A baptism long ago and a pall for days to come: life well dressed.

A couple of weeks ago I contacted the church my parents belonged to in Battle Creek, MI where I was born.  I wanted to find the date of my baptism and the name of the officiant.  The current pastor at Maple United Methodist was very helpful.  She got back in touch quickly.  The news was mixed.  While they had a record of my mother's and father’s membership and the date of my sister’s baptism, there were no records of my baptism.  Indeed, there was a gap in all records of baptism, marriage, and membership beginning in the summer of the year I was born and continuing for 3 and ½ years.  Apparently, the minister and officiant at my baptism was not the greatest administrator in the history of the Methodist church.

I went in search of the specific date of my baptism because I wanted to plan a specific portion of my funeral.  You see, I’m not one who is much enamored by the trend among American Protestants to call funerals “Celebrations of Life”.  Celebrations of Life are, as one author called them, “the triumph of the biographical.”  They send us back through the life of the deceased, and we remember the moments of light comedy, the accomplishments, and we highlight that which her/his friends and family find worthy.  Then we are instructed not to mourn, but to “Celebrate”, because the deceased has “gone home”.   Indeed, oftentimes, there are hints that the deceased has not ‘gone’ anywhere at all, but hovers over the proceedings watching and smiling in nebulous bliss.

Despite the hints of orthodox theology, life over death and all, there is more than a whiff of Gnosticism wafting about these celebrations.  Gnosticism disparages the world.  Gnosticism denies the scriptural testimony of Elohim’s experience at creation.  There it is, plain as day, “And God saw that it was good.” But no, for the Gnostic, this world, our bodies, matter, well, they really aren’t that good. Some vaguely ‘spiritual’ world, found either inside of us somewhere or in some ethereal ‘heaven’, is superior.  The early Church spent much of its time and intellectual effort trying to turn away the many heresies spawned by the Gnostic world view.  The Apostles’ Creed begins with creation and ends with resurrection of the body: nothing other worldly there.  Unfortunately, a version of Gnosticism has spread into American Protestantism.  In many of our churches “going to heaven” is preached as the goal of the Christian life.  We are told to mistrust our bodies because they so obviously are subject to weaknesses and corruption.  Why our intellects that contemplate the “propositional truths” or the ‘lessons’ of Scripture aren’t equally weak and corruptible is a question not asked.  Mind or spirit is, “of course” superior to body or ‘this world’.

All that is to say that a Celebration of Life denies the movement of time unrelentingly toward eternity.  There is, according to the Scriptures, an “In the beginning” and there is an announcement by the Lamb, “Yes, I am coming soon.”  There is memory, as in “remember you too were once slaves in Egypt.”  But there is no rewind.  This world, corrupted by sin as it may be, has meaning that is not to be denied by sentimental do-overs on a last day.  Just ask the apostle Thomas.  The once stone-cold dead and now risen Jesus still has the hole of a life pierced by pain and a Roman spear in his side.  Jesus lived and died in the world that His Father loves.  His life and suffering are not to be ignored and passed over,  just as our sufferings as well as joys should not be passed over.

 More importantly, Celebrations of Life practically shout at us to deny our feelings.  We are hurt by loss.  I remember quite vividly coming to attend a funeral of a saint of the church and when I mentioned to the officiant that it was a sad day, I was chastised, told my feelings were mistaken, that “no, this is a great day.  She is with the Lord she followed through life.”  Au contraire, I thought.  Even as I share both the now deceased saint’s and the pastor’s hope in the promise of resurrection—the day of the saint’s funeral was not that resurrection day.  I was missing her.  Those of us who call ourselves friends of the grieving are simply being nervously thoughtless or near hopelessly self-centered when we try to convince the grief stricken, either in private conversations, or worse yet from the authority of a pulpit, that ‘good’ Christians are happy in the face of loss rather than devastated by the hole death opened up in the ground right there in front of them.

 Why do we downplay the pain?  Are our histories with the dead, our lives of uncertainty due to loss, and the real anguish of our body aching to hold a loved one close to be so discounted and minimized?  Now it may be true that a long lived, died in her sleep, saint of the church deserves to have her virtues proclaimed at the ceremonial recognition of her death.  They are proclaimed because we will miss them.  They are gone from this present.  Her life mattered.  Her loss is felt.

So, back to my search for the date of my baptism and my funeral plans.  I recently stumbled upon an ancient Christian practice: the funeral pall.   The use of a funeral pall seems to me to properly weigh and balance a Christian recognition of a life lived and now gone, the pain and finality of death, and the hope of life to come.  Since early in the life of the Church, the dead have been draped in a cloth: a mort-cloth [mort, literally death, in Latin], or pall.  It can be black or white (more usual now) and it is usually embroidered with a cross or other Christian symbol.  It is laid over the body or coffin (or nowadays, urn).  At some point in my service, I want the officiant to point to the pall and say something like this, “As St. Paul told the Galatians, ‘For all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ’.  So too, Peter, presented by his faithful parents, MaryBeth and Chuck Doan, was baptized, and so clothed with Christ, in 1954 at Maple Methodist Church in Battle Creek, Michigan with Rev. Robert Dobbs officiating.  So here, signified by this pall, Peter is still, even in this day, clothed in Christ, and will be clothed in Christ as he sleeps in the dust in the hope, promised by Christ, of the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting yet to come.” 

Now that, to me, is a fine testimony to the fullness of life, the finality of death, and the hope of life to come.  The goodness of the creation is honored in recounting of the name of the place where I was clothed in Christ.  God’s careful formation me, bodily, in the womb is recognized in the remembering the names of my parents. The church, one visible part of the body of Christ in this world, is recalled by naming the officiant.  The finality of my death and its consequence is named aloud in the recognition that I return to the dust out of which humans were formed.  The hope of a day to come, not a day in which I will ‘get to heaven’ but a day in which Christ will  bring heaven to earth and raise me bodily from the dead is proclaimed in the words of the Creed. 

In the end, as my last act of evangelism in this life, I want a funeral pall.  A pall announces the Good News that Jesus has come, died, and lives again in order to clothe the world in Himself.   A pall evokes the wonder and majesty of the scope and stretch of God’s presence in His Son, Jesus, in and over my life and death, in and over this world He so loves.  As I was baptized and clothed in Christ, so I will wait for His return well dressed.  Buen Camino.