What happens to us when we die?

A funeral sermon for a longtime parishioner.

What happens to us when we die?

Surely this is one of the primary questions that drives our human lives in myriad ways. It steers us onto particular career paths. It urges us into all kinds of decisions related to the families we create or choose not to have. It pushes us to make meaning and to search for meaning.

What happens to us when we die? is the question that lingers under the surface, resting quietly on the river bed when the daily rhythm of life is like gently flowing water, moving smoothly over stones and with ease around meandering bends.

What happens to us when we die? is the question that surfaces when we encounter the end of life in non-upsetting ways, such as learning of the death of someone whose life was long and well-lived.

What happens to us when we die? is the question that rears its mysterious head, like a sea monster, when a once placid stream is instead churning rapids, when a sudden or unexpected death disrupts all that we know of life, makes us question the meaning of it all, makes us question what we’re doing with our lives and the precious time we have this side of heaven.

And yet this question’s answer we cannot know while we live.

“Beloved, we are God's children now; what we shall be has not yet been revealed,” writes the author of the first letter of John. Of course, as Christians, as resurrection people, we know that death does not have the final word, but is merely a part of our lives. But what happens to us after we die lies beyond a veil we, the living, cannot fully know or understand.

Our sacred scripture offers us some glimpses. Our reading from the prophet Isaiah speaks of the glory promised to God’s people, who wait for their Messiah: a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear.  Tears wiped away, great rejoicing.

Our sacred liturgy expresses our hope in the great beyond and what we imagine we might witness at that heavenly banquet. It offers us an opportunity to even practice that hope in the prayers that we offer together and sort of participate in that reality from this side of life.

What happens to us when we die, is a question that has been extraordinarily present to me these past 8 or 9 months as I spent time with Robert Browning as he approached the end of his life on earth. But, in all the times I tried to explore this question and to prepare Robert for his transition, he never really wanted to talk about his death.

Robert, in the few years that I knew him, was always too busy living his life, even from the bed he was confined to in the last month’s of his life. I started to wonder whether Robert was too afraid to wonder what happens when we die.

Well he set me straight real fast. Robert’s faith was steadfast and he wasn’t afraid at all. He told me several times he was ready to meet God face to face, whenever God was ready to call him home.

Still, he wouldn’t tell me what he wanted for his funeral. While, some time before I ever arrived, he quietly made arrangements to have his ashes interred in our columbarium, he didn’t really expect a funeral. Which means he never selected readings. So I chose them. The first I chose because it reminded me of a story Gary Alexander told me of seeing Robert at the symphony, dutifully, step by step, making his way to his seat way up in one of the higher mezzanines. Robert loved fine music and I know it was one of the things he loved most about Ascension. We bought him a radio when he was bed bound so he could listen to WFMT, which he did, every day. The glory yearned for and prophesied by Isaiah seemed fitting for what I hope Robert is now enjoying in a new way.

I chose our epistle from the first letter of John, because I wanted to reassure us that while we don’t know the answer to that question, what happens when we die, that we are already God’s beloved children.

And the Gospel reading I chose because it made me think of all of you, gathered here today and how you have indeed laid down your lives like shepherds for Robert. Not in the dramatic, stepping in front of a bullet sort of way, but in the quiet, tender, and caring sort of way. In the ordinary way that understands that this is our duty as Christians.

We care not only for the living, but also for the dead. And here you are, on a Friday late morning, gathered to do so. Setting aside the demands of your daily lives to be here. To offer a solemn requiem mass in honor of one of your own. You have handled the paperwork required by the various agencies upon death. You have provided for the hiring of musicians. You have committed to carrying a candle, to light the way for Robert as he enters and leaves this church one last time. You have kindled the coals for incense so we can cense him for a final time before laying him to rest. You have put on vestments and sung the words of scripture. You are in the loft recording this mass so that those who cannot be with us in person today can witness this blessed offering. You have shown up and given your time freely and graciously to be here.

It is what you do. Because you are the church. Because we are Christians. We are sheep, and the Lord is our shepherd, yes. But we are also shepherds, who tend to the sheep, who tend to one another. Who lay down our lives for each other in deceptively small and ordinary ways.

