Tag: Reconciliation

A Sudden and Evil Death…

We don’t use it all that often.  Ash Wednesday.  Maybe the odd Sunday in Lent or Advent. The Litany (LSB 288) is a highly stylized and formal call and response prayer.  Technically our “Prayers of the Church” are a litany. They are petitionary in that they ask God for something. There is a call and response form to them.  The difference is that the call, the petition, is usually changeable and specific week to week, while the congregational response is fixed in one of two forms: “Hear our prayer” or “In you mercy.”  The formal litany is contemplative in both call and response.  The petitions are general: “from all sin, error and evil…deliver us good Lord.” As a contemplative prayer, we individually supply our sin, error and evil.  And collectively we offer them up to Christ seeking deliverance.  A litany in English has just become a synonym for an overly long list. But if that word was still grounded in the world of contemplative prayer, it is a list of things important enough to bring to Almighty God. It is a list of things common enough that we all fear the things in it.  We don’t like to contemplate them, but we need to.  And turn them over to Christ who alone grants us peace.

The line that plays on my memory today is one that I don’t think we tend to share with most Christians of most times and places as a trouble.  “From sudden and evil death…good Lord deliver us.” Every time I intone that line, my contemplation is that I think most of us would prefer that, a sudden if not evil death.  Don’t let me suffer or linger or be a burden.  Let my death be fast and if not fast then easy. Our entire end of life system these days is built towards giving that.  Although I am not sure if that is for the comfort of those remaining or of those leaving. But that petition was important enough for most Christians to make it into the litany.  Sudden death for most of history was all around. Sudden death could be an evil death for multiple reasons, but primarily two.  A sudden death might “capture us unawares.” Like the 5 virgins who fell asleep without oil, the day came, and they were not ready.  The second thing a sudden death precluded was reconciliation. We tend to keep grudges, and if not grudges, there are all kinds of minor things, each a brick in a wall that builds up between us and our family or neighbor. And if not a full wall, a stumbling stone that makes interaction in anything but gentle pleasantries uncomfortable. The time before death was the time to clear away any of those hindrances. In our sufferings, to fill up the sufferings of Christ, and be reconciled to all. A sudden death would rob that.

Of course, I’m reflecting just on the fact of the sudden death of Dale and Marge. None of us knows our day, hour or minute. And neither of those two concerns were a problem with Dale or Marge. They were not caught unaware by the day.  They both had a solid and fervent faith in Jesus. And in living out that faith I saw no evidence of stumbling blocks placed or walls that needed to come down. Dale and Marge lived the faith day by day. And in that they are examples of the saints we are to hold up for our instruction.  We can pray that God would grant us the time to be in earnest, that sudden and evil death would not catch us, so that we might be reconciled at the last. Or we can recognize that now is that time. Today is the day of grace. Today is the day to strengthen our faith toward God and our fervent love toward one another. Today is the day to check the oil for our lamps.

Fathers, Sons, Reconciliation and Peace

There are so few stories of universal resonance.  I’ll save my “what’s in a name” Romeo and Juliet soliloquy for bible study.  Our Old Testament reading this week (Genesis 17:1-17,15-16) backs up last week’s Sacrifice of Isaac which we looked at in detail in Bible Study.  God changes the names of Abram and Sarai to Abraham and Sarah.  The meaning of the new names makes all the stranger the request of the sacrifice.  When I say universal resonance I’m not downgrading any of our personal experiences. Those are all very meaningful to us, but most of us don’t live universal lives.

Shakespeare runs through my mind all the time because he had an uncanny gift for tapping into the emotion of those universal stories.  Romeo and Juliet is of course about that impossibly deep teenage swooning, but also about terrible adult reactions. The vampire nostalgia of those like the nurse and the friar living off the emotion and enabling it, but also the hardened hearts of the family heads who demand the undemandable. Telling teens to choose more carefully, by last name, who they love.  Rewatching HBO’s Rome, dodging the no longer softcore porn involved, for a story about Fathers and Sons, I was amazed at how much they missed it all.  The real story wouldn’t have needed the porn to keep attention. Billy Shakes captures it all in “Et Tu, Brute?” Julius Caesar had a bunch of “sons”. His miliary son, Mark Antony.  His foreign son by Cleopatra, Caesarion. His adopted relative Roman son, Octavian nee Augustus. But it was the illegitimate son, Brutus, from his real love, Servillia, who had been sacrificed to his ambition. “You also Son want me dead?” And all of those “sons” would tear the Republic apart after fighting for what the Father could never give them.  It’s a reminder of how blessed Americans are to have a world unique man, George Washington, as the Father of our country.

But of all of those universal lives and their stories, even George Washington’s, there is nothing quite like Jesus Christ.  “For while we were still weak, at the right time, Christ died for the ungodly (Romans 5:6).”  It is the story of a Father and a Son.  But not one of a Father who only gave love through usefulness, which is not love at all. It is also the story of an impossibly deep love.   “God showed his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. (Romans 5:8).”  It is ultimately the story that contains all of them. As Pilate would say, “Behold, The Man (John 19:5).” Here is the true man.  Not the man gone wrong like Adam and all us sons of Adam and daughters of Eve.  But the true man who has come into the world to redeem the world.  Who has reconciled us to Our Father by his blood.  Who willingly put down his life out of love for the Father and His creation.  We are included in that story as the recipients of such a love.

Which is the only explanation for why Paul can make such an audacious boast, “we rejoice in our sufferings (Romans 5:3).”  Absolute foolishness, even to stoics.  The stoic might endure, but they do not rejoice. We rejoice in our sufferings because they are an inclusion in the story.  They are as Paul would say elsewhere a fulling up of the afflictions of Christ (1 Colossians 1:24).  But the afflictions are not the thing itself.  The sufferings produce endurance.  But unlike the stoics, endurance is not the point.  Endurance produces character.  But unlike the virtue ethicists of every age, even character is not the point.  Character produces hope.   Hope that does not put us to shame.  Hope that we are included in this greatest story ever told.  Hope that the love of God has been poured into our hearts.  Hope that all sad stories have once more verse. That we are reconciled to God and have peace.