". . .FROM EVERLASTING TO EVERLASTING, THOU ART GOD."
James W. Crawford
January, 1999
For James Cox
On November 24th 1995 I received a telephone call from by brother-in-law Walter B. Smith in Arlington, Virginia. My sister Polly, after a long, painful and frightening struggle with Ovarian Cancer had died in hospice during the night. She left not only her husband, whom we called Uncle Waldo, she left three sons, Charles, Jimmy and Walt, Jr., ranging in ages from 16 to 10 years old. Polly was forty four.
On May 27th 1997 I received a telephone call from my brother-in-law John Francis in Toledo, Ohio. My sister Jane, after a long, painful and frightening struggle with Ovarian Cancer died in her home during the night. She left her husband whom we called Uncle John - U.J. for short. Jane was forty nine.
Ovarian Cancer is one of those diseases still afflicting womankind that kills, so to speak, on contact. Just to discover it means you're too late. A variety of highly sophisticated procedures enables those stricken to live longer, to be relieved of significant pain and to remain lucid and alert almost to the end. I have no doubt the antidote to these killer cells will someday be discovered, but to this day, the invasion of Ovarian Cancer cells means the body's defense systems will be ultimately subverted and overwhelmed. The invasion renders premature death virtually inevitable.
That our family has been profoundly grateful to the immediate care of skilled and compassionate physicians, nurses and health care workers is understatement. Lewis Thomas wrote a compelling history of twentieth century medicine, entitled The Youngest Science, a book reminding us time and again that medicine is no less an art than a science, that a judgment based on facts, experience and intuition forms the core of a physicians true authority, and that medicine can be called, in the true sense of the expression, "a practice."
I claim no uniqueness for our family amid this four year vigil. Heaven knows - I know - men, women, and children in this congregation who themselves fought the battle against cancer in their own bodies and won a reprieve. All of us know others who bore with it in their spouses, partners and children and best friends. Health professionals worship with us this morning who battle this illness every day. Let me say simply we wrestled with many of the anxieties, angers, the frequent sense of helplessness and powerlessness you did - and do through your vigils. We clung desperately to every sliver of news suggesting an oncological breakthrough at Bethesda's National Institute of Health, in Stockholm or in London. We stood baffled by the disease striking these two sisters within a year of one another. We speculated on diet, stress, the location of our childhood home, genetic predisposition, sympathetic responses, the asbestos surrounding our high school swimming pool. We oscillated between seeing the illness as just another piece of nature going on about its business or viewing it as a weapon of the devil to be cursed and sought and then finally in exhaustion and despair surrendered to. Since room conversation consisted of the world series, "Celtics' pride," the weather, miserable golf scores, hanky-panky in Washington, our joint plans for our summer place, the fortunes of Dartmouth basketball, euphemisms became the order of the day; we denied the inevitability of their succumbing to this damned thing, we danced around death.
And yes, while this went on, so did the miraculous support of family and friends. What a fantastic network of human beings took shape amid our anxious pilgrimage. Thank God for the congregations with their prayer calendars, their carefully designed visiting schedules, their tape recorded services. God bless those with "chipper" entrances into hospice and sick room, their wacky and sentimental presents, off-the-wall joke books and sublime flower arrangements, their pot luck suppers and boxes of candy, their weird and riotous get-well cards. As the author of Hebrews says, a veritable "cloud of witnesses" formed around these women and their families offering humor, compassion, chit-chat, and from time to time the silence of solidarity in recognition of being jointly involved for a time in the marvel and mystery of mortality.
So there, you catch a glimpse of our story. My brothers-in-law would highlight different things. Our mother, who possesses an enormous capacity to embrace and share human suffering with serenity and courage, and who provided inspiration to all of us would surely bring another perspective. Many of you this morning can tell stories containing similar components,. On this occasion let me say I know a few of these stories, shared a piece of them with some of you and am grateful to serve as a witness to, and receiver of, your constant faith and abiding hope as you and your loved ones over the years make your way through the "valley of the shadow." The witness of this congregation to me as you deal with the frailty and glory of the human condition grounded in the faith and hope of the Gospel continues to inspire, encourage and sustain my own faith. To you my deepest thanks.
I
Now, friends, the true test of any religious tradition lies in its capacity to handle the grandeur and misery of human existence, the dimensions of human suffering, the threat and reality of death. Faith and hope begin and end on life's boundaries. In our family's encounter with these two deaths our faith has been both threatened and deepened, and in the time remaining I want to point to a couple of markers we discovered out there on the boundary.