These past few weeks, since the death of our friend Robert, I have learned something of what happens to us when we die. I have learned that when we in the church die, someone calls to make sure the arrangements are made to collect your remains. Someone sends an email to make sure that a funeral will take place. Someone sends another email to make sure there are acolytes for that funeral. Someone hires the musicians. Someone plays the old Baptist hymn on the organ that you sang to the priest from your deathbed. Someone bakes a coffee cake and brings fresh flowers. Someone makes sure everyone knows when and where to be for this final send off.

You all have offered to me and to one another a glimpse into the meaning of resurrection.

All of these, simple, tender acts: resurrection sightings. Glimpses into God’s heavenly kingdom already at hand. Glimpses into that heavenly kingdom, where we wait in joyful hope to fully join Robert someday.

Cranberry-Orange Irish Bread

Soda bread by anyone else’s description, this bread is my family’s link to the past. In revising it, I’ve attempted to maintain that link. The cranberries recall driving through Cape Cod with my grandparents to see the bogs filled with the tart fruits. The caraway seeds are optional, but they are to nod to my grandmother’s version, which was redolent with them, and, when coupled with the orange zest, the two dance well together in an Irish jig kind of way.

Cranberry Orange Soda Bread

2 1/2 cups (300 g) all purpose flour

1 teaspoon baking soda

½ tsp salt

1/4 cup (50 g) sugar

1 tsp caraway seeds (optional)

Zest of 2 oranges

3 ½ Tablespoons butter, chilled and diced

½ cup dried cranberries

1 egg, lightly beaten

¾ cup buttermilk

Preheat the oven to 400°F. Either butter a 5-inch cast iron skillet or line a baking sheet with parchment.

In a large bowl, stir together flour, baking soda, salt, sugar, caraway seeds, and orange zest. Add the butter, rubbing it into the flour mixture until it resembles coarse sand. Add the dried cranberries and mix. 

Add the egg and the buttermilk and stir to form a sticky, shaggy dough. Let it sit a minute to allow the dough to hydrate. Turn it directly into the skillet or onto the parchment and quickly shape into a ball, and flatten lightly with your hand. Transfer dough to the parchment-lined baking sheet. Using a bench cutter or knife, score into quarters pressing nearly all the way to the bottom of the loaf (do not go all the way through). 

Bake for 35-45 minutes or until cooked through and golden. Cool on a wire rack for 30 minutes. Spread slices with good butter and enjoy.

This dirt is a sign of our life shared

Ash Wednesday
March 2, 2022

Some years ago, my friend and fellow priest Nurya invited me to come plant wheat on her
farm, called Plainsong, in Michigan just outside of Grand Rapids. It was the second year
she’d organized a wheat planting, where a small community would press wheat berries into
the soil in hopes that what grew could be harvested and then milled into flour for
communion bread.

When I’d first heard Nurya speak about Plainsong’s wheat and communion bread
program, I immediately thought of the offering prayer spoken over the bread and wine
before for communion: “Blessed are you, Lord God of all Creation, through your
goodness we have this to bread to offer: fruit of the earth and work of human hands, it will
become for us the bread of life.”

It was a moment of epiphany for me: The blessing is a reminder that the bread we eat does
not begin in the hands of a baker or even in the hands of a farmer who sews and then
harvests grain. The bread of life we eat begins in the soil. The dirt. The dust.

According to the creation myths of Genesis, dirt is where all life on earth begins. God
separates the Land from the Sea and beckons the earth to put forth vegetation that bears
seed as plants and fruit trees. Later, the Creator calls from the land “cattle and creeping
things and wild animals of every kind.” Likewise, and finally, humankind is called forth.
There are two myths of creation told in Genesis, and it’s in the second one where God
most explicitly calls a human from the soil. God fashions Adam, whose name in Hebrew
means “from dirt.”

It’s not just that Hebrew, however, that acknowledges our etymological and spiritual
connection to the soil. The Latin root of human, humus, also means soil, dirt, ground.
Soil is the common heritage of plants and animals in all their variety. Soil is the common
heritage of humankind in all its variety.

But soil is not just where life begins. Earthly life ends in the soil too.
There is an artist in my neighborhood, her name is Molly Costello, and she sells pins that
proclaim, “We are all temporarily not dirt.”

