For the Living of These Days

Ruth 1:1-17; I Corinthians 15:50-56

A Sermon by Donald Mackenzie

November 21, 2004

University Congregational United Church of Christ

Seattle, Washington

“Where you go, I will go…”Ruth 1:16b

Today we return to the themes of emptying and filling, memory and hope, giving and receiving and living and dying. The combination of the joining of new members and the remembering with thanksgiving the lives of those we have loved who have died on the Sunday before our national day of Thanksgiving, of gratitude, brings forth many images.

The truth about what happens to us when we lose loved ones and when we make new friends, either one, is often hard to see. When we lose someone, we are overcome by grief, by that feeling that we are totally filled by tears and deep longing that seemingly, cannot be fulfilled. And as we move forward, hoping for some sort of solace, some sort of comfort, often what we are hoping for doesn’t happen, at least not in the way we expect it. When my father died about six years ago this month, I had been anticipating his death for about a year. In fact, I made four trips to Tennessee to see him and my mother that year and as I left each time, I cried in the car on the way back to the airport. I made sounds I didn’t think I was capable of and, in the emptying, did find some solace in the two-hour drive back to the airport in Nashville. But I wasn’t prepared for the drama of my being redefined by that loss. Somehow, I thought I would “get over it.” Six years later I know I will never “get over it,” but I will find healing. When I stop to contemplate the loss of my dad, I feel that desperate yearning that doesn’t seem to have any limits. When I see the moon, I always spontaneously say “hi dad.” I don’t know why and I certainly don’t believe that he is “up there.” On the other hand, it is comforting to think he is somewhere. And, I believe, when I take the time to think about it, that dad is just as much with me now as God is with me now. My father’s spirit lives on in me as God’s spirit does and it is the spirit, the very essence of a life that we do need to carry forward with us.

John Irving’s novel A Widow for One Year, chronicles the story of a young man who falls in love with a woman named Marion who at the time is married to a man named Ted. Eddie is young and wholly taken by this relationship until one day the woman leaves both Eddie and Ted and disappears. Then Irving writes in commenting on the coming of Eddie’s life as a writer: “It was losing her (Marion) that had given him something to say. It was the thought of his life without Marion that provided Eddie O’Hare with the authority to write.” I wrote that out and put the piece of paper on my bookshelf. I had read the book in the month following the death of my father and was haunted by the possibility that the death of my father would, as it redefined my life, help my life to move forward in ways that I could not have imagined. Perhaps it was a joining of spirits in a way that cannot happen while one is contained by the human body. This haunts me to this day and I do find solace in it because my father’s voice and mine are becoming one. I’m not suggesting that this sort of thing might be universally true, at least in this way, but I am saying that there is something to the idea that life does not end with death and that, in fact, we can feel that in experiences such as those I have been describing.

This is why I enjoy and appreciate the story of Ruth. The Book of Ruth is one of the most unusual books in scripture because it uses a woman in a man’s world to show the way. Ruth, in many ways prefigures the life of Jesus because of her devotion to Naomi and her willingness to go to a new and foreign place to continue her life after her husband had died. She takes us to a new place of love as she rejects the usual path for a widow, for one who has experienced a redefining loss, and takes up a new and frankly frightening path by going with her mother-in-law to a new place, a place to be transformed and recreated. As John Irving writes of Eddie O’Hare, we might see it written of Ruth, it was the loss of her husband that gave Ruth the authority to decide to move out in a new and unexpected direction in her life.

In Paul’s first letter to the church at Corinth, we find these themes exploding and making noise as they seek to redefine our thinking about life and death. What Paul is saying in this passage is that life does not end with death. Something important happens to be sure, but it is not nothingness. The broad term for this is resurrection and Paul’s enthusiasm for this comes from his own experience with the risen Christ on the road to Damascus. Paul might well have written, when we experience a loss by death, God gives us the authority to move forward in a new way, a way we cannot know and can describe only in the vaguest way.

William Temple, who was the Archbishop of Canterbury in the first part of the 20^th century wrote that “tragedy is the experience of irreparable brokenness. In God’s eyes, nothing is irreparably broken.” In other words, the defining feature of our experience with God as we move through this life to what comes next is healing—healing, in the sense of being made whole and having our sufferings converted to joy. It’s a difficult concept, especially when in the midst of grief and that bottomless feeling of loss. But the tradition does keep repeating in all parts of scripture, this theme holds true, that even in our most desperate moments, God is with providing for our needs and preparing our way as we enter our future. God provides for us for the living of our days and even makes us new in the midst of pain and the suffering of loss.

Let us give thanks this morning for all those we have loved who have died during this past year and for the reassurance that their spirits live on in our spirits and, not just that but they give us things in such a new relationship that we could not have dreamed of. Amen.