Bob Hurd on Eucharist, Lazarus and a Way of Dying




Bob Hurd on Eucharist, Lazarus and a Way of Dying

My early morning reading in Bob Hurd's Compassionate Christ, Compassionate People: Liturgical Foundations of Christian Spirituality, serendipitously anticipated the gospel reading for the 5th Sunday in Lent, Year A--the raising of Lazarus and the anticipation of the death of Jesus. The subchapter heading, "A Way of Dying," (pp. 209-217) begins with:
To understand the dying of Jesus as self-emptying love and our participation in it, we must have the courage to be truthful and vulnerable in the face of death, even while affirming our faith in the living God. 

A few lines later he says bluntly and presciently in the context of our current reality, "Though we are a little less than angels, we are also food for worms." We live in this world. In death we donate ourselves, willingly or not, to the Mystery, and we, in some real and physical sense, don't leave the planet. Whatever the transcendent hope we hold, whatever value we have to God, we are absorbed back into the ongoing biology of a living planet.

Hurd references Hans Holbein's grim painting, "The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb". The painting could as well be the body of the Lazarus or the latest victim of Covid-19. Imagine the morgues of hospitals in Wuhan, Florence, Madrid, Tehran, New Rochelle. We cannot really come to Easter without confronting the silence, the finality, the grief, the disruption of any semblance of permanence in family and friendship circles. Psalm 90 is utterly truthful, "You turn us back into dust."

Liturgy and preaching cannot rush past Good Friday and Holy Saturday. Lazarus has begun to stink. "Kenosis"--the self-emptying, the out-pouring of life--is abandonment, before, if ever, it is to be theosis--the being taken up into the life of God.

As Hurd points out, in death Jesus experienced God utterly forsaking him. I sometimes imagine my own death and like to think that I will when that time comes pray, as I do most every night in Compline, "Lord, into your hands I commend my spirit; for you have redeemed me, O Lord, O God of truth." On the cross Jesus did, but will I stand in such confidence? I don't know. I may instead feel utterly abandoned...except for the grace of "accompaniment" by family and others who journey with me. Jesus also cried out in abandonment, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me." (Matt. 27:46)

Hurd speaks of experiences with the dying he has had at Pilgrim Place, an ecumenical  community of retired church workers and social justice activists. If the first thing to learn about death is the crisis of faith it provokes, the second thing is that it is "a time for accompaniment. Human persons are not born alone and they are not meant to die alone, though sadly this often happens." (p. 216). On Facebook this morning I saw a photo of Sr. Mary Klaehn, OSL, a hospital chaplain garbed in a facemask with the simple line, "My new uniform." She embodies professionally and personally that line in the United Church of Canada "in life, in death, and in life beyond death God is with us. We are not alone." Her ministry is a ministry of accompaniment when patients are on the fulcrum between life and death.

In this time when we are all feeling vulnerable and resist imagining the dead body--our own or a loved one--we are called to also imagine and embody our ministry of accompaniment. How we do that in the time of social distancing and self-quarantine calls is challenging. We cannot gather at the bedside to sing hymns, tell stories, or express love. Lazarus is in Bethany and we are not able to go to him. What can we do? What will I do?

Location: Woodbridge, VA 22191, USA

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