Requiem for R. David Thomas, Jr.
On Saturday, March 8, St. Matthew's and friends said farewell to our beloved parishioner, R. David Thomas, husband to our Deacon, Virginia C. Thomas, whose sermons are such an important feature of our website, as well as our Sunday worship. By permission, we copy here the homily preached at David's burial service by The Rev. Norman A. Hjelm of Philadelphia.
The Funeral of R. David Thomas, Jr.
St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church
Enosburg Falls, Vermont
The Eucharist
March 8, 2008
Preaching text chosen: Romans 14:7-9
In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Let us pray:
O God, who has made us creatures of time, so that every tomorrow is an unknown country, and every decision a venture of faith, grant us, frail children of the day, who are blind to the future, to move toward it with a sure confidence in your love from which neither life nor death can separate us. (Reinhold Niebuhr)
And now let the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be always
acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Norman A. Hjelm
Wynnewood, Pennsylvania
nahjelm@comcast.net
In the midst of life we are in death…
I have for a long time been haunted by words from St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans.
Listen: “We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves.
If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we are the Lord’s. For
to this end Christ died and lived again, so that he might be Lord of
both the dead and the living.” (Romans 14:7-9)
These words appear in the midst – or perhaps as the climax – of a difficult and much debated chapter in the Epistle in which Paul writes about attitudes towards person who “are weak in faith” (14:1). The issue had to do with the religious rules of the time concerning eating everything, including meat, or abstaining from meat as a vegetarian. This is, to us, a rather obscure kind of problem and not exactly a religious one, although there may well be extensions of the issue toward very serious ethical dilemmas today. In a way, Paul dodges the specific problem by setting it against a horizon that embraces all of Christian life: life and death. Whether we do one thing or another, we are the Lord’s. Ultimately: whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s.
It sounds so simple; and it sounds so religious. But is it? Take this matter of death… No reality is less surprising or more certain – for you, for me, and as we acknowledge today, for David Thomas. But I vacillate. I am not sure. If I die am I the Lord’s?
-- Johan Sebastian Bach composed an incredibly serene piece of music and
called it Komm, süsser Tod, “Come Sweet Death” but St. Paul could say that “the last enemy to be destroyed is death” (1 Cor. 15:26) and the battle would still be going on until “the last trumpet.”
-- Dietrich Bonhoeffer could write from his prison cell in Nazi Germany that “Death is the supreme festival on the road to freedom” (Letters and Papers from Prison, p. 99; cf. also p. 195) but Martin Luther, Bonhoeffer’s spiritual father (and also mine), could write about the Christian life as one in which we must “fight against sins and … slug it out with death” (LW, 17, 388) – and that hardly sounds like a “supreme festival.”
Yes, I vacillate. And, to be honest, the death of our good and deeply loved friend David hardly settles the matter. Yes, I know that he lived belonging to the Lord:
-- I well remember the unspeakable grief we all had at Andy’s death: David, who
received the news while in Czechoslovakia disregarded his own grief to be a rock of steadfast love and support to his shattered family.
-- Many remember the grace and humility with which he received countless international awards for his accomplishments in metallurgy.
-- Many remember his management style as executive of a major company. I well remember him telling me that with some fear and trembling he once opened a particularly contentious meeting with the labor union by suggesting a moment of silent prayer
-- His sixty-eight-year marriage to Virginia set a standard for many: a friendship that does not mark all happy marriages; the nurturing of high achieving children; his remarkable support of Virginia when she decided, of all things, to be ordained a deacon in the church they both served and loved; the willingness he and Virginia shared to be designated “Grandpa” and “Grandma” to my own children who never knew their American grandparents; he was a friend who I often felt showed me the way to become a grownup…
-- And many here are aware of the seamless move Virginia and David made in 1988 – from urban Philadelphia to northern Vermont – a move with grace…
All of this and much more testifies that David Thomas lived his life “belonging to the Lord.” And, whatever it means, I know that David Thomas died “belonging to the Lord.”
W.H. Auden in a remarkable poem describes humans as living in two worlds, “two atlases” as he calls them: the one is the public, external space which we share with everyone; the other is the private, internal space which is our solitude and it is often dark. Each of us ask whether we can bring these two worlds, these two atlases together in some sort of consistency. And each of us wrestles with the question as to whether or not we can belong to the Lord in both of these worlds. With a high degree of confidence, I can say that the life of David Thomas can today be remembered as an answer of Yes to both these questions. (cf. W.H. Auden, “New Year Letter,” Collected Poetry, p. 297)
To find in life a consistency between our public and private selves takes, indeed, a lifetime. How the world of work, of family, or responsibilities, of vocation, of politics and human communities is related to our inner joys and fears and commitments – that is not at all an easy question. I think that David knew the secret and worked it out…
Even harder – if we are not content with the platitudes of piety, as I am not – even harder is to discover how the Lord Jesus Christ can in effect own both our public and private spaces. Auden in another remarkable poem has the startling line, “Our claim to own our bodies and our world / Is our catastrophe” (“Canzone,” Collected Poetry, p. 162). Our most besetting sin can well be described as our passion to control, to control other persons and other things, to determine our own destinies, to decide our own values. The Christian life is somehow the reverse of this besetting sin, it is to concede ourselves to another: “whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s.” And that other decides things, including our destinies.