I have one of those pins and I’ll be wearing it throughout Lent because I love its grounded
take on our connectedness to one another, to all of creation in all its variety. That we allwill return to the dirt is indeed what unites us. Unity, our common heritage as God’s children, our common heritage as God’s creation, is exactly what I could use a little more of these days.

***

In hospitals, cleanliness is indeed godliness. Sanitation protocols are rigid and necessary for
the health and safety of staff and patients. In other words, everything possible is done to
protect against “dirt.” Hand sanitizers outside every room. Clearly marked receptacles for
the disposal of anything that has touched or pierced a patient. Sinks and soaps, and yes,
masks for everyone now. All to keep the dirt away.

And yet, Ash Wednesday is one of the busiest days of the year in a hospital. Nurses,
doctors, and hospital staff all line up to see the chaplains when they arrive on their floors
with ashes. “From dust you came, to dust you shall return,” the chaplains intone, again and
again, marking the very people who tend to earthly bodies every day. The very people who
know well that all earthly bodies will return to the earth eventually.

Even the patients, from the mildly ill to those who already know their days are well limited,
request ashes. When I did my chaplaincy internship at Rush in 2020, on a normal day,
more patients declined my offer of a visit than accepted it. On Ash Wednesday, nearly
everyone whose door I knocked on invited me in.

Every year as we mark the beginning of our journey toward Easter, I find myself wondering
why so many ask to be marked on their foreheads with such an outward symbol, a cross of
ashes. Why seek the reminder of our inevitable return to dust?

The phenomenon has a particularly interesting contour in a hospital setting, when death
already draws so much nearer. It’s particularly salient in a hospice unit, where I was
assigned to distribute ashes in 2020. There, death doesn’t just draw near. In some rooms, it
is already passing over.

It seems so counterintuitive to mark the dying with a reminder of their death, when it is
but hours away, already present in the rattle of their lungs as they take their last breaths.
And yet, their families often request it. I recall marking a young woman whose family had
specifically requested my presence. I remember how cool this woman’s skin felt against my
thumb. I also remember the papery, thin skin of her grandmother. The foreheads of her
middle-aged uncles and aunts, her youthful sisters and cousins, and even the hospice nurse
caring for them. As I marked them all one by one, I, too, bore the sign on my own
forehead. A sign, in dirt, that we are all in the process of returning to our humble origins.
And that we are in this together.

***

Yes, this dust, this dirt is a sign of death. But this dirt is a sign of life, and of life shared.
We are called to the dirt, to the soil, because we come from it. The soil where we plant
seeds of life is the same soil where we bury our dead. The soil is a beginning and it is an
end, and when we tend to it closely, we can know that painful yet beautiful paradox ever
more intimately.

Paul’s epistle to the Corinthians captures that paradox of life, of life in Christ: “We are
treated as impostors, and yet are true; as unknown, and yet are well known; as dying, and
see—we are alive; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor,
yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything.”

The cross of ashes is a paradox: a sign of our death, and yet a sign of our life. Our life that
was, our life now, and the life that is to come.

***

There’s a reason that planting seeds is such a beloved and well-worn metaphor for the
beginnings of something new and I think it has less to do with the seeds than it does with
the dirt. When we return a seed to its source, having been produced by the plant which
grew in the soil, we make an act of hope, an act of faith in new life. When we return a seed
to the soil, we say that the future is something we want, and we want it to be beautiful,
good, and life-giving. We want it to produce food and flowers and even more seeds. Even
more life.

Pressing a wheat berry into the dirt is a commitment to its care, to the practice of coaxing
forth the plant coiled tightly within. It says, I am willing to water and to weed, to find the
right amount of sunlight and shade. It says, I believe in the value of that work and what
that work will produce—life-giving bread—though it will take time.

So let us begin our journey toward Easter together. Let us enter this 40-day period of
fasting, almsgiving, and prayer united at our very core in our identity as creatures of God,
fashioned like Adam from the dirt.

And as we are reminded of our humble beginnings, let us allow our lives to be like kernels
of wheat, kernels of promise and possibility, returned to the soil to be watered and warmed
these 40 days into something new. For who knows what might spring forth?