Foothills Congregational Church The Rev. W. Matthew Broadbent
United Church of Christ Easter Sunday
461 Orange Ave., Los Altos 94022 March 23, 2008
REQUIEM FOR GOD
Matthew 28:1-10; Colossians 3:1-4
When we were planning this year’s services last summer, our Music director, Fred Cummins, called me and said, “I would like to do a big piece of music that the choir could perform in concert. What do you think of the Rutter Requiem?”
“It’s beautiful,” I said.
“And what would you think of doing it on Easter – since we are going to put in all this work to prepare it? I know you like big, joyful celebrative music on Easter. How do you feel about a requiem mass?”
I had to think about that for a minute, but then I said, “Well, Easter is the story of the death of God, after all. Easter is about coming to the cemetery to see what we can make of the crucifixion and death of Jesus. We can always throw in big hymns, maybe this will be a year to come, wait, and see if God is still speaking.” So, here we are, in a place not unacquainted with death, but then again full of life.
Frederick Neidner (Christian Century, March 11, 2008) writes: “Rarely are cemeteries as peaceful as they seem. My boyhood friends visited them by night to consult with the spirits – 86 proof as I recall. Sometimes we’d glimpse young couples having soulful, breathy talks among the tombstones.”
I have always loved cemeteries – for other reasons. When I was in High School one summer I spent my mornings in a program at Syracuse University. When it was over I would walk back to my father’s office to finish my homework. I had to pass through a large, city owned cemetery. Often I would sit on the grass by a large tombstone and read. I used to run hills at a local cemetery to get in shape for football season. And when I came to California I interviewed at a little church in the Gold Country. I was early for the meeting so I went up to the “boot hill” cemetery above the church and read the legends of miners, and civil war veterans, young children, and east coast transplants to the land of opportunity. Cemeteries are a more full of life than you would assume. Stories still walk the grounds.
Some cemeteries rival modern cities in size. There are a series of five cemeteries around Cairo, collectively calledthe City of the Dead, that almost equal Cairo in acreage. I read that nearly 5 million people live among the tombs and shelters that date back to the Mamalukes and Sultans of the Middle Ages. Certain cultures have an easier relationship with death than we do. This is true of Jerusalem, a city of peace that has known war and devastation for thousands of years.
The Mount of Olives, to the east of Jerusalem’s wall, was the site of Jerusalem’s ancient cemetery. As people passed through the eastern wall, during Passover, their conversation would hum with political intrigue, anger and in some cases, resentment. There were preachers who would have invoked the prophetic language of Zechariah who saw the day coming when all the nations would be gathered against Jerusalem, then God would step in and on that great “day of the Lord,” and the Lord would stand on the Mount of Olives, and Mount Zion would grow in height and the tombs would open, and the saints would rise up and enter the city.
“Get ready,” these preachers would whisper. They were whispering because this was seditious, offensive talk, and there were people listening. The writer of the gospel of Matthew was listening. We heard the scripture on Maundy Thursday that on the moment Jesus died: the curtain in the temple was torn in two... The earth shook and the rocks were split. The tombs were opened and the bodies of the saints were raised (Matthew 27:51-52). This may not have happened, in fact, but it is what they all expected.
“Unfinished business lingers in every graveyard,” Frederick Neidner says, “broken promises, betrayals, and countless secrets left to perish with the departed.” Death is the final healer someone once told me. There is resolution and completion. Even in deep grief with unfulfilled promise, death closes a door you don’t have to reopen.
Divorce has been likened to a death, with all the five stages of grief, except that your spouse isn’t dead. They keep showing up. There is an end with death. All we can hope is that our beloved might rest in peace.
Requiem aeternam dona eis Domine:
Grant them rest eternal, Lord our God:
Et lux perpetua luceat eis.
And light perpetual shine on them forever.
