“Now it is high time to
awake out of sleep: for now is our salvation nearer than when we
believed.” Romans 13:11
I walked down the street from the
hospital with my faith renewed, full of joy, grateful to be a priest. I had been called in a few hours earlier
because Gertrude Worrall, my oldest parishioner, had reached the end. She was 98, baptized at Christ Church when
William Howard Taft was president, a saintly woman, greatly loved by her
family. They had surrounded her in the
hospital room, four or five generations of them. We’d prayed and sang hymns together. There was laughter and tears, and she was
delighted by all of it until she slipped peacefully away. It may sound very odd if you haven’t seen
one, but there are beautiful deaths, and sometimes, as a priest, I’m invited to
be part of them.
I was walking a few inches above the
sidewalk as I made my way back to the church to put away my stole and the
communion kit. And I decided this would
be just the moment to expand the use of the passing bell at Christ Church.
You
ring the passing bell to mark a death, calling all who hear it to prayer for
the one who has died, a stroke for each year in the person’s life. A few weeks before I’d read Dorothy Sayers
“The Nine Tailors,” that quintessentially Anglican mystery novel, which is
really all about churchbell-ringing. In
the novel’s village of Fenchurch St. Paul, the church sexton rings the church’s
passing bell not just at the end of funerals, as we already did, but as soon as
the news of the death arrived. In the
novel, the villagers know each other so well that they can count the strokes,
and immediately figure out who has died.
I thought this would be a marvelous addition to village life, so I
stormed up the stairs into the bell tower, and began tugging the rope, 98
times.
I stepped out of the tower, my ears
still ringing, to find someone shining a flashlight in my face. “What do you think you’re doing?” the gruff
voice demanded. It was the village
policeman, summoned by a neighbor who had taken more account than me of the
fact that it was now nearly 10:00 at night.
I had probably woken up half the neighborhood, he suggested, and every
dog for a half-mile seemed to be howling.
I began to explain myself, and the good man shrugged a bit and lowered
the light. He was as agreeable to the
restoration of medieval customs as anyone else.
But he firmly suggested I confine bell ringing to daylight hours in the
future.
“It is high time to awake out of sleep,”
writes Saint Paul, “for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed.” Of course, the passing bell was intended as a
means to carry news across town, and to call us to prayer for an old
friend. But it was more than that. John Donne was thinking of just such a bell
when he wrote while facing his own death, “therefore never send to know for
whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.[1]"
The
bell was meant to awaken its hearers, to summon them to consider what a
commentator I read this week called “the bedrock truths of life.[2]” Someone has died this day, perhaps full of
faith and gratitude, perhaps in fear and confusion. A soul will stand before the Judge of all, to
give account, to hear the verdict.
Perhaps it will be “come ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom
prepared for you from the foundation of the world.[3]” And perhaps it will be “I never knew you:
depart from me, ye that work iniquity.[4]” And you, where do you stand? When all else is stripped away, how will you
answer for your life?
It
is an inescapable part of the Christian life, the very first step of all,
really, to hear that bell sounding and to know the true ground of your
hope. Metropolitan Anthony Bloom, one of
the greatest Orthodox spiritual writers of the last century explained it this
way: “There is always a moment in the experience of discipleship when fear
comes upon the disciple, for he sees at a certain moment that death is looming,
the death that his self must face. Later on it will no longer be death, it will
be life greater than his own, but every disciple will have to die first before
he comes back to life.[5]”
I’ve
seen it many times in my work as a priest.
A few years ago, when I was serving at Christ Church we hired an
advertising person to help us put together the publicity for a new service we
were starting. Before she started
drawing the logo and crafting a strapline, she wanted to know what made people
come to Christ Church for the first time.
I
thought over what our latest crop of new members had told me about what brought
them to us. This one had a cancer
diagnosis. That man had lost his job. Their marriage was in trouble and they needed
something to pull them together again.
They’d experienced the marvel of a beautiful child coming into the world,
and didn’t have the first idea what to do next.
They like the music and the liturgy and the friendly people, of course,
I told her. But people mostly come to us
when they realize they can’t handle life on their own. You could say we’re in the crisis
business. When everything falls apart,
we seem to be the only ones who know which way is up. “Every disciple will have to die first before
he comes back to life,” as Metropolitan Bloom had it. The advertising lady said, very politely,
that she’d never really designed a campaign along those lines before.
This
is Advent. Today is the first day of the
Church Year. We begin by learning from
the end, reading and praying about the last things: death and judgement, heaven
and hell. He will come at an unexpected
hour. Today is the day of
salvation. Cast off the works of
darkness today, put on the glorious armor of light while there is still time. Receive Baptism’s gift, the new life that
comes from He who fills all His children with the radiant beams of His
Presence.
“What
is your only comfort in life and in death?”
That’s the very first question of the Heidelberg Catechism, as good a
place to start as any I know. Above all,
that’s what the passing bell asks you, perhaps especially when it rings at a
quarter to ten on a cold winter night. “What is your only comfort in life and in
death?”
And
the answer, the one we confess today and hope to live faithfully until He
returns: “[My only comfort is] That I with body and soul, both in life and death, am not my own, but
belong unto my faithful Savior Jesus Christ; who, with his precious blood, hath
fully satisfied for all my sins, and delivered me from all the power of the
devil. He so preserves me that without
the will of my heavenly Father, not a hair can fall from my head.. He assures
me of eternal life, and makes me sincerely willing and ready, henceforth, to
live unto him.[6]”
[1] Meditation 17, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions.
[2] “The Hour.” Sunday’s Readings. The Living Church. 27 Nov. 2016, http://livingchurch.org/hour-2016-11-27
[3] Mt. 25:34.
[4] Mt. 7:23.
[5] Meditations, A Spiritual Journey, qtd. at “Soulwork
towards Sunday: Advent 1A,” At the Edge of the Enclosure, http://www.edgeofenclosure.org/advent1a.html
[6] The Lord’s Day 1. The Heidelberg Catechism (1563), Christian
Reformed Church, https://www.crcna.org/welcome/beliefs/confessions/heidelberg-catechism
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