The Journey Home: A Funeral Meditation

There is a story that is sometimes told at funerals about a ship sailing off into the horizon. There are two perspectives on that ship from someone standing on the beach. The one is of that ship getting farther and farther away, looking smaller and smaller until you can barely make it out anymore, and then it is gone completely, and the one on the beach is left standing there, all alone.

This is used to describe the process of dying that many people go through. Most of us know that people don’t often simply die, they sort of fade away and get farther and farther away from us until they are gone, just like that ship as it sailed away into the horizon.

But then there is the other perspective, that of someone standing on a beach as the ship is sailing closer and closer to it, getting sort of larger and larger and more distinguishable. Little by little the ship grows from being just a speck to a faint form, to an outline, to a ship with sails on it, perhaps, to being able to make out people on deck, to seeing their faces, and with that joy grows and grows because the journey is over and they are home now.

This, of course, is supposed to be the perspective from heaven, as our loved one draws closer and closer to his permanent home with the Lord.

I’ve always liked that story, it really sets up a beautiful picture in my mind of the dying process, which is really all about life, not death, even as death itself is only a transition from one stage of life to another; but there is a third perspective that is not told, and that is from the perspective of those who are onboard the ship.

At first, there is just the here and the now. He is alive and surrounded by friends and family and he can’t imagine being anywhere else. But then the ship casts off, and begins to move farther and farther away. And after a while, the voices of those on shore begin to grow faint, and the one onboard can’t tell what they are saying anymore, and then the people on the beach are harder to distinguish and he has to really strain to see them anymore, but still he looks and looks and leans over the railing to try and catch a glimpse of his family.

And then he stops looking, as his thoughts begin to draw towards the journey, towards his new home, which is waiting for him. So he rushes over to the opposite side of the ship, and look there is a speck of land, it is growing closer and closer and the excitement builds because there are loved ones waiting for him over there, too. And he doesn’t forget about the ones he left behind, but yearns to arrive at his new home.

-Excerpt from a funeral sermon that I gave for William H. "Fatty" Fazenbaker, d. April 21, 2009.

Such a Beautiful Song

In the churches I serve, we have a tradition of singing the Psalms during Sunday worship. For this I use a resource called The Psalter for Christian Worship, by Michael Morgan, published by Witherspoon Press. Michael Morgan's goal was to versify the psalter for ease of congregational singing, and so each psalm can be sung to a common hymn tune, instead of using traditional psalm tones. Suggestions for each psalm are provided, as well as the meter, so that more than one tune can easily be applied.

In preparing the service bulletin for the coming Sunday, I was looking over the Psalm for the Third Sunday of Easter, Psalm 4, and began to think, oh, what a mournful song for such a happy time as Easter. However, Psalm 4 is a song of lament, which is mournful, but sings about a faith in God which cannot be broken by long-suffering.

It is sung to the tune Slane(Be Thou My Vision):

God of all righteousness, hear when I pray,
In my distress be my hope and my stay;
Long have I suffered revilement and shame,
Great God of mercy, I call on your name.

Angry, yet silent, I know there will be
Justice according to holy decree;
Never to answer corruption in kind,
But in Your promise true peace will I find.

When those around me my faith would confound,
May I rejoice in Your gifts that abound;
Peace and assurance all discord withstand,
Safely I rest in the palm of your hand.

Da'ath Elohim

"The object and aim of the Hebrew system is Knowledge of God: da'ath elohim. Man can never know himself, what he is and what is his relation to the world, unless first he learn of God and be submissive to God's sovereign will." -Norman Snaith, The Distinctive Ideas of the Old Testament, Pp. 184-5.

Snaith says that the Greeks are just the opposite. "Know thyself...However, we find this approach of the Greeks nowhere in the Bible. The whole Bible, the New Testament as well as the Old Testament, is basd on the Hebrew attitude and approach.

Furthermore, Marvin Wilson states that "the Hebrews did not view a life of true piety and godliness as an impersonal relationship to a structure of thought, but as a personal relationship renewed each day with the living God. Its true locus was not found in an array of dogmas or cultic regulations, but in the response of one's whole person in love and total obedience to the Creator." -Our Father Abraham, Pp. 320

This is why I call myself first a follower of Jesus Christ, then a Christian, etc. Thinking in this way helps me to cut the links from the chains that would otherwise bind me to institutionalized religion, a religion, albeit, in which I have been raised and formed. Therefore, I believe that truly following Christ must necessarily over-reach Christianity as that institutionalized religion. Da'ath elohim, knowledge of God, can only be vaguely hinted at by systematic theologies and dogmatic creeds, just as any intimate relationship cannot be adequately expressed in words.

