Death, Grief, and All Saints Day

All Saint’s Day takes me to late February and early March 2015.

Time travel

Philosopher Charles Taylor suggests there is a “higher time” that re-orders and warps “secular time.” So-called “secular time” marches lock-step in line, this-before-that. But there’s something that bends similar events together.

Thus, he writes, “Good Friday 1998 is closer in a way to the original day of the Crucifixion than mid-summer’s day 1997.”

This is what we’re acknowledging when we celebrate holidays (i.e., holy days) and engage the Christian calendar with times like Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter, and All Saints Day. It’s what we’re doing subconsciously when we celebrate birthdays and anniversaries, too. We’re drawn into a closeness with something that happened in the past.

It’s not quite Back to the Future, but I’ll take it.

November 1 takes me back to that intensive care unit, snow crusted around the window panes, and we’re a family of six huddled around the hospital bed, and we watched her last breath.

My wife’s mom died that day.

My father-in-law asked me to speak at the funeral. I’d never spoken at a funeral before.

Language matters

All Saints Day is an annually reminder about how to talk well about Christian death. The way we talk about death and the way we celebrate the saints form and shape us as a community on mission.

Notice I wrote that she “died.” As a Christian, a person of Resurrection, I believe that how we talk about other Christians who have died matters. She did not “pass away.” She wasn’t “called home.” She didn’t “go to be with the Lord.” We didn’t “lose” her.

She died.

There was no euphemism to side-step the pain and grief that left. Pain and grief are acceptable responses to death. It’s not supposed to be this way. We don’t have to be okay when loved ones die.

It’s deeply significant that the story recording the weeping of Jesus is the Lazarus story. Jesus enters into the grief of death. God is compassion in this moment. About this radical compassion of Jesus, Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann writes, “Compassion constitutes a radical form of criticism, for it announces that the hurt is to be taken seriously, that the hurt is not to be accepted as normal and natural but is an abnormal and unacceptable condition for humanness.”

Death is real. There’s no getting around it.

But resurrection is real, too. And that is our subversive hope as a Christian community.

Why November 1

In the days of the early church, followers of Christ found themselves at odds with the political powers. They began commemorating martyrs with special days. But after 400 years, there were more martyrs than days of the year, so it was decided to take one day of the year to specially remember the saints that had died. In the 8th century, Pope Gregory III determined that day should be November 1.

From it’s earliest days, the Church understood the communal and family nature of the human experience. We know what kind of God God is because of the Christian community that surrounds us. I know what I know about God because of the Sunday school teachers, small group leaders, mission trip volunteers, spiritual aunts and uncles, grandmas and grandpas I’ve encountered throughout my life in the Church.

The stadium watching us

Several years ago I ran in a marathon. I was nuts. I’ve never been an athletic person. Trust me, I’ve tried. And I’ve certainly never been fast. I was always dead last in youth basketball practice windsprints.

But I decided to run a marathon. More accurately, my friend Kyle said he would, so I volunteered to join him. I learned that discipline and stubborn determination beat athleticism every time. We had a plan and we stuck to it. Every day.

Two weeks before the race was the 22-mile practice run. But Kyle was out of town. I had to do it by myself. I decided I’d go along the planned course. But it was sidewalks and stoplights and traffic. The whole city was oblivious to my physical odyssey through midtown.

At 20 miles I couldn’t do it anymore. I called my wife. She came and picked me up in the car. I couldn’t move anymore. I had no clue what I was going to do come race day. There was still six more miles before the finish line.

Race day came. But I wasn’t alone. It seemed like the entire city showed up. Those not running the race were lining the streets for 26 miles. And along the final miles were people cheering like crazy and holding homemade signs that read things like “26.2 is for people picked last in PE.” All these things made my adrenaline boil.

And at the final leg, I started to see a familiar sight along the sidelines: runners who had finished who are now cheering the rest of us to the finish line.

This is what All Saints Day is for.

The saints surround us

When I think of All Saints Day, I think of Hebrews chapters 11 and 12. In Hebrews 11 and 12, the writer recounts some of the epic heroes of the Bible’s stories. Noah. Abraham. Isaac. Jacob. Moses. And the writer gets so carried, he runs out of space to talk about everybody he wants to. Then he paints this picture:

All these people earned a good reputation because of their faith, yet none of them received all that God had promised. For God had something better in mind for us, so that they would not reach perfection without us.

Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a huge crowd of witnesses to the life of faith, let us strip off every weight that slows us down, especially the sin that so easily trips us up. And let us run with endurance the race God has set before us (Hebrews 11:39-12:1).

Sure, the life of faith may be a marathon, but it’s also a relay race. Our lives are connected with generations past. Moses. David. Mary. Martha. All of our spiritual mentors who have died. In the Christian view, my mother-in-law finished her race, passed the baton to us, and joined the spectators at the finish line cheering us on. She joined this great cloud of witnesses with Abraham and Sarah and all the others. With the resurrection in mind, she hasn’t left us but is very near.

This is the hope of resurrection.

This is the hope of All Saints Day.

And that was the funeral sermon I preached.