These words,
taken from the traditional requiem mass, were used by John Rutter to compose
the Requiem, a year after the death
of his father in 1983. New releases of
the Requiem in 2003 were dedicated to his son Christopher who died in a tragic
accident in 2001. We can hear the
poignant grief in the beautiful Pie Jesu,
the musical evocation of the Pieta – the image of Mary holding her crucified
son: Blessed Jesus, Lord I pray in thy mercy grant them rest./ Lord our God,
we pray thee, grant them everlasting rest.
I think of this as the posture and the mood of the Mary’s who went to visit the tomb. The text says they went “to see the tomb,” to observe, literally “to behold” the fact of death. One commentator said the word means “to study the tomb.” They went to see what they could see because they couldn’t get close to the tomb since it was guarded by troops. The authorities were afraid of body-snatching by the disciples.
For Mary, Jesus was dead. Let him rest in peace. Kyrie eleison. Lord, have mercy. The Easter story is a requiem for God. God is dead. Long live God.
In our early twenties, Barbara and I went to a pre-Broadway stage production of Godspell in Boston. One of the most moving moments was the scene following the crucifixion when the disciples take down the body of Jesus and holding him on their shoulders walked through the audience singing: Long live God…
But – that is a but, but, but, but… like a drum riff – the resurrection story suggests God will not rest in peace – at least not in quiet. For like the dancers on the stage who break into foot stomping joy, Matthew says, the earth shook with grief, and the guards were stunned into a stop-action frame. The angel of the Lord spoke to the women – Do not be afraid! - and they rush off to tell the others in fear and great joy – mega joy, it says. The word for joy is Xaire, and when they bump into Jesus he says…
Well our translation (NRSV) says “Greetings!” That is rather sedate and polite. The King James Version says, “All Hail!” That is rather imperious. The Greek is Xairete which literally means “be joying” or “be ye rejoicing!” This is big news worthy of a big sound – “Rejoice!! Alleluia!! Christ has risen!”
The Gospel of Matthew is saying that the God revealed in Jesus of Nazareth, crucified on a cross, is unwilling to let the story of us and God end in death. This is the essence of our faith. Easter is the story about how God keeps – despite us – seeking us. Resurrection is not about a future time, or even about heavenly time - a time after all this pain and suffering - it is about our time and the quality of our experience, right now.
William Willimon writes (Journal for preachers, Easter 2008, p.3) “God is thus revealed by Easter to be relentlessly pro nobis (for us), despite the failures and disappointments to be found among the nobis.” God’s new age has broken into our time, and not to the chosen few, or the elected elite, or the spiritually sensitive and perceptive, but rather to people like us – you and me - those of us who come to the tomb each Spring, to behold, to study, to see if he is still dead.
I think too
many of us in the church approach our religious life in this way. The last thing we want to see is someone
return from death. In the Agnus Dei,
Rutter uses the text: Man that is born of
a woman hath but a short time to live and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down like a flower;
he fleeth as it were a shadow. In the
midst of life we are in death…
My God, my God that sounds so like the church, and yet it is the church, with all its warts and strangeness, all its false beliefs and crazy doctrines, all its prurient pride and petulant prejudice that is the primary witness and evidence of resurrection. Clarence Jordan wrote: “The crowning evidence that Jesus is alive, is not a vacant grave, but a spirit-filled fellowship. Not a rolled away stone, but a carried away church.”
This is why the
Rutter Requiem was particularly
appropriate for Easter. Some of us,
especially in the choir, were quite carried away with the emotion of the
music. It does not end with a loud
rejoicing, but rather takes one through the emotion of grief to a rising
assurance of faith that we –like all creation- are formed in love and received
again in life that knows no end. Though
In the midst of life we are in death, there
is the affirmation:
I am the resurrection and the life, saith
the Lord;
He that believeth in me, though he were
dead, yet shall he live;
And whosoever liveth and believeth in me
shall never die.
We may come in fear and dread but we leave rejoicing in the assurance that God is with us because death no longer determines our living.