No Bones About It

May 8, 2011

Third Sunday of Easter, Year A

1 Peter 1.17-23

            Back in the day in Merry Old England you had to be buried in sanctified ground – which meant the churchyard – if you wanted to go to Heaven. Problem was, people tended to stick around, so generations of folks died in the same village, creating a housing crunch in the cemetery. Consequently they developed the practice of digging up old bones to make room for fresh corpses.

            This practice evidently disturbed William Shakespeare, whose grave under the chancel of Holy Trinity Church in Stratford bears a self-composed epitaph that calls down a curse on any sexton bold enough to disturb his final rest. His phobia also puts in an appearance in a scene in the play Hamlet. The melancholy prince watches a laborer excavating a fresh grave, evicting the femurs and skulls of lords and ladies in the process. “Did these bones,” he wonders, “cost no more the breeding, but to play at loggats with ‘em?” Or, translated: Did centuries of judicious inbreeding produce nothing more than a snooty set of pick-up-sticks? Hamlet then offers a meditation on the irrelevance of bloodlines in the face of mortality.

            Peter, by contrast, exhorts believers to remember the cost of their pedigree – not of their bodies, but of their souls; not of the human blood that bred them but of the divine blood that bought them; not the perishable seed of human succession but the imperishable seed of eternal salvation. Our hope of Heaven rests, not on an undisturbed grave but on a disturbed one. We anticipate eternal life not because the seal of Rome kept intruders out, but because it couldn’t keep Jesus in.

            So behave yourselves, Peter scolds. Don’t go native. Your home above earth is a bus stop. Your home below earth is an airport terminal. Your home is in eternity: Make yourself at home.

Gravely,

Doug

Collect

God our Father and Judge, You sacrificed the precious blood of Your only Son to save us. Grant us grace to walk, not as those who fear to feel the flames of Hell, but as those who fear to fall short of the heritage of Heaven, that we may reflect in our love for one another the love of Our Lord who redeemed us by His precious blood. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

 Benediction

God makes you a misfit in this world,

            To fit you for a world as yet unseen.

God frees from you the riches of this world

            To grant you wealth that does not pass away.

God grafts you to a family in this world

            Whose love will last for all eternity.

In the name of the Father,

And of the Son,

And of the Holy Spirit,

Amen.