Co-missioners,
Today we send you the second half of Fred Niedner’s address at the recent closing of the Lutheran School of Theology, St. Louis. If flows directly from the end of Part One where Fred has named the event as the funeral it is and declared his intention to “preach gospel”; to which he adds, “… the way I do this at funerals is mostly by showing as best I can how…our story is story, and his story our story. All through our lives, Jesus lived and lives our story. And we get to live his.”
With that, off we go into Part Two. Faithful ending (s) indeed, as you’re about to see. (A quick tip as we get started: some of you will want to save this for reference next Holy Week.)
Peace and Joy,
The Crossings Community
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Faithful Ending(s)
(Part Two)
An Address by Frederick Niedner
November 3, 2024
Curiously enough, we, the surviving warm bodies of LST, are also the deceased. It’s the end of us as this educational ministry we shared and loved that we’re grieving, giving thanks for, and burying this evening.
So how do we end faithfully? How do we go about dying? How do we die faithfully, with shalom, in peace? Jesus shows us. We follow him, of course, because his story is our story, and ours his, but it looks a bit different depending on which gospel we’re reading and inhabiting—which means we’ll now have something like four funeral homilies because we can’t skip any of the four gospels as I see it.
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From Wikimedia Commons
Let’s inhabit Mark first. There, Jesus dies alone, in darkness, betrayed, abandoned (even by God), and reviled. And that could be us. Some of us will die like this even if we’re not rounded up, grilled, tortured, and nailed to posts like Mark’s first readers. We will get nailed, one way or another. Disease, or merely old age and losing first our friends and then any control we have over our bodies and lives.
But this might be us, LST, as well. We’re small. The world, or at least our culture, doesn’t care if we vanish. Indeed, it has turned against us and what we do in some ways. Many who also claim the name Christian see us as fools, or enemies. (The rhetoric of the current election cycle reminds us of this daily. But then so does some of the side-gossip in our own assemblies.) If they did know of our demise, many would dance. So, we could join in the cursing all about us and go down spitting in the faces of our detractors, like everyone else but Jesus in Mark’s crucifixion scene. But no. We join Jesus in a psalm of lament. “My God, my God, why have you, too, forsaken us?” We are honest about our pain and sorrow, our sense of abandonment, but we sing the whole psalm, including the part that says, “Well, we’ll just wait. God will think of something. And it will be good. Even if we pass away. There will still be reason to sing, praise, give thanks.”
And thus we make a witness of our dying. The centurion sees how this one dies—how we die—and confesses Jesus “son of God”—the very confession that’s gotten Jesus killed! The witness of our faithful dying has an impact. And then in Mark we get a glimpse of the new thing God will do. At the empty tomb that neaniskos, the “new guy,” the one who fled away naked in Gethsemane, shows up in a baptismal robe, and he preaches. It’s brief, but powerful: “Don’t look here…he’s risen! Go to Galilee, there you will see him, even as he told you, risen and on the loose.” We have played our part, we have witnessed, and now God will keep clothing newly baptized ones in Christ, and the promise will continue…. The risen Christ and that neaniskos who tells of him are out there, on the loose in the world. (You want to see him? Go to Galilee!)
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We step into Matthew. Oddly enough, there are two Jesus figures in this version of the story. One is Jesus Barabbas, a notorious prisoner, maybe even an insurrectionist, and the other Jesus, the Nazareth fellow some call messiah. Both stand before Pilate. He asks the people, the world, “Which do you want?” And of course, they want Jesus Barabbas, the one who will do our bidding by making some noise and of necessity hurting some people. He will spill some blood and stomp his way to some form of salvation. As for Jesus of Nazareth, he dies instead of Jesus Barabbas, who vanishes.
Which Jesus do we follow? It depends on what day you ask, I suppose. We have followed and fashioned ourselves after each of them at various points in our lives. Some in the church would love insurrection. (Let’s cast the mighty down from their thrones and do a little of our own stomping!) But in the end, we have thrown in our lot with the one who goes to the cross. Yes, the bad guys persist—even the ones who linger in our own hearts. But there’s atonement and forgiveness for the world in the sacrifice of those who love, trust, and despite some of their own instincts lay down their lives for God’s gracious embrace of the world and all its sinners. Daily we die with Christ, and daily we proclaim and embody forgiveness. It extends even to betrayers, and to those who deny even knowing Jesus. And in the end, as Matthew tells our story, we again die crying out that same lament—“Why, God? Why does it all feel so empty and alone, like we have failed at everything and now we have nothing, and nobody?” But once more, we sing that psalm to the end. And we wait. But then, in Matthew, there’s one more wordless cry from Jesus, though it’s never mentioned in a Good Friday tres-horae service. After that psalm, in the darkness, Jesus “cries out.” The verb is krazo (in Greek). It’s the verb of the screeching, unblockoutable, gull-like cry of the Canaanite woman who begged for her dying daughter, and at first, Jesus didn’t listen. And now, behold, Jesus shrieks, and God hears—and answers—and the earth splits, the saints emerge from their tombs. They trickle from the cemetery, head into town, and prepare to party.
And then, there’s one more earthquake. And oh, now there will be a party!
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We usually go last to John, but not this evening. John is another gospel for persecuted people—written after Domitian outlawed Christianity in the empire and broad, systematic persecution began. Now, everywhere you could be asked, “Are you one of them?” If you said “yes” the cost could be great.