The Easter Resurrection Homily of St. John Chrysostom

This classic Paschal or Easter Sermon on the Resurrection of Jesus Christ is from Saint John Chrysostom, fifth century early church father and one of the greatest preachers of all time. This homily for Holy Pascha exhorts all, even those who have not kept the Lenten fast, to rejoice and enter into the Easter feast of the resurrection.

Let all Pious men and all lovers of God rejoice in the splendor of this feast; let the wise servants blissfully enter into the joy of their Lord; let those who have borne the burden of Lent now receive their pay, and those who have toiled since the first hour, let them now receive their due reward; let any who came after the third hour be grateful to join in the feast, and those who may have come after the sixth, let them not be afraid of being too late, for the Lord is gracious and He receives the last even as the first. He gives rest to him who comes on the eleventh hour as well as to him who has toiled since the first: yes, He has pity on the last and He serves the first; He rewards the one and is generous to the other; he repays the deed and praises the effort.


Come you all: enter into the joy of your Lord. You the first and you the last, receive alike your reward; you rich and you poor, dance together; you sober and you weaklings, celebrate the day; you who have kept the fast and you who have not, rejoice today. The table is richly loaded: enjoy its royal banquet. The calf is a fatted one: let no one go away hungry. All of you enjoy the banquet of faith; all of you receive the riches of his goodness.

Let no one grieve over his poverty, for the universal kingdom has been revealed; let no one weep over his sins, for pardon has shone from the grave; let no one fear death, for the death of our Savior has set us free: He has destroyed it by enduring it, He has despoiled Hades by going down into its kingdom, He has angered it by allowing it to taste of his flesh.

When Isaiah foresaw all this, he cried out: "O Hades, you have been angered by encourntering Him in the nether world." Hades is angered because frustrated, it is angered because it has been mocked, it is angered because it has been destroyed, it is angered because it has been reduced to naught, it is angered because it is now captive. It seized a body, and lo! it discovered God; it seized earth, and, behold! it encountered heaven; it seized the visible, and was overcome by the invisible.

O death, where is your sting? O Hades, where is your victory? Christ is risen and life is freed, Christ is risen and the tomb is emptied of the dead: for Christ, being risen from the dead, has become the Leader and Reviver of those who had fallen asleep. To Him be glory and power for ever and ever. Amen.

The 55th Psalm: A Meditation for Good Friday

Good Friday is, of course, the day that we bury Christ, and with Christ, we bury ourselves. It’s not a happy day, but it is a very real day, and by that I mean that, in my belief, it is one of the very few times in the life of the church when the Church is sort of officially honest about who we are, about what we have done and what we have become. We drop any myths about our own righteousness and accept our hypocrisy.

Good Friday is about being broken, it is about falling down and taking ownership of the very real fact that, yes, I really did put Christ on that cross. How do we deal with that, and then move straight on to Easter, with all its rejoicing and celebration and good food? We can do it because we have a God who is alive and who is living within us, not condemning us for our sin, but yet convicting us to bury what is past and to move on into life.

But now, before we get ahead of ourselves and rush on into Easter, let us pause and meditate on those things that have brought us not to Easter, but to Good Friday. I don’t believe that God wants us to obsess over our mistakes, but God does want us to reflect on them, and I can almost hear my mother saying to me, “Go to your room and think about what you’ve done.”

The other day in Morning Prayer, we read together Psalm 55. It was written by King David, possibly during a time when he was dealing with the betrayal of his trusted advisors. But we can almost hear the sound of Jesus’ voice in the Garden of Gethsemane, agonizing over his own betrayal by those whom he loves.

Give ear to my prayer, O God:
do not hide yourself from my supplication.
Attend to me, and answer me;
I am troubled by my complaint.
I am distraught by the noise of my enemy,
Because of the clamour of the wicked.
For they bring trouble upon me,
And in anger they cherish enmity against me.

How often do we think of things from the perspective of Jesus? He came to love us as his own family, he came to teach us how to love Him:

It is not enemies who taunt me –
I could bear that;
It is not adversaries who deal insolently with me –
I could hide from them.
But it is you, my equal, my companion, my familiar friend,
With whom I kept pleasant company;
We walked in the house of God with the throng.

At that moment of betrayal, I wonder if David realized that he was speaking with the Lord’s voice to us, because even though this may have been his own expression of pain, is read now as prophecy:

My companions laid hands on a friend
And violated covenant with me
With speech smoother than butter,
But with a heart set on war;
With words that were softer than oil,
But in fact were drawn swords.

King David was in such anguish that he prayed to God to destroy those who had hurt him. Christ, however, prayed to God, “Forgive them Father, for they know not what they do.” Amen.