I have to admit I was afraid going into today's All Saints service that I was being a little too ambitious for someone who is still feeling my way into life as an ordained minister. We not only were doing a service for All Saints. We dedicated our columbarium and then interred the ashes of the Senior Warden's husband in the top niche. Fortunately, I am tall and strong, so I had no problem slipping the canister into place. What I didn't know was how the light was hitting that spot right at that moment.
Our supply priest had asked me to preach the sermon, and so I put the emphasis on the unseen body. The light bathing that niche was the visual evidence of the presence of what I was talking about. I couldn't have scripted this moment if I tried!
I think most of you know that besides splitting my time between
here and Christ the King downtown…I spend at least half of my week as a massage
therapist in Tallahassee.
One of the techniques I learned while I was in massage school is called
polarity. It’s a type of touch therapy that is very light and involves the
therapist placing her hands at two points on the body, possibly doing some
rocking motions, often we’re just holding still.
The client’s experience of this work can be any range of sensations
with the hope being that it will bring release of tension or pain they might be
holding.
For the therapist…we feel the energy pulsing and moving back and
forth between our hands. Unlike other types of massage…where we are actively
sinking into the muscle tissue with our fingers or knuckles or elbows…polarity
work involves engaging with energy that surrounds the body and all its muscles,
the joints, and ligaments. When my hands…and my energy…meet the client’s field
of energy…it’s something like when you hold two magnets with the same poles
facing each other. It feels like a very lively force field.
This magnetic energy is the unseen body.
Whether we’re conscious of it, we can sense and feel that energy as
it swirls up and down and all around a person’s physical frame.
As I sat with our first reading from Wisdom…I kept thinking about
the experiences I’ve had feeling and sensing that energetic body of a client: There’s
this unseen dimension that also has a presence. And it’s that something more
which I think gets captured in the poetic words of the Wisdom writer when we
hear about that part of us which will “shine forth and will run like sparks
through the stubble.”
It’s that same idea that Paul writes about in his First Letter to
the Corinthians, when speaking about the mystery of God that passes human
understanding. Death is not a finality.
Skeptics tend to say that once the person is dead, that’s it.
They’re gone.
But while that physical body is gone from this world, the spirit of
a person, that energetic body is what continues on…free from the physical
limitations of time and space that exist in our here and now. This energy is
beyond our flesh and blood version of reality (see 1Cor. 15:51-53).
This reading from Wisdom is among the choices the church gives for
use at the time of a funeral and so it makes sense that as we celebrate All
Saints that we have this reading.
This time of All Saints marks a period of liminal space.
Here in the northern hemisphere, the light dims earlier in the day
and the temperatures…finally!...start to cool off. There is a thinning of the
veil between the worlds of physical and spiritual living…which lends itself to
feeling the closeness of our loved ones who have transitioned and… in the words
of Shakespeare’s Hamlet…“shuffled off this mortal coil.” Many cultures
particularly in Latin communities are keenly aware of this thinning of the
space between the living and the dead.
The two-day celebration of Dia de los Muertos is a time of food and
drink and dancing as families feel that energetic presence of their ancestors
being close to them. It’s not a time of weeping but rejoicing. And in this
way…death isn’t an ending; it’s another leg of the soul’s
journey.
So it seems only fitting that on this day, we are dedicating our
columbarium which shares this sacred space with the two major visual cues of
our Christian heritage: the baptismal font and the Eucharistic table.
We come into our faith in Jesus through the font. As we note in the
service of baptism, it is through those waters that we are buried with Christ
and risen again into his life everlasting (BCP, 306). To be brought into the body of Christ means to
be brought into the mission of Christ’s work of reconciliation in the world.
And spending just a few minutes listening to the nightly news, there is a lot
of work to do in these times of polarized politics. Seems like there is no time
like the present to give sight to the blind, good news to the poor, free the
captives and liberate the oppressed (Luke 4:18).
The font is in line with our altar…the gathering place where we put
aside all labels and pretenses about ourselves…to be re-membered with Christ. Living
into the promises of our baptismal covenant…particularly the promise to seek
Christ in all persons and respect the dignity of every human being…is a
struggle. As Christians, we are called to resist the powers that want us to
assert dominance over other people…or even to tell the driver in the other car
who cut us off what we think of them…in sometimes very colorful language.
This table is where we come to be nourished and fed so that we can
get back out there and keep striving to bring about a kingdom where we live as
a beloved community of God.
And now we have added this columbarium. This is the place where we enter
our final rest, freed from our physical bodies, and yet that energetic spirit
dwells just on the other side of the veil. Having the columbarium in this space
is a reminder that our mortality does not cut us off from being in communion…and
is part of the journey of life.
We are changed in death…but life continues.
Our energy lives on in that great cloud of witnesses who keep watch
over the work we must continue to do in our realm…as we live into our own
versions of sainthood.
These saints may be at rest from their labors, but
God is continuing to work in and through us, perfecting us, coaxing us, bugging
us until we can’t ignore God any more. Their work is done. But ours is just
beginning.
Time to shine forth like sparks running through the stubble.
In the name of God…F/S/HS
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