Memento Mori
Sermon preached by the Rev. John Elliott Lein at St. Thomas à Becket Episcopal Church on Mar 1, 2020 on the following texts: Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7, Psalm 32, Romans 5:12-19, and Matthew 4:1-11.
Good morning!
Welcome to the season of Lent, where we will be sojourning for forty days of fasting intermixed with five Sundays of feasting.
There’s a saying many are familiar with, and I bet you can finish it for me: “There are only two things certain in life: ________ and _______.”
That’s right, death and taxes.
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One of my favorite movies combines these two themes. Has anyone here seen Stranger Than Fiction from 2006 with Will Ferrell and Maggie Gyllenhaal? Now, I’m not generally a Ferrell-fan, but this one I re-watch regularly. Will plays a man named Harold Crick, Maggie owns a little corner bakery shop as Ana, and Emma Thompson plays a vital role as well.
As the story begins, Emma’s narration tells us that Harold is a man of “infinite numbers, endless calculations, and remarkably few words…Every weekday, for twelve years, Harold would brush each of his 32 teeth 76 times. 38 times back and forth, 38 times up and down. Every weekday, for twelve years, Harold would tie his tie in a single Windsor knot, instead of the double, thereby saving up to 43 seconds…And every weekday for twelve years, Harold would review 7.134 tax files as a Senior Auditor for the Internal Revenue Service…Beyond that, Harold lived a life of solitude. Harold would walk home alone, he would eat alone, and at precisely 11:13 every night, Harold would go to bed, alone.”
But then, as Harold finishes the day he's begun auditing Ana’s books and resets his watch from a bystander’s time, the narrator says “Little did he know that this simple, seemingly innocuous act would result in his imminent death.” This revelation is not only to us as viewers, but is overheard by Harold himself, as the narrator and protagonist merge into the same story.
It is this announcement of “imminent death” that actually begins the movie, as we see how Harold attempts to come to terms with this proclamation with the help of Dustin Hoffman as a literature prof.
It is this encounter with the immediacy of death, rather than the theoretical knowledge we all have that both “death and taxes come for everyone,” that changes Harold’s life. He re-evaluates all his priorities and values. He stops calculating his way mindlessly through every day and finally pursues things he’s dreamed of for his whole life.
This visceral awareness of death changes Harold’s life, for the better. As for the rest of how the movie turns out, you’ll have to watch the show; just watch out for the flowers scene—gets me crying every time.
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The theme also reminds me of a classic mystical story which goes like this (from Anthony de Mello’s The Song of the Bird):
Uwais the Sufi was once asked, “What has grace brought you?”
He replied, “When I wake in the morning I feel like a man who is not sure he will live till evening.”
Said the questioner, "But doesn’t everyone know this?”
Said Uwais, “They certainly do. But not all of them feel it.”
* * *
This coming to feel that we will die is called in Christian tradition Memento Mori, translated from the Latin as "remember that you will die.” We’re not the only ones to see this contemplation as a wisdom practice. Socrates is attributed by Plato to have said that the proper practice of philosophy is "about nothing else but dying and being dead.” The Stoic philosopher Epictetus “told his students that when kissing their child, brother, or friend, they should remind them- selves that they are mortal, curbing their pleasure.” Buddhists and Muslims, particularly Tibetan Buddhists and Sufi mystics, affirm the benefit of intentional awareness of mortality.
Our Apostle Paul, well familiar with both Hebrew wisdom traditions and those of the Greek philosophers, regularly talked about the centrality of death in Christian consciousness, as he wrote such lines as “I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified.” (1 Corinthians 2:2 (NRSV)
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As I have said in the past, most Sundays I am grateful for our lectionary reading selections from the Bible—being given a set of passages from throughout Scripture for preaching on is regularly a gift of the Spirit. However, there are moments when I have difficulty with a particular excerpt or pairing, and today is one of those days.
The pairing of Genesis chapter 2 and 3 with this reading from Paul and from Matthew are misleading; Paul’s letter here is notorious for having been later misread and misinterpreted by St. Augustine to support a problematic doctrine, and Matthew’s teaching about Jesus is reliant on Deuteronomy not on Genesis. The temptation of Jesus is entirely separate from the situation in the Garden. So for today, I’m asking you to set aside those two later stories and focus on this early creation narrative from which we source our Ash Wednesday line “remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
* * *
Our reading from Genesis begins with these lines:
The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man, “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.”
The important question here is, what does it mean that the man will die on the day he eats of the fruit of the knowing of good and bad, that is, of discernment and wisdom? After all, if we continue with the entire story through chapter 3, both man and woman eat of the fruit and God merely evicts them from the Garden of Eden on that day rather than executing them.
Through extensive study and translation of this story of what we Christians have long traditionally called “the Fall,” I have come to understand it not through the eyes of the brilliant yet tortured Neo-Platonist theologian Augustine but rather through the perspective of Ancient Near East Hebrew Mythos. For myself, this is the story of how humans became aware of death. We have the capability of living with the knowledge of death and dying in a way that the rest of the created order does not. With the emergence of independent consciousness and vivid awareness of the past and future, we know that we will die, even if we prefer to avoid this knowledge.
As the story tells us, this knowledge comes with psychological sorrow and toil, the work of providing food and children as both life- and death- dealing. Thus the blessing is is paired with a curse. The trade-off of gaining wisdom like that of God is the recognition of the limitations and hardships of our human life.
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Yet as so many wise teachers have instructed, facing our fear of death and contemplating our limits is a way to find freedom and wise living. “To learn how to die is also to learn how to live. Death can serve as a ‘coach,’ encouraging us to live completely in the present, with more confidence and less fear.”
We may learn to “shine the light of death on life.” This is not about morbidity, self-pity, or self- terrorizing; rather those who do this practice say that “...one often feels light, happy and unburdened after directly acknowledging the truth of our inevitable death.” This contemplative practice flushes out fear, allows us to work carefully with fear. It allows us to be more intentional about our lives and our values, to choose carefully.
After all, it is that which is limited that is valuable; as the ecumenical teacher Thich Nhat Hanh says,
“Life is impermanent, but that does not mean that it is not worth living. It is precisely because of [this life’s] impermanence that we value [it] so dearly... we will know how to care for those who are close to us and how to bring them happiness. When we accept that all things are impermanent, we will not be incapacitated by suffering when things decay and die. We can remain peaceful and content in the face of change, prosperity and decline, success and failure.”
And while it is a very powerful idea, we are reminded that “what most of us are afraid of is not really death but our idea of death.” In this way, following our savior Jesus Christ in facing death, we defeat death. We ritually enter into life through death as we go through baptism. It is accepting that we are raised to life after dying that we identify with Jesus. Thereafter, we can say with the Apostle Paul, “Where, oh Death, where is thy victory? Where, oh Death, where is thy string?” (1 Corinthians 15:5)
Through facing death, we may be freed from slavery to the oppressing voices around us so that we may live in liberation as servants of God’s eternity in this present time.
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And so my prayer for us all this Lent is:
that we may open ourselves up to the awareness of death so that we might find the sweetness of life;
that we may emerge from this contemplation with love for those around us;
and that we may bless the God who gives us these gifts.
AMEN.
