Phil. 2:5-11; Luke 19:29-40

 

 

The Rev. Paul DeLain Allick, St. George’s Episcopal Church, March 28, 2010

 

 

In the priesthood as with other vocations one comes into contact with death on a regular basis. In this past month I have experienced the death of beloved parishioners, close friends and relatives. I have felt the vibrations of heartache from those of us left behind.

 

 

In our culture we avoid death. We are becoming more and more clinical in our grieving. We are shortening the grieving process. We are holding memorial services where we don’t talk about death but about the life of the deceased. Our medical system is fraught with attempts to stave off death as long as possible no matter how much it may prolong suffering.

 

 

Don’t get me wrong, to want to live is a good thing. We should be fighting death. But we are all facing death whether we want to admit it or not. We are all heading to that process in our lives. We should talk about it more. We should learn how to grieve better.

 

 

We used to give ourselves more time to grieve, to face death. We used to have wakes wherein we could gather to pray and tell our stories and to sing songs. Now we try to pack all of that into an hour liturgy. Indeed our funeral masses have become more like wakes with communion added onto to the end. The actual funeral is where we commend the deceased person to God; it’s about God, not the deceased. We should learn again how to prolong the process so that we can say good-bye better.

 

 

This weekend I participated in such a process. In the American Indian community we still have wakes. This weekend we said good-bye to my mentor Fr. Phil Allen. We started on Friday night with a wake wherein we had a prayer service that lasted almost three hours. We told our stories, we sang our songs. When the service was over we ate some more and told more stories. We grieved with tears and laughter. By the time we got to the funeral mass on Saturday we were ready to focus on commending Phillip’s soul to God.

 

 

On this Palm Sunday we now “enter with joy upon the contemplation those mighty acts” whereby God has given us life and immortality through Jesus Christ.

 

 

This whole experience of Holy Week will be about facing the death of Jesus. How will face it with Him? It will be a prolonged process. We will gather on Maundy Thursday to share in His last meal and strip our altar of all its accoutrements so as to feel the loss of our teacher. We will be here on Good Friday to watch and wait with our Blessed Mother, the other women disciples, and the disciple whom Jesus loved. It will be an exhausting process but when it is over we will feel better; we will have “gotten it all out.”

 

 

Here is the heart of the matter: Look at any parish’s attendance for Easter as compared to Maundy Thursday and Good Friday and you will see a stark difference. (I am not trying to shame us here but to alert us.) This speaks to how we as people are facing death and how we are understanding our religion.

 

 

How does Jesus face His death? He faces it by emptying Himself. This is how He lived His whole life. He empties Himself as to follow the will of His Father. He enters Jerusalem not in human glory but in humility which is the Divine Glory.

 

 

We do not have a high priest that cannot understand our fear of death. We have one that has passed through all of it with us. Jesus doesn’t get to skip staring death in the face. To follow out the mystery of our salvation, Jesus must experience everything with us: the joys and the sorrows, life and death.

 

 

When we avoid the reality of death we never come to fully appreciate life. Death is a part of our eternal life. What is the power of Resurrection without any Crucifixion?

 

 

Isn’t that process at the heart of our existence as human beings? We die and rise all the time. Well before that final, physical death, we die little deaths. We make it through all kinds of deaths live again.

 

 

The 8^th Century bishop, St. Andrew of Crete wrote this in a sermon about Palm Sunday:

 

 

Let us run to accompany him as he hastens toward his passion and imitate those who met him there, not by covering his path with garments, olive branches or palms, but by doing all we can to prostrate ourselves before him by being humble and trying to live as he would wish. Then we shall be able to receive the Word at his coming, and God, whom no limits can contain, will be within us.

 

(The Liturgy of the Hours, Vol. II, Catholic Book Publishing Corp. New York, 1976, p.419)

 

 

You can’t conquer anything without facing it down. So this Holy Week let us take courage. Let us face death without fear or denial. Let’s take our time in the process and not rush to Easter. Let us walk this journey with Jesus so that we can come to understand our own mortality and how God in Christ has conquered death.