Voices of the Dead

FUMC Fort Dodge

November 4, 2007

Mark Haverland

Daniel 7 1 In the first year of Belshazzar king of Babylon, Daniel had a dream, and visions passed through his mind as he was lying on his bed. He wrote down the substance of his dream. 2 Daniel said: "In my vision at night I looked, and there before me were the four winds of heaven churning up the great sea. 3 Four great beasts, each different from the others, came up out of the sea. 15 "I, Daniel, was troubled in spirit, and the visions that passed through my mind disturbed me. 16 I approached one of those standing there and asked him the true meaning of all this. "So he told me and gave me the interpretation of these things: 17 `The four great beasts are four kingdoms that will rise from the earth. 18 But the saints of the Most High will receive the kingdom and will possess it forever--yes, for ever and ever.'

Much has been made of contemporary worship lately. Indeed, we are experimenting with more up to date technology and music ourselves. And I’d like to experiment even more, but I know there is a limit to how much change people can accept. And the truth of the matter is most of us like the old familiar hymns and traditional worship styles. We don’t want to and, we are lucky we don’t have to, invent our faith anew each generation. We think with, are guided by, and encouraged by the Christian tradition and faithful believers of the past. The sound of the organ, a traditional instrument which goes back hundreds of years, is a familiar and comforting sound to our ears as are the equally historical hymns and prayers and order of worship. This morning the passage from Daniel is about 2,500 years old. And we have come here this morning to engage this text, imagine that, to see if something this old has anything to say to us, people who live in a far different time and place. You could think of Christianity as an extended conversation with dead people. Maybe that’s why it’s so hard to communicate with the young who have so little interest in the dead. We gather each Sunday to read texts that are at least 2,000 years old, to worship as people have worshiped for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years, and sing songs that have encouraged the faithful for generations. Can we possibly be inspired or even interested by contemporary music, worship styles, and technology, mere babes in the field?

With these suspicions in mind, I once asked Eugene Lowery, a famous professor of preaching, what he thought of some of this new fangled praise music. He gave a program on the blues and the church in Ames a few years back. He had told us that the blues originated in the black church of the south, with its spontaneous, extemporaneous, call and response preaching and singing. Both the blues and much of black church worship is what he called pre-enlightenment, by which he meant that most of what went on was not in the head but in the heart. Praise music seems a lot like white folks equivalent to pre-enlightenment worship. A lot of eyes closed, hands raised, deeply emotional singing and praying that is much more in the heart than in the head. White, post-enlightenment, up-tight preachers, like me, characterize much praise music as four words, three chords, and two hours. But my sense is that such cynicism may miss something. We sing songs even here at FUMC which can be called praise music and you seem to like it. So do I. So, I asked Gene Lowery what he thought.

He said that because it is new, much of it is pretty crummy. What we think of as traditional music was once new and much of it was crummy, too. But only the good stuff survives in our hymnals. There will be a sorting out of the good and the crummy praise music, too, with just the good stuff enduring to join what we call traditional music to be the music Christians use to worship in the future. He also said, by the way, that by 2020, there will be just two kinds of churches: those that project in worship and dead ones. Sigh...

This got me to thinking about the advantages of tradition. The advantage of traditional music, worship and prayers is that we know what is coming and that we know it is good. It’s the same advantage exploited by the chain stores. You know that a McDonald’s anywhere in the world will serve pretty much the same kinds and quality of food. This is helpful and comforting to those looking for a restaurant in a strange town. The traditional worship service is like that. We can go into a United Methodist Church anywhere in the world and find much that is very familiar. New music, new prayers, and new worship styles force us to decide first whether we like it or not. Only when that decision is made can we let God speak through it. The old familiar music, prayers and worship are tried and true. We don’t have to decide whether or not they are any good. We can get right to the devotional work of attending to the way God shines through them.

I imagine that many people come to this church for their weddings because it is such a traditional structure. It really looks like a church. At about 100 years old, the architecture of this church is familiar to just about everyone who grew up in a church in the 20^th century. It just looks like a real church, somehow. And it just seems easier to find God in a church which looks like a real church. Stained glass windows with pictures of the saints in them remind us literally that saints are the ones who let the “son” shine through them. We have to work harder to find God in a church without stained glass windows and high arched ceilings. But, hard as it is to imagine, the architecture of new churches nowadays is a whole lot better than these quaint old structures, which are so comfortingly familiar. New church buildings can be quite impressive and spiritual, not to mention far more functional for the kinds of worship and programs that characterize the emerging church. It is no surprise to you to realize that this building is both a great asset and a great liability.