John’s Jesus is in control—“No one takes my life from me; I lay it down of my own accord” (John 10:17-18), Jesus promised, and then he acts that way. He heads for Jerusalem, and as some of us heard today in the All Saints gospel lesson, he stopped along the way in Bethany to pick up his dead friend Lazarus. He needed him, so he had to raise him first, then have him unwrapped so he could come along to Jerusalem, and sure enough, the powers that be see they have to kill Lazarus, too. (You can see us in Lazarus, right? Newly raised, relieved of the grave-cloths and following Jesus on the way to the cross….) Then we watch as Jesus finds his own donkey. He turns himself in at Gethsemane and from then on, everyone from Judas to Pilate obeys his every order. He takes over every trial scene, carries his own cross, and dies crying, “It worked!” Which is really John’s way of asserting that Rome and the other rulers of this world aren’t in charge. It’s God’s world, and in our living as well as our dying, we’re part of something far bigger than they—or even we—can imagine. We, too, can cry, “It worked! Gospel got said and done among us!” We, too, helped gather people to Christ, sat beneath his cross with Mother and Beloved disciple, communities who need to learn to live together, and with the bride he sought back at the well one noonday in Samaria, and finally took with that last drink on the cross. We, all of us, are the bride. “Yes, it worked!”
And yet, at the same time, we aren’t in control, but stumbling and falling beneath our crosses and other burdens. So in John’s gospel, Jesus promises, “In my Father’s house are many abiding places,” and then, “I go to prepare a place for you,” which we at first take to be the far-off “heavenly mansions” we’ve heard about since childhood Sunday School lessons. But that’s far too simple. As John tells the story, Jesus had several other PLACES to go first…the place that Judas knew, the place of betrayal; then the place called Gabbatha, the place of judgment and condemnation; next the place called Golgotha, where they crucified him; and finally the place where they laid his lifeless body. And he went to each of those places to prepare them for us because we’ll end up in each of them, one way or another, as we have this evening, in this place of burial at this moment of letting go—the dark places where we have felt alone and betrayed; where we have been judged (by ourselves as well as others); the place where we have got nailed, often deservedly; and the place we are now, at the graveside, laying the body to rest, and part of ourselves with it. But we’re never alone in any of them. He’s always there, with us.
And now we sit with Mary Magdalene, waiting for dawn on the first day of the week, and we hear footsteps. Is it the gardener? Well, yes and no. In the end, it was the Bridegroom, come to find us, the white-robed throng of baptized ones, our wounds barely covered and our tears so newly wiped. This weekend—All Saints—many of us have once more envisioned this scene, the great wedding feast that has no end. That’s us, too. We won’t eat and drink and dance the night away, but we have every reason to.
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From Wikimedia Commons
I saved Luke for last because I think we’re more like Luke’s audience than those of the other gospels, and Jesus lives out our story, too. Luke’s Jesus famously travels continually, and always stops for meals, and he tells parables in which we so easily find ourselves learning what the truest treasure of life is. The same thing Heaven treasures: People! Relationships! Friends. Which is all Jesus ended up with—his only treasure. He had no money, no institution, not even a home his estate could sell. He had only friends. That was his treasure, and it includes us. So now, our life works the same way.
Accordingly, Luke’s Jesus goes the way to Golgotha with Simon of Cyrene walking behind him, and we’re with Simon, of course. We’ve signed up or been dragooned into a lesson in “daily cross-bearing,” as Luke re-phrased Mark’s call to “take up your cross and follow me.” We have options, means, even some authority and power. So now, in Luke, Jesus teaches Simon of Cyrene, and us with him, how to use our options all along the way toward dying. We watch and learn as Jesus looks out for others. First, as only Luke reports, we meet the women weeping along the way. (“Weep not for me,” Jesus says. “It’s you and the horrors you will face we must care about today.) Then, even as they pound spikes into his flesh, he prays for his executioners. (What a hell of a job they have, killing people all day every day, and listening to all that screaming, simply because they have orders.) Then one more conversation with the man who half-joked, “Hey, you, with that king-sign over your head—can I be your lieutenant when you take over?” With some of his last breaths then, Jesus makes one more friend. “Sure, friend, you and me. This is my kingdom, and because we’re together, with even a few breaths left, this is paradise, God’s garden. While we have breath, let’s be together,” Jesus says. And that’s who we are, people crucified with Christ but still making plans, still making friends. This is my favorite vision of the church, a bunch of crucified people—crucified with Christ by baptism into his death—hanging here, making plans. What shall we do with what we have left of time and space and breath?
Living inside this story, we see that LST is “over,” but the gospel and the church are not “over.” Indeed, we are not “over.” We’re still hanging here. Nailed, yes. Dying, yes. But we still have each other, even hanging here on these crosses. And we’ll keep talking, right?
And then, as Luke’s story goes, with our very last breaths, we’ll sing a bedtime song, “In your hands I rest my spirit, O God thou faithful God,” Jesus prayed. It’s the one Jesus’ mom taught him, a bedtime prayer Jewish moms taught their babies like some of us learned, “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray thee Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray thee Lord my soul to take.” And if we wake up, we’ll do it all again, through another day of cross-bearing. If we don’t wake up, we’re in the best hands possible. One day at a time, we walk to Golgotha making friends among the dying. And then we say our bedtime prayer.
Our hearts are full wi3th a mix of everything. And there’s so much we can’t see or know for certain, especially the future and what will become of us and others like us, so even as our imagination both trembles and dances, we’re still singing at times a song of lament that says “we loved what we had, and we’re sad to see this chapter end,” but we keep singing, because we know it’s not the end of everything.”
For now, we know this much for certain. We got to be together. And that’s the whole point of living. To be together. Who we get to be in our one, brief arc through space and time depends so much on who we get to be with. I got to be with you! We got to be with each other. Would you have it any other way?
In the end, all that’s left to say is—“Thanks be to God!!”
