Sermon for April
19, 2014
Holy Saturday
Service
The Rev. Vicki
K. Hesse
St. Philip’s
In The Hills Parish, Tucson, AZ
I speak to you
in the name of One God:
Creator,
Christ and Holy Spirit. Amen
In John O’Donohue’s book Anam Cara,
he writes about death.
“Death is a lonely visitor.
After it
visits your home,
nothing is
ever the same again.
There is an
empty place at the table;
there is an
absence in the house.
Having someone
close to you die
is an
incredibly strange and desolate experience.
Something
breaks within you then
that will
never come together again.
Gone is the
person whom you loved,
whose face and
hands and body
you knew so
well.
This body, for
the first time,
is completely
empty.
This is very
frightening and strange.
After the
death many questions
come into your
mind concerning
where the
person has gone,
what they see
and feel now.
The death of a
loved one is bitterly lonely.
When you
really love someone,
you would be
willing to die in their place.
Yet no one can
take another’s place
when that time
comes.
Each one of us
has to go alone.
It is so strange
that when someone dies,
they literally
disappear.
Human
experience includes
all kinds of
continuity and discontinuity,
closeness and
distance.
In death,
experience reaches
the ultimate
frontier.
The deceased
literally
falls out of
the visible world of form and presence.
At birth you
appear out of nowhere,
at death you
disappear to nowhere. . . .
The terrible
moment of loneliness in grief
comes when you
realize that
you will never
see the deceased again.”[1]
This is the
human condition.
Holy Saturday.
The day of the
entombed Christ.
The Lord’s day
of rest.
On this day,
nothing happens.
Movement
stops.
The day is
airless, still, unholy hot.
We are
bone-weary sad.
On this day,
we are stuck between
crucifixion
Friday and Easter Sunday.
On this day,
our devotion drew us here.
Our faith
requires us
to be in this
desolate place
with tears
dried upon our faces
and witness as
they take away the body of Jesus.
Carefully they
remove his body from the cross.
Methodically,
they wrap him,
with the
spices of myrrh and aloes,
in linen
cloths.
Turning him
over until he is properly prepared.
They lay Jesus
in the nearby tomb.
Christ has
died.
Joseph turns
to us and asks:
what do we
need to bury today?
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