| Rector’s
Sermon
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| How often do you think about your own dying and death? God knows, we have reason enough to think about the dying and death of others, whether here at Christ Church or other family or friends or victims of tragedies or firemen, policemen, and soldiers who serve in harm’s way. We think about those people all the time. We pray for them all the time. But what about ourselves? Is that something we spend much time on? This week we come to that part of the story where Jesus begins to focus on his own dying and death. Beginning next Sunday, Palm Sunday, that part of Jesus’ story gets especially intense and graphic. We’ll recall Jesus literally sweating blood in prayer and then shedding blood in the torture which was crucifixion. But today we have John’s version of Christ’s thinking and talking about his dying and death and what the implications are for those who follow him, namely, you and me. Perhaps you’d like to argue with me. Perhaps you’d suggest you don’t come to church to be depressed, to be scared, to be morose, but rather you come to church to be uplifted, inspired, to find a place of security. I couldn’t agree with you more. I can’t resist this little joke if only to lighten up this sermon a little bit: Well, whether or not you have to, when you get here you’d just as soon not be bored, disliked, or depressed. Nonetheless, the cross of Jesus greets us every time we come here which is to say that the victory of the Resurrection has a price attached to it, a cost we would be well advised to consider for our own lives. Henri Nouwen was a Roman Catholic priest deeply conscious of his own spiritual journey. Author of any number of books on spirituality, he left his academic careers at Notre Dame and Yale to take up residence in the L’arche Community in Ontario, Canada. L’arche Communities are found worldwide and are ones in which people with and without intellectual and developmental disabilities and assistants choose to live and work together. Henri Nouwen died of a heart attack in 1996 but his legacy included not only his love for those whom Jesus called “the least of these my brothers and sisters,” but also his deeply honest reflections which included this particular quotation: I have a deep sense…that if we could really befriend death, we would be free people. So many of our doubts and hesitations, ambivalence and insecurities, are bound up with our deep-seated fear of death. Fear of death drives us into death. But if we can make friends with our own death, we can choose life freely. That reflection reminds me of Francis of Assisi’s Canticle of the Sun. In it, Francis identifies himself with all of God’s creation: Most high, all-powerful, all good, Lord! I believe Henri Nouwen and Francis of Assisi would encourage us to think of dying and death as part of the created order, even as gifts from God, if my faith will allow me to embrace that. Is that a gift I might embrace? Is the fear of death something I can give to God in return for the assurance that in both life and death God will keep me close? Might I understand more completely what Jesus meant when he said that those who are willing to lose their life for his sake will find it? And might we think about these things for the next two weeks because Jesus certainly did. |
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