A friend of mine is nursing her 97 year old mother during the prolonged descent into Alzheimer’s Disease. The mother is mostly bed ridden and almost completely cut off from her memory. I sense in my parents’ generation a great fear of becoming dependent on their children as they grow old. In 1900 nearly two thirds of people over 65 lived with their adult children. Today less than 20% do so. Independence is everything. I sense in my own generation a great fear of growing old at all - especially if growing old means losing our minds. Mark Twain quipped that once he could remember anything whether it happened or not. And then, he said, he got so that he could remember only the things that didn’t happen. Medicine has now advanced to the point that we live long enough so that we don’t remember anything at all.

This is truly a living death. Not to remember the past is to cease to be who we are today. All Saints Day, which we note today, is our attempt to remember the saints of our tradition, the long history of our faith, the ancient witness of a faithful people to God’s presence in their lives. I’ve even started what I hope becomes a tradition of retrieving the names of those in our community who have died over the past year so that we can remember and honor them and their families. We know that they are still with us and still have meaning and significance and influence in our lives.

It is no accident that All Saints Sunday comes the day after Halloween. Halloween is a shortened form of all-hallows-even and is the day before all hallows day, which is now called All Saints Day. It originates in a Celtic pagan celebration of the harvest time when it was believed that the dead could for one day come back to haunt and cause mischief. The Christians took over this celebration because we also needed a time to honor and remember those saints who have passed on to the next world.

A large part of the allure of Halloween is a fascination with death, those who have died, and especially with the possibility that they may still be lingering around. This notion that the dead may not be completely gone may also explain our interest in our ancestors. I have enjoyed along with many others doing research into family history. I spent some delightful time in Germany researching the Haverland family before they came to the United States in the 1870s. I followed up by visiting the location in Missouri where they first settled and where I still have some cousins.

I'm not sure why this is such a moving experience. Perhaps we think that a part of us is explained by these people. It's important to know where we have been if we are to understand where we are. Whenever family members gather for a funeral, for instance, you can always see the deceased in the faces and mannerism of the living. I find that as I grow older, I am reminded more and more of my father as I look in the mirror. I draw strength and comfort from this similarity. It's as if my father is here to help me along. Even though he died two years ago, I know that in a sense he will never be gone. All of us entertain readily the notion that the dead may not really be completely departed.

This is a universal experience. We watched a clip from the Disney movie, Mulan, earlier in the service? It's a film about a young unconventional Chinese girl who saves her people from an evil enemy. But she can't do it without the help of her ancestors, whom she conjures up in a prayer to the family shrine. Of course the one the ancestors choose to accompany her on her adventures has the voice of Eddie Murray, so you know her protector isn't always completely reliable. But with the help of her deceased ancestors, Mulan conquers the enemy, saves her people, and meets a handsome prince, which pretty much takes care of all the basics.

I particularly liked the way the movie made real the fact that those who have gone before are not gone away. They stay with us to provide and protect, encourage and guide.

Archbishop Romero was a saint of great courage in a repressive El Salvador and was eventually killed for his resistance to tyranny. It was Archbisop Romero's practice to read at the Eucharist the names of those members of the community who had "disappeared" or been called during the previous week to the Church Triumphant, as he called the destination of the righteous dead. As the prayers of the community were spoken, the names would be lifted up, one after the other. And the congregation would respond to each name by boldly proclaiming "Presente!" ("present").

William Faulkner was right: "The past is not dead; it isn't even past."

So it is that the past lives on. Those who preceded us in the faith, in our families, in our communities, die but they never go away. Halloween seems to me to be a celebration, albeit a bit on the dark side, of the fact that the dead remain with us forever. And fortunately, this need not be quite as scary as the Halloween goblins that prowl our neighborhoods extorting candy from us.

The point of all this is not just to admire the saints of the past. The hope is that something of their saintliness will rub off on us. We need to think of the saints in our past like the saints that often are on the pictures in gothic churches. In real churches, the whole side walls are full of stained glass windows with pictures of the saints. Saints, then, are the ones whom the sun shines through. I agree that modern churches like modern worship, music and prayers have to work harder to let the light of the saints shine through to us. When we use familiar architecture and familiar hymns and familiar worship styles, God seems for many of us a little more available. The saints shine their light on us a little more brightly. Their glory rubs off on us a little more easily.

But however we get to them, whatever architecture and worship technology, whatever music style we use, the point of worship is to get in touch with the tradition of the saints who are of the past but not in the past. The saints, though dead, continue to let the Son of God shine on us so that we, too, can be saints, who, as Daniel assures us, possess the Kingdom now and forever.