along with 15 or so other distinguished Presbyterian theologians, our current moderator served on a committee that created our most recent Presbyterian creed, called simply the Brief Statement of Faith. If you read one thing every day, this would be a pretty good choice. 

The Brief Statement begins with the simple, startling phrase “in life and in death we belong to God.” In life and in death we belong to God. If you have ever written anything, from a book to a letter to a recipe, you know that the first line is always the most difficult. In life and in death we belong to God. The committee borrowed that line from a historic confession, the Heidelberg Catechism from the 1600’s. The catechism’s first question asks -- “What is your only comfort, in life and in death?” And the response is – “That I belong – body and soul, in life and in death – not to myself but to my faithful savior, Jesus Christ, who at the cost of his own blood has fully paid for all my sins and has completely freed me from the dominion of the devil…Therefore, by his Holy Spirit, he also assures me of eternal life, and makes me wholeheartedly willing and ready from now on to live for him.”

Most surely death has been in the news. Reports from the Middle East are grim, as are the continuing reports about war in Afghanistan. It seems now that death in each locale is becoming the expectation. I was in Texas last week, and the intense focus on the trial in Houston defies comprehension and breaks the heart. Tomorrow we mark six months since the death dealing events of September 11. 

And yet we say in life and in death that we belong to God. The faith promises of our life together should not seem to be pie in the sky – and they are not. Jesus says to us that I came to give life and to give it abundantly, and we cling to that promise in a way that transforms life as we know it at this very moment, for the living of our days, right here, right now. 

Last week we shared the opening pages from the wonderful children’s book The Very Hungry Caterpillar. The story has a happy ending, of course, as the transformed caterpillar springs forth from the cocoon as a newly transformed butterfly. 

The crucial turning point in all this, of course, is moving from the very human way of contemplating death to the very transformed way of celebrating life, and to realize that the very same God who called the world, and us, into being, cares for each moment of each life, and cares for us never more deeply than at the point of death. 

When we say that in life and in death we belong to God, and seek to embrace that in our living, we are saying that we belong to nothing else. We do not belong to the world, to the culture, to a political or economic way of doing things. We do not belong to our portfolios or to our pedigrees. We do not belong to our professions, which is challenging news to some of us. We do not belong to our own wits or capabilities or competencies. 

At the end of the day, those belongings do not offer life. They simply do not. We know that. This is not pie in the sky. It is about the here and now, about embracing the life that God has given each one of us and allowing it to be transformed into something extraordinary, something life-affirming, something abundant and eternal. 

The Apostle Paul wrote to the early church at Rome – “to set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.” Life and peace. This affirmation is about the choices we make every day – about our work, our relationships, our parenting, our citizenship. 

By the spirit, the choices we make can affirm life and make peace. 

Reading the paper this morning, I was reminded of people I have met working for peace in the Middle East, working for peace in Northern Ireland, working for peace in some of the most violent and death-dealing housing projects in the United States. You know them as well. Their own way of living is a wonder to behold, as is the reconciliation that shines forth all around them like a beacon of hope. They are liberated by the very good news that they belong to God whether they live or die, and so they live life fully, freed from anxiety and self-deception. 

So that, when that moment comes, as it will most surely come for all of us – though the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness. 

“And death will have no dominion,” Dylan Thomas once wrote. That is the promise to which we hold and into which we live each day. The promise of light, perpetual light, at this moment and for all moments, and peace at the end of the day. 

“Calm fell,” Thomas Hardy wrote. “Calm fell. From heaven distilled a clemency;/ There was peace on earth, and silence in the sky;/ Some could, some could not, shake off misery:/The Sinister Spirit sneered: ‘It had to be!’/And again the Spirit of pity whispered, ‘Why?’

Lent is that season to shake off misery in order to live into the silence in the sky, what the composer calls requiem, what the good news calls resurrection. Amen.