The first comes from a lesson we read a few moments ago: Psalm 90. Psalm 90 formed the base of Isaac Watts' hymn we sang to open our service this morning, "Our God, Our Help in Ages Past." By general consent that hymn stands at the greatest hymn ever written. How could it help but be so? Psalm 90, read at almost every memorial service, uses a variety of images for human life. The Psalmist describes life as short as a three hour watch in the night. He draws it as a fresh grass growing in the morning, scorching in the midday sun, withering and dying by evening. He pictures life as a sleep we forget than no sooner we wake. But he sets this transciency in God's eternity. Our life appears brief, transitory, partial because its measure lies not so much in our counting of the days months and years, but as one translator puts it, "with the God in whom we dwell in age after age, before the mountains were born or the earth and land labored in pains of birth." From the perspective of Eternity we measure our temporality.
To be sure, this marvelous Psalm bears a melancholy note. The poet grasps the limitations of life, its vulnerability, its suffering, its final demise. In portions of the Psalm we omitted this morning, the poet understands our life as incomplete and separated from the Divine intentions designed for it. He understands us to be in danger of self injury, if not self destruction. Yet, though the poet expresses melancholy, we find him neither cynical nor in despair. No, he rejoices, in our finding our true home within the embrace of One whose eternity sustains us, One who bears us through and across all of life's boundary situations, enabling us to live with security and courage in face of life's contingencies. The Psalmist lives with One who offers "a dwelling place in all generations," a God "who from everlasting to everlasting" is home to us.
II
A second marker set at the boundaries of life, indeed at the boundary of death itself, resides in the affirmation of what Paul' calls the "resurrection of the body." The other day I passed a Hari-Krishna house on Commonwealth Avenue and saw on their bulletin board a reference to the body's being an embarrassment to the soul. That's one way to look at life. But the Biblical faith follows another way. We deal with the resurrection of the body because we believe that human personality includes all of our created being. Our bodies are not irrelevant husks incarcerating some pristine soul waiting to escape this prison house. Hardly! Our bodies help to define who we are; our bodies play a role in creating, expressing and representing our personhood.
Let me illustrate with a little piece I wrote for my sister for her memorial service a week or so ago in Ohio. After a short introduction indicated a fierce inner determination and phenomenal physical coordination, a paragraph or two centered on Jane's capabilities as an athlete and competitor. It went like this. "She could ski faster and more gracefully than the rest of us; she could swim with broth suppleness and power; and Jane with her sister, Polly dazzled us as a water-ballet duet. She became a superior tennis player, an excellent golfer, an intimidating bowler, a wicked ping-pong aficionado. We all thrived on her eagerness to excel. But did you know she could water-ski in a fashion worthy of Cypress Gardens as a teen-ager? And did you know she and Uncle John, (U.J.) preempted the affections and attentions of all their nephews and niece during vacation? Why, you ask? Because between the hours of 6 and 9 p.m. on a glorious New Hampshire lake, when the father of this nefarious brood headed for some barren fishing hole, Aunt Jane, in collusion with U.J., pointed to some obviously ridiculous and sterile eddy or shoal - and found fish. I suppose some of the fun hinged on her colorful expletives, heard and sympathized with by many of us when the bass spit out the hook, the putt rimmed the cup, or the ping-pong ball dribbled into the net. . ."
Do you see? Her arms and legs, her muscles and brain, her feet and fingers played a vital role in the unity of her person. When Paul affirms God's Power as raising our bodies, he's talking about God's hanging onto the whole of us, loving and treasuring, not some evanescent, gutless soul, but all of who we really are. "Resurrection of the body" serves as a metaphor for the complete, whole, full, you. God loves all of you, and beyond the boundaries of life, God receives all of each of you home.
III
And briefly, just a word about the Communion of Saints, heaven, the so-called "after-life." In faith we confess God receives us unto a loving embracing Self and we affirm our joining with others in this Divine condition we call Eternity. We dare not exclude anyone from God's boundless acceptance, nor deny anyone the capacity to change. I believe the compassion and hope God holds for each of us continues to sustain and invites us to perfection throughout eternity. Nor dare we speculate on what Reinhold Niebuhr called, "the temperature and furniture of heaven." But how about a wild, unverified conjecture? In the case of my sisters, I've wondered if Jane has recruited a golf foursome including Cleopatra, Joan of Arc and Eleanor Roosevelt, and since it's heaven, tied them all - on earth she'd have whipped them - and is right now (since in heaven they need no churches) enjoying a cool lemonade and potato chips at St. Peter's 19th hole cafe. As for Polly and her artistic gifts, she's no doubt looked up your spouse, or mother, or father, or son, or daughter - someone you love and miss - and made them a funny little doo-dad to pin on their wings or dangle from their halo.
Regardless of what they're doing, we know where they are, where those whom you love and miss are, and where, by the promise of the Everlasting God, we may be headed. We know what promise we finally live and die by. Paul lays out that promise for us by asking a brilliant rhetorical question. You know it was well as I. Remember? "Who shall separate us from the love of God? Shall tribulation or distress, or nakedness, or peril or famine or sword?" Then he answers the question confessing, like our Psalmist, the sovereignty of God over all of life and death," No," he says, "in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loves us. For I am persuaded that neither life nor death nor angels nor principalities, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth nor anything else in all creation can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Amen
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