Art from Ashes

In the latest issue of Newsweek, reporter Roxana Popescu has written an article entitled, "Keepsakes - Thinking Outside the Urn." She begins by telling us about Patty Gorman-Bishop, who kept her mother's cremains in a drawer for nine years, not sure how to display them. She didn't want just a traditional urn. She eventually discovered a company on the internet named Art from Ashes that incorporates a teaspoon of pet or human cremains into luminous artwork. She ordered a cobalt blue paperweight, which catches the sunlight on her windowsill. "It's vibrant," she says. "It matches my mother's personality."

The article goes on to describe other ways people are thinking outside the urn, for example: by incorporating cremains into a diamond, from a company called Life Gem; or into a colorful coral reef, from another company, Eternal Reefs; or into a painting, or a piece of jewelry, or wind chimes, or a walking stick, or even into a stuffed animal that you can cuddle with at night. One man went so far as to have an urn made into the shape of Dorothy's ruby red slipper, since The Wizard of Oz was his wife's favorite movie.

What are we to make of this? Is this just silly and harmless, or is it misguided, selfish and even a betrayal of the central tenet of Christian faith, the belief in God's power to raise the dead to be so much more than a vibrant reflection of a loved one's personality?

Our passages from the Bible today help remind us what a faithful response to our own death or the death of a loved one looks like.

Job's declaration, "I know that my Redeemer lives, and at last he will stand upon the earth; and after my skin has been thus destroyed, then from my flesh I shall see God, whom I shall see on my side, and my eyes shall behold, and not another," is a declaration which we make from our Book of Common Prayer at the beginning of every service for the burial of the dead. Job's declaration is so important that he wants his words inscribed in a book and graven with an iron pen and lead into a rock for ever. It is these words, even more than Job's own mortal life, that are worthy of remembrance, precisely because they are not his words, but the very word of God for all people who have experienced the tragic dimension of life to one degree or another, just as Job did, and yet who have come to believe, even in the face of suffering for which they are not directly responsible, that God will make things right in the end, that God will redeem the sufferings and the tragedies, that God, and God alone, is able to think so much farther outside the urn than we can even begin to think, and that the only proper response we can make in the face of death is to turn what is left of us, our mortal bodies, over to God totally and completely and without reservation, in utter humility, knowing that there is nothing we can do to sustain or to bring ourselves or our loved ones back to life.

The psalmist echoes Job's declaration, when he speaks of the vindication which only God can give to us. Easter is all about God's vindication of Jesus, of the Father saying "Yes!" to everything his Son ever said or did, and especially what he said and did in his death and in his burial, in taking away our sins and restoring us to fellowship with the Father. The empty tomb cannot contain the risen Lord. Not even this world can now contain him. That's what the doctrine of the ascension is all about. Mary Magdalene cannot cling to Jesus any more. She can only acknowledge the truth of his resurrection and trust that she too will one day be found worthy to share with Jesus in a similar vindication of her own faith in the creative and eternal life giving power of God's love for our mortal bodies and our eternal souls.

Paul's message to the Thessalonians was a promise that those who believed in the resurrection of Jesus would also inherit the same glory for themselves. Paul warned them that there would always be those who did not share their faith in the resurrection. And I think it is here that we are right to say that wind chimes and paperweights are more than just harmless attempts to keep a loved one alive. They suggest that this is actually the best that any one of us can ever hope for, to live on in some other tangible form, but in a form that is so much less than the way we were as wondrous and unique and irreplaceable creations of God. Even if they do not intend to do so, people who act in this way are ultimately dishonoring God's handiwork even as they suggest that God is not capable of reworking us into a new creature who is even more glorious than our former self.

The Sadducees, in today's gospel, attempt to prove to Jesus the absurdity of the resurrection by describing a hypothetical situation in which one woman marries seven brothers over the course of a mortal lifetime and then suggesting that this leads to the absurd conclusion, if resurrection is indeed possible, of having a woman married to seven husbands at the same time for all eternity. Jesus responds to the Sadducees by saying, in effect, that they are still thinking and living within the very limited confines of the urn, if you will, of this mortal life. But even within their urn, their narrow and limited perspective, as contained within the Pentateuch, the five books of Moses, which they held to be the only true and inspired words of God, in contrast to the Pharisees, who included the prophets and the other writings like Job, which are more clearly suggestive of the possibility of resurrection, even within their more restricted urn, Moses himself bears witness to the resurrection when God speaks out of the burning bush and refers to himself as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, each of whom must be alive in some sense, because God is not the God of the dead but the God of the living.

Jesus explains that the resurrection life, the life of the world to come, is so different than this mortal life that the two cannot properly be compared to each other. It's like comparing a point to a line, which is an infinity of points, or comparing a line to a surface, which is an infinity of lines, or comparing a surface to a solid, which is an infinity of surfaces. This life and the life to come do have something in common - and our physical bodies, believe it or not, are one of those points in common - but what we shall be, and how that one point, that "ashes to ashes and dust to dust" will be incorporated into a resurrection body, we cannot and, as I have suggested, dare not even try to create for ourselves.

Jesus goes on to say some important things about marriage, since the Sadducees had used marriage as a means of trying to disprove the possibility of resurrection. The reason that the Church can regard holy matrimony as a sacrament, as something worthy of God's blessing, is not primarily because a husband and a wife have the God-given potential to procreate children, but in order that any children who may in fact be given to them by God might come to know, through the example of their own faith in the even greater power of God to raise us up from death, that same faith for themselves. Children need mothers and fathers who are not afraid to die so that they will not be afraid to fully live in this life in the hope of eternal life, beyond this mortal life, in spite of whatever Job-like suffering they may encounter between here and there, where we will all be brothers and sisters in Christ, and not husband and wife, where we will all be children of one loving Father, and no longer as a multitude of parents.

It is no accident that these lessons were chosen for today, because we are nearing the end of the long season of Pentecost, symbolized by green as the color of spiritual growth, which is nearing an end with a final harvest beginning now to come into view. Some of us will in fact be harvested before others. Whether sooner or later, whenever our day may come, may God give us the grace, to let our loved ones go, to commit them completely to the One who has the power to recreate and resurrect them, to let them rest in the peace of Christ, who has made it possible for us to have a sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life in the world to come. AMEN.