(This sermon was preached at our Memorial Service, where we're joined by the relatives of folk in the parish who have passed on in the previous calendar year. Their names are read out and family members can light a candle in their memory if they wish as part of the service.)
Two observations and a story to begin with this morning.
I wonder how many times those of you who drive have come to your senses after you’ve been thinking about something, or listening to the radio, and realised, to your horror, that you have no recollection of driving the last three or four miles you’ve just driven.
And I wonder how many of us have had the experience of chatting to someone on a Monday morning and when they ask you what you did at the weekend, your mind goes completely blank. What did I do?
There are enough smiles around to suggest this isn’t just me!
Hold on to those observations as I tell you the story, which comes from the Eastern tradition.
Tenno had completed his ten years apprenticeship in Zen Buddhism and had risen to the rank of teacher. One rainy day he went to visit his master and as was the custom, he took off his clogs and left his umbrella outside the front door before entering.
As he walked in, his master smiled and welcomed him. Then he said “Tenno, you left your clogs and umbrella outside, didn’t you? Tell me – did you place the umbrella to the right side of the clogs, or to the left?”
Tenno was embarrassed because he didn’t know the answer. He realised that he lacked awareness. So he apprenticed himself to the master for another ten years so he could learn the art of constant awareness.
Two observations and a story that help give some substance to a thought. How much in life passes us by.
We’re so busy getting from A to B that we overlook the journey.
We’re so preoccupied with getting things done that time and experience slip past almost unnoticed.
Without determined effort on our part, we don’t cultivate the discipline of awareness that adds depth and richness to our living.
To quote Pink Floyd – a phrase which gives you an insight into just how contemporary my CD collection is – “And then one day you find ten years have dropped behind you, no-one told you when to run. You missed the starting gun”.
Life runs away while we’re still tying our shoelaces. Life happens to us, whether we’re ready for it or not. We’re born into the world and before we know it we’re being swept along in a crowd that dwarfs the London Marathon, running hard, trying to keep up, focused on what’s round the next bend, keeping our heads down, puffing and panting our way to the end of the human race.
But every now and then something happens to us that makes us pull up and stop running. Something so significant that we have no choice but to pull up a chair and sit on the sidelines for a while, as the rest of humanity goes streaming by.
Sometimes it’s one of life’s great gifts that hauls us out of the fray for a while. An encounter with beauty, in music, or words; in art or in nature. The birth of a child. The blossoming of love.
Miracle as they are, these things can never be hurried along. They deserve to be savoured. And in those moments we come to our senses and realise again that the human race means very little if we don’t take time to enjoy the journey.
But, and this is why many of you are here today, there are times when what stops us in our tracks is not gift, but grief.
A phone rings, a conversation takes place, information is exchanged, and you put down the receiver a moment later in a world that is changed utterly. Someone is gravely ill. Someone has died.
You find yourself sitting at the side of the road with your head in your hands wondering how on earth all these other people can keep obliviously running, when the world – your world at least – has stopped turning.
I got a call like that in January of last year – many of you know the story.
My father was going into hospital for surgery and on the day he went in, my mother had a stomach aneurism and nearly died. I had to drop everything and go back home straight away. Poor Mary Reid stepped in to take the Sunday service, and little did we know what the rest of the year would hold in store for Mary and her family.
Mum had 3 months in intensive care, and another three recuperating in hospital before she finally got home. And within her limitations, she’s doing pretty well now, though her health is still very fragile.
But those were strange days. Normal life was on hold. In the beginning it was hard to focus on anything other than what had happened to her. The family closed ranks, pulled together and got through, but we lived in this heightened atmosphere where her illness, for a while at least, became paramount for us. We lived daily with the prospect of losing her.
Why, for so many of us, does it take a brush with death to make us really appreciate what we have in life?
It’s a year and a half on, now, and I’m back in the human race again, jogging along; but something changed for me in that time – something that’s hard to put into words.
I think it’s the realisation that time isn’t just short, it’s precious. And in the time we have left, I want to find ways to be with my folk in ways that are truly meaningful. I want to know them and be known by them.
One of the saddest things in my time as a minister in some of the tougher corners of Glasgow was the experience of going to visit families who’d lost their mother – and it always seemed to be a mother – and when I asked them to tell me about her, all they were able to say was that she liked the soaps and she loved the bingo. Seventy, eighty years of life, and that’s all they were able to say about her.
Thankfully, that was a rare occurrence and I’ve not found the same thing up here. More often than not, the problem I’ve had is trying to condense everything you’ve had to say about the person who’s passed on!
And that overflow of stories and memories and laughter and tears that pours out when I visit bereaved folk highlights the point that I’m trying to make: when death visits our families, and none of us would ever want that visit, it leaves us a strange and unexpected gift. A heightened appreciation of the richness of this thing called life. For a few days or weeks or months we get it. We understand just how precious the gift of life really is.
But that heightened appreciation doesn’t last forever. It gently fades away like the ring of a bell. In time, some of us return to a life that seems infinitely greyer because that dear person has passed on. Others tie up our laces and fall back in step with the rest of the human race. Either way, the danger is we forget what we learned in those fraught days and weeks and months: that life is precious. That our lives are precious: not to be wished away or frittered away on things that don’t really matter. We only get the one life – we need to make the most of it.
I’ve never heard that idea better expressed than in the words of a song called “When I’m Gone” by Phil Ochs.
There's no place in this world where I'll belong when I'm gone
I won't know the right from the wrong when I'm gone
You won't find me singing on this song when I'm gone
So I guess I'll have to do it while I'm here
My days won't be dances of delight when I'm gone
The sands will be shifting from my sight when I'm gone
Can't add my name into the fight when I'm gone
So I guess I'll have to do it while I'm here
I won't see the flowing of the time when I'm gone
The joys of love will not be mine when I'm gone
My pen won't pour a lyric rhyme when I'm gone
So I guess I'll have to do it while I'm here
I won't breathe the bracing air when I'm gone
I won't be worried about my cares when I'm gone
Can't be asked to do my share when I'm gone
So I guess I'll have to do it while I'm here
I won't be running from the rain when I'm gone
Won't even suffer from the pain when I'm gone
Can't say who's to praise and who's to blame when I'm gone
So I guess I'll have to do it while I'm here
And I won't be laughing at the lies when I'm gone
I won't question where or when or why when I'm gone
Can't live proud enough to die when I'm gone
So I guess I'll have to do it while I'm here
He puts it well, I think. We owe it to those we love to make the most of the time that we have been given. But where Phil Ochs and I part company is in his assumption that death is the final end.
Christianity dares to hope for more than that, and I want to finish this morning with these words from writer/minister Fred Buechner:
“Unlike the great oriental religions, Christianity takes death very seriously, which is of course why it takes life very seriously, why there is such urgency about living it right and living it now. In the New Testament there is no doctrine of endless rebirths on the great wheel of life, no doctrine of a soul which by its nature cannot die. On the contrary, by our nature we do die, as Christianity sees it, with our bodies and souls as inextricably one in death as they are in life.
But if death is the end in Christianity, it is not the final end; it is the end of an act only, not the end of the drama. Once before, out of the abyss of the unborn, the uncreated, the not-yet, you and I who from all eternity had been nothing, became something. Out of non-being we emerged into being. And what Jesus promises is resurrection, which means that once again this miracle will happen, and out of death will come another realm of life. Not because by our nature there is part of us that does not die, but because by God’s nature he will not let even death separate us from him finally.
In love he made us and in love he will mend us. In love, he will have us his true children before his work is done”.
Thanks be to God for life now, and the promise of life hereafter. Amen
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