9 Sept 2024
Creation is about more than fluffy animals and the climate crisis. We are celebrating creation this month to honour God for all God’s works. Our first hymn (at the 10am) is, All Creatures of our God and King, which is based on St Francis’ Canticle of the Sun, which is based on Psalm 148. It’s a bit like when U2 covered Jimmy Hendrix, who was covering Bob Dylan’s ‘All Along the Watchtower’. It’s Jimmy’s version you remember, but we’ll stick with the hymn here, which has the following verse:
And thou, most kind and gentle death,waiting to hush our latest breath,O praise him, alleluia!Thou leadest home the child of God,and Christ our Lord the way hath trod:O praise him, O praise him,Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.
We aren’t singing that verse this morning, for no other reason than because it’s a very long hymn. I once put in six verses of ‘O Come All Ye Faithful’, because otherwise you never get to sing “Lo! Star-led chieftains”, which I would argue is one of the best lines in any carol, but the Director of Music was not happy and midnight mass ran a little late that year. ‘All Creatures’ has seven verses, that I know of, and something has to give – In this case ‘kind and gentle death’.
I bring it up because it’s highly unusual in Christian circles to put death in a positive light. Terry Pratchett famously had death as one of his heroes and as an amusing side character in many of his novels, but he was not so keen on the faith. Death features as the bass player in the Bill and Tedfilms, which were in the nineties among my favourite. But generally the Christian attitude to death has been defined by St Paul: ‘the last enemy to be destroyed is death… Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?’
It’s so well known it almost feels like Scripture, but John Donne’s Holy sonnet strikes the same attitude:
Death, be not proud, though some have called theeMighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrowDie not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be, Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,And soonest our best men with thee do go,Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery.Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,And poppy or charms can make us sleep as wellAnd better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then?One short sleep past, we wake eternallyAnd death shall be no more, death thou shalt die.
If you’ve ever seen Margaret Edson’s heart-breaking play Wit, you will remember the attention paid to the final line: ‘And death shall be no more [comma] death thou shalt die’: ‘Nothing but a breath, a comma, separates life from life everlasting.’ Donne, who was familiar if not obsessed with death, finds in punctuation a way to utterly diminish the enemy death.
It’s intriguing then that St Francis makes of a death a friend; And better than a friend, a sister. Death in the above cases, in fiction, is always male so why does Francis choose death as sister? Is it because, under Christ, death is no longer constant – like sister moon earlier in the poem, more obviously feminine, as Juliet of Romeo and Juliet fame presses:
O, swear not by the moon, th'inconstant moon,That monthly changes in her circled orb, Lest that thy love prove likewise variable.
Or is it because Francis sees in death a nurturing aspect, a bringer of peace, a provider of food, as all food unless you’re Ozzy Osbourne, comes packaged in death. Is death than a nurturer, a protector of souls? Since arriving in Putney I’ve taken 115 funerals, more than our weddings and baptisms put together. It’s been a great help with the film script I’m working on: four funerals and a baptism. Tolstoy famously declared all happy families to be alike, and in many respects, all weddings and baptisms are largely the same, but funerals are strikingly different. I’ve taken a packed funeral here of a twenty-year old whose mother still maintains he was murdered; a beloved mother whose son was too vulnerable to attend so the funeral went ahead with only myself; a funeral of a man who ended his own life in the presence of his largely estranged family who were red hot with anger; of a teenage soldier where I was glad to have seventy women and men in uniform, some armed, as the locals were prickly; funerals here of good friends.
There are times when death seems like a friend and times when death is certainly the stalking enemy. But whether we see death as a part of life, or the abrupt absence, she is someone who plays an ever-increasing role in our lives and the touchstone of our faith, in whether we are able to keep rolling away that stone and believe in death’s defeat. And if you have sat at the bedside of someone as they lie dying; Known the strangeness and wonder of a life passing; Or equally known the unbelievable rush of a life coming into the world, in its Advent hiddenness or it’s Easter bursting forth – You will know that doubleness of our materiality in pulse and breath of the working time of our bodies; And the baffling mystery of life in its ex nihilo miracle, intelligence and vulnerable hunger for love; the absence and presence of life that is more than biological facts.
I wanted to begin this Creation Season by reflecting on death, as it’s a defining characteristic of our creation and so is at once something which is the antithesis of the divine, while also pointing us towards God. By definition creation is not God. It is everything apart from God. It is temporal, finite, partial, fallen, suffused with suffering. But everything is created by God and so must reflect the divine in some way. Even wasps. It’s difficult to look closely at a bumblebee or a passionflower, and not come away with a sense of awe; Death likewise can point us towards the eternal God, both as a counter-point, and in accentuating the miracle of life, the interwovenness of creation and the love that underwrites our relationships, a love which in Christ was exemplified in death:
Thou leadest home the child of God,and Christ our Lord the way hath trod:
The implication is that, as Christ hallowed weddings by appearing at the wedding at Cana, so Christ has hallowed death in order to point beyond it. Or to put it another way, we might turn back to psalm 139:
If I climb up into heaven, thou art there if I go down to hell, thou art there also.
The incarnation brought God into the world in order to show that creation may be redeemed. Creation, which has been made to praise God. So if we return to that opening hymn, we might sing:And thou, most kind and gentle death,waiting to hush our latest breath,O praise him, alleluia!
It’s not just the refrain of the hymn, which itself points to the uninterrupted praise of God, but our latest, our last, breath, the work of our most kind and gentle death, is to praise him: alleluia. Death too finds its proper place in the praise of God.
So as we enter again into this season of thanksgiving for every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, we thank our Father of lights, with whom there is no change; We thank God not without difficulty for sister death; We thank God for those we love and see no more, separated from us by that breath, that comma; And we ask that as we reflect and pray for our creation, we might find new ways of joining with it in praise of its maker: O praise him. Alleluia.
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