Now that is either human and religious nonsense, or it is a confession of
faith which makes all the difference. And there is a test to conceding
ourselves to another, to the Lord, a test which David Thomas passed.
The test of belonging to the Lord is nothing other than our ability to belong also to other people. The faith that is confined to religious piety and practice, whether public or private, is really no faith at all. Our Lord expressed it unforgettably in the words of his Jewish tradition: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself” (Luke 10:27).
We take words like these so much for granted. “You shall love the Lord your God… and your neighbor as yourself.” Familiar words. Do they still have power? Or are they words used so often that they are at best meaningless and at worst blasphemous.
To belong to the Lord in this life is also to belong to our families, our neighbors, our societies. The two commandments hang together, and if they still have power they require a great deal of us. The secret of the Christian life, this present life, is to give ourselves so completely to the Lord that we are liberated from the need to control things.
“Our claim to own our bodies and our world / Is our catastrophe” – and set free to live worldly lives given in service to other people. David Thomas demonstrated in his living the power of our Lord’s two commandments. He made no claim about himself; he was liberated to serve his family, his colleagues, his church – other people. Be grateful for David’s life of love and faith.
But still, there is this matter of dying. And that, after all, is what has brought us together this morning. “Whether we live or whether we die…”
Paul Tillich in a sermon preached in the aftermath of World War II told a remarkable story:
In the Nuremburg War-Crime Trials a witness appeared who had lived for a time
in a grave in a Jewish grave-yard in Wilna, Poland. It was the only place he – and
many others – could live, when in hiding after they had escaped the gas chamber.
During this time he wrote poetry, and one of the poems was a description of a
birth. In a grave nearby a young woman gave birth to a boy. The eighty-year-old
gravedigger, wrapped in a linen shroud, assisted. When the new-born child
uttered his first cry, the old man prayed: “Great God, hast Thou finally sent the
Messiah to us? For who else than the Messiah Himself can be born in a grave?”
But after three days the poet saw the child sucking his mother’s tears because
she had no milk for him. (“Born in the Grave,” The Shaking of the Foundations,
1948, p. 165)
And another gigantic theologian of the past century has scored something of the same point in terrifying words concerning the expression “buried” which we use of Christ in the Creed:
By a man’s being buried it is evidently confirmed and sealed … that he has no
longer a present, any more than a future. He has become pure past. He is
accessible only to memory, and even that only so long as those who are able and
willing to remember him are not themselves buried. And the future toward which
all human present is running is just this: to be buried. (Karl Barth, Credo, 1936,
pp. 84-88.)
Where does it all end up? Jesus’ story, I mean. And David’s? And yours? And mine? In the graveyard? In a columbarium? We Christians who are so familiar with the old words, those of us who think we know how the story turns out, those of us who talk so much – we better be careful.
I prefer not to say too much. About death and the end of the story I don’t know a lot. I mostly stutter and stammer before the mystery. But let us be clear about one thing: The answer of Easter – which Christians spout out so glibly – is not merely an inevitable happy ending, like in some movies. The answer of Easter became possible for Christ, and it becomes possible for us precisely because Christ was and David has been and we will be – buried. New life would not really be a new life if it did not come from burial, the complete end of the old life. But if the new life has come out of the grave, then the Messiah has appeared (cf. Tillich, op. cit., p. 168). And Christians are the ones who say that they have in baptism been buried with Christ so that, like him, they might one day “walk in newness of life” (Romans 6:3-4).
Our Lord was obedient unto death, death on a cross. To live a genuinely human life means to live a life that is formed by the shape of death. Christ by going through death rather than around death, has transformed the shape of death into the shape of life. And thus it is that when Christians gather together, like now, they celebrate the Supper of the Lord, they eat the bread and drink the cup – the body and the blood – in memory of his death: “For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes” (1 Cor. 11:26).
We began this meditation with the words, “In the midst of life we are in death.” But in light of Christ’s obedient death we can now with confidence say, In the midst of death we are in life.
For whether we live or whether we die, we belong to the Lord.
That’s all we know – and all we need to know.
Amen.
