Sunday 2nd November, 4 before Advent, evening
Luke 6:17-31
by Revd Kate Tuckett
Steve Jobs, the man who invented
apple and the inventor of many sleek devices modelled around the letter i said
this when he was diagnosed with a terminal illness: ‘No one wants to die. Even
people who want to do to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death
is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it
should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It
is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.’
These are the words of a man who
has found a technological solution, a gadget for almost everything one can
imagine, and here he is telling that even death can be managed if you go about
it in the right way. He’s so engaging and he’s touching on a raw nerve that we
desperately want to believe him. And perhaps we almost do. Maybe, just maybe
he’s offering the greatest gadget of all.
However, if you’ve lived through any
kind of bereavement or profound loss, I suspect you won’t be taken in. Because
when you’ve truly loved someone and they are uprooted from existence, there’s
no neat words or helpful gadgets that can assuage the dizzying effects of
grief. Many of us here will know the harrowing emptiness described by W H
Auden:
‘He was my north, my south, my east
and west,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My moon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever; I was wrong.’
But while there is something
intensely grating about Steve Jobs’ words, and we know instinctively that such
a brisk and business-like approach to death cannot be right, there is maybe
some truth in what he says that death, while sad, is not altogether bad. Maybe
some – or indeed most of the things that are truly good and beautiful and
wonderful about life wouldn’t be so precious if there was no sense of
limitation to them.
As Christians we believe that
somehow there is hope is our death and so death is not entirely a tragedy. And
yet death is always a tragedy. There is no easy way to lose someone we love.
And death is no less a tragedy for those who had no one to love them because
they were still made in God’s image and as human beings had potential and
dignity and worth. And death is a full stop. It is an end to our individuality
and to human relationships as we know them and no amount of faith and trust and
wise words and consoling gestures can deny this. And we are likely to
contemplate our own death in a similar way: with fear, resistance, denial and
paralysis, and perhaps somewhere a little hope that this life has been a
foretaste for the real thing that is still to come.
Tragedy and hope. Cross and
resurrection. This is at the centre of our Christian faith.
And I want to suggest that it is
precisely in inviting us to look into the most tragic parts of life, in giving
ritual to things perhaps we would rather not think about, that our faith gives
us hope. It seems that our culture is pretty resistant to the idea of hope. If
we refuse to look into the tragedy of our life – that one day it will come to
an end – it seems that the hope that is available to us is by here-and-now
satisfaction. Hope becomes the fulfilment of desire – for tangible possession,
for experiential feeling, for abiding and gratifying comfort. The trouble is
that death utterly destroys all of these hopes. So the only remedy is to make
these desires and their fulfilment so all-consuming that we’re able to forget
about or at least ignore death until we absolutely have to.
There’s also a kind of hope that
diffuses our own lives into the wellbeing of all. This is what soldiers do in
laying down their lives for their country, or what victims’ families may do
when they express an aspiration that the lessons learned from their loved one’s
death will alleviate suffering and thus enhance the lives of those to come.
Which is very laudable. But I’m not sure that this gives any more meaning to
death than a relentless quest for experience does.
I’m not actually sure there is very
much hope without God, either to our death, or in fact to our life, because the
tragedy of all our lives is that they will come to an end. This is a bleak
realisation, but flip the coin over, and we find that there is limitless hope
in God. Boundless, infinite, life-giving hope that not even our death or the
death of those we love can take away.
We have come together in an act of
remembering, and that is an act of hope itself, because there is life and
presence and relationship in remembering our loved ones. It isn’t always easy
to remember, because remembering may bring back the pain of loss. It isn’t always
easy to remember a relationship that may have had difficulties or has left us
feeling guilty, or with things we wished we’d said or done but didn’t get the
chance. And every death to a point is like this. Every death leaves unfinished
business; no life attains the kind of completeness we long for and find truly
satisfying.
So coming together to remember and
honour our loved ones takes courage. But we do this in the context of a greater
remembrance. As Jesus approached his own death, he shared a simple meal with
his friends. He urged them to remember him every time they break bread or drink
wine. And he promised that this was a story for all time, and that whenever
bread was broken and wine was poured, whenever the story was told around the
table, that he would be there. And so as we gather around the altar and pray
the ritual that we pray week in and week out, at whose climax a sliver of bread
is put in our hands and a sip of wine will pass our lips, we believe that in
faith we will touch and be touched by God.
And in doing this, we remember, and
we are re-membered, literally put back together again through the broken body
of Jesus. Do this and remember me. Do this, and re-member. That is our hope.
Our lives and our memories are broken and will be broken. But as Christians we
believe that we will be re-membered in God; this is resurrection.
To do this comes at a cost. It
means we have to look at death square on. Easter Sunday does not come without
Good Friday. And I think this is what the gospel reading told us too. We are
told that those who weep are blessed. We may well ask where the blessing is to
be found in all the tragedy that surrounds any death. And yet Jesus tells us
that it is the poor, the hungry, the weeping, those who know life’s tragedy that
can know its resurrection. This is not transactional kind of language – do this
and you will receive this, do that and you will receive that. It is descriptive
language – this is who these people are now, but this is what the future holds
for them. It is not the language of law but of gospel, the language of hope and
promise that the way things are now is not always the way they will be.
The cross of Christ, which we
remember as we share communion tells us that our hope is not without tragedy,
nor without indescribable cost to God. And many of our lives confirm it. But
the resurrection of Christ promises that out of fear and suffering and tragedy
and death arises never-ending, overwhelming, beyond-describing, infinite life
in God.
Facing death, facing tragedy is
unlikely to be something that any of us choose to do. But when we come together
we remember and to be re-membered we may begin to see God’s blessed ones, and
to recognise the poor, the hungry, the weeping and one another not just as
people we can help, but as people who can help us if we will let them, and that
their hunger and thirst for God and for resurrection are not voids to be filled
but appetites to be envied.
I want to describe two men who
together give us a picture of cross and resurrection, of tragedy and hope, of
facing death in and blessing others. Poet and hymnwriter Joachim Neander was a
17thC German Protestant. Standing at the edge of his death and aged
just 30 before he died of tuberculosis he wrote these words: ‘All my hope on
God is founded, the doth still my trust renew, me through change and chance he
guideth, only good and only true. God unknown, he alone, calls my heart to be
his own.’
Two hundred and fifty years later,
Neander’s hymn was sent to the famous composer Herbert Howells. Howells was
deep in grief after the death of his 9-year-old son Michael from meningitis.
It’s said that Howells received the hymn text in the morning and didn’t move
from his chair until he had composed the tune. He was profoundly moved by what
these words said about the interplay of tragedy and hope, cross and
resurrection, and was overwhelmed by how these words described his grief and
faith in the face of the death of his son. And so in gratitude for the blessing
granted by Neander, in tribute to his young son, and in praise of God on whom
all his hope was founded, he named the tune Michael.
Notes
This sermon uses materials from:
Brown Taylor, B. (2013), The Healing Word, London: SPCK,
pp159-263
Percy, M. (ed.) (2014), This Bright Field, London: Canterbury
Press, pp238-240
Wells, S. (2013), Learning to Dream Again, London:
Canterbury Press, pp165-172
