Photo by Mario Mendez on Unsplash
We take risks when we choose to love. Inherent in loving is the reality, in fact, the necessity, of loss. On October 31, 2021, All Saints Day was near and mingled with Halloween and Dia de los Muertos. When we focus intensely on death and our loved ones, no long among us physically, we consciously face not only the fact of death but the way death can make both life more precious and the act of love more daring. As Yehuda HaLevi wrote long ago: “It is a holy thing to love what death will touch.” “To remember this brings painful joy.” Here’s a sermon based on based on John 16.16-22 and a poem by Yehuda HaLevi.
1.
To live is to risk.
To love is to take a chance.
Life and death walk hand in hand, whether we like it or not.
So do love and loss.
Death and loss is what we pay for the privilege of living and loving.
Christian faith experience is honest about these truths.
2.
“Very truly, I tell you,” says Jesus in our reading today, “you will weep and mourn.”
As passionate as Christian faith is about life, it is also honest about the obstinate nature of death.
“You will have pain,” says Jesus, “but your pain will turn into joy.”
Then with an image appropriate for this day when we baptize two children, he illustrates this truth:
“When a woman is in labor, she has pain, because her hour has come. But when her child is born, she no longer remembers the anguish because of the joy of having brought a human being into the world.”
Jesus points to the universal truth that we can only really know joy against the backdrop of pain and despair. It’s the paradoxes of life that make possible the exquisite wonder and beauty we can, from time to time, enjoy.
Dawn shines its welcome light against the backdrop of night.
The mighty oak tree stands tall and durable over the decayed husk of an acorn that fell to the earth and died.
We savor and relish a remarkable achievement or victory because of the hard work and struggle and risk of failure.
This week I walked alongside one of you who recently lost a loved one. You told me how you’d recently had a day of deep sobbing. “But,” you said, “it was so much more than sadness. My tears were also tears of such immense gratitude and wonder that my body didn’t now what else to do but cry. It was a flood of both grief and gratitude; I didn’t know where one ended and the other began.”
Life and death. Love and loss and . . . joy.
3.
Today is All Hallows Eve.
Tomorrow is All Saints Day.
Tomorrow and Tuesday, many people of Mexican descent will celebrate Dia de Muertos, a day to remember loved ones who have died.
All three are festivals that recognize the truth that:
To live is to risk.
To love is to take a chance.
Life and death walk hand in hand, whether we like it or not.
So do love and loss.
Death and loss is what we pay for the privilege of living and loving.
It is a spiritual practice to hold these paradoxes in tension. In the tension, something new emerges.
When we live in such a way that we know we and others will die, life becomes precious—our life, the life of all others, the life of all creatures and plants, of inestimable worth.
We live reverently when we live with death in full view.
And when we love, even knowing that we will suffer loss, love becomes precious—we take nothing for granted; we cherish what we have here and now and what with hard relational work we can create; we tend relationships with care, compassion, reverence, and with a courage that knows at any moment we could lose this love.
4.
So death and loss can be gifts to us, not enemies. They can become for us stimulants to help us live well and love skillfully.
Autumn itself teaches us this.
Maria Popova, that remarkable contemporary thinker and writer, put it this way in an essay posted on her online literary journal this week:
“Autumn is the season of ambivalence and reconciliation, soft-carpeted training ground for the dissolution that awaits us all, low-lit chamber for hearing more intimately the syncopation of grief and gladness that scores our improbable and finite lives — each yellow burst in the canopy a reminder that everything beautiful is perishable, each falling leaf at once a requiem for our own mortality and a rhapsody for the unbidden gift of having lived at all. That dual awareness, after all, betokens the luckiness of death.”
Autumn and the death and the loss it signifies is a reminder, a requiem, even a rhapsody. Oh, I love that! Especially, the way she holds together loss and joy.
5.
Today, we have remembered the saints—and what does “saint” mean? “God’s beloved” . . . and ours . . . and that love, a holy thing. And we have felt grief, for the measure we grieve is a measure of the way we’ve loved or wanted to love or be loved.
And now we will baptize little Oscar John Stone and John Asa Tillema. And in a few minutes we will ritually welcome into our life together new members who are committing more deeply to our shared life and who are taking risks as they live and love among us.
All these rituals anchor us in a dual awareness, the paradox of living, that can create an extraordinary value for our lives and our loves, making them gifts of inestimable worth, precious beyond our imagining.
6.
Marian and Zane, Sara and Aron, come now and bring your children for sacrament of baptism. Let us gather around this font, which is a symbol of both life and death and the immense value of living, the preciousness of loving.
‘Tis a fearful thing
To love
What death will touch.
To love, to hope, to dream,
And oh, to lose.
A thing for fools, this,
Love,
But a holy thing,
To love what death will touch.
For your life has lived in me,
Your laugh once lifted me;
Your word was gift to me.
To remember this brings painful joy.
‘Tis a human thing, love,
A holy thing,
To love
What death will touch.
‘Tis a holy thing
To love what death will touch.
May this sacred act awaken in us a resolve to live fully and love freely here and now—to taste joy in the preciousness of this life and our commitment to love, no matter what love costs us.