Midnight Oil, by Jan Richardson. Used by permission.
Around this time of year in 1994, my mother, Nancy Crippen, told me she had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer. This was by no means the first sign of health troubles for her: as I mentioned in a sermon this past Ash Wednesday, my mother survived several major back surgeries in the 1970s. To treat her severe post-polio syndrome, the surgeons cut her open from neck to hip, more than once, and put her in full-body casts for months at a time. They installed metal rods in her lower back, and in subsequent years she occasionally would let us kids tap her down there to feel the surreal hard-as-a-rock sensation. The arrival of cancer two decades later, then, was not an out-of-the-blue calamity for an otherwise healthy person. But it was scary nonetheless, and I remember crying when she told me.
“Just eight months,” I recall her saying. “Eight months of treatment, and it’s over.” She had high hopes that chemotherapy would heal her.
She was mistaken. She died on June 21, 1996. “The longest day of the year,” my father said. “The longest day of the year,” he repeated.
My mother died. But she died with her faith intact; she died a devout daughter of Abraham, a confident follower of Jesus, a serene child of God. We Christians pray that our loved ones might have a “holy death,” and if that term means anything, my mother surely had one. Her pastors came, the pastors from Gloria Dei Lutheran Church in St. Paul, Minnesota, with whom she had worked as the congregational president (that’s a ministry akin to our wardens). I recall one of the pastors singing a hymn to her. All of her seven children were there. And her husband, my father, was there, sharing her faith, keeping the faith, sorting through boxes of memorabilia while she rested.
But – she died. She had prayed – hundreds of people had prayed – for her to “beat” the cancer. Yet another pastor (I grew up with no shortage of Lutheran pastors) said it this way: “We are storming the gates of heaven for you, Nancy.” She liked that image, and some of my siblings still use it. Storming the gates of heaven. Prayer can feel like that. And sometimes we talk about prayer “warriors” – we praise those among us who are so good at fervent prayer, they resemble warriors. “Beating cancer” … “storming the gates” … “prayer warriors” … it’s curious, all these images of war and battle!
In a sense, though, everything we do in this room, warlike or tender, vigorous or timid, demonstrative or tedious – everything we do in this room is prayer, not only when Jordan and the music circle lead us in song, but even on a weekday when Eric is in here alone, vacuuming the carpet. I know how Eric feels about this community. I know that every task he completes here is a prayer. And the rest of us, like Eric, like Jordan and our musicians, we all pray fervently for our sick friends, for our scared parents whose children are in peril, for those around the world who endure massive, unrelenting suffering.
But our loved ones still die, and some of them all too soon. My mother was 58. (Her 85th birthday would have been this past Monday.) Countless millions have died since that longest day of 1996, many of them all too soon. So if we’re “storming the gates of heaven,” is it working?
Yes. Yes, it is. “All of those died in the faith without having received the promises,” writes the anonymous author of the letter of Hebrews. “[They] died in the faith without having received the promises, but from a distance they saw and greeted them.” From a distance they saw and greeted them. That sounds like my mother, at a distance from health for nearly her whole life, unable to meet more than the first seven of her (now nineteen) grandchildren. God promised her health, but in her earthly lifetime it remained at a distance.
She once told one of those older grandchildren that the first thing she’ll do in heaven is run. She had never been able to run, and she longed for that feeling of freedom, power, and delight. She saw this hope, and her hope for healing from grave illness, and her hope of freedom from the grave itself: she saw all these things that she hoped for, but from a distance. She would not run on this earth; she would not recover from cancer; she would not be saved from the grave before entering it. But she saw these promises nonetheless.
Now, sometimes people do experience a dramatic cure. Sometimes death is averted. When I was a chaplain in 2018, I saw a young man recover from an injury so severe that the organ-donation team had gathered outside his room. He told me he believed God had saved him. And yet, though wondrous things do happen, I thought of so many others in that hospital who didn’t make it, and I remembered that prayer is not about receiving what we ask for exactly when we want it. Prayer is not ordering off a cosmic menu, or conjuring God’s power like a wizard with a wand. No, “faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things unseen,” and prayer gives our faith the long view. Think of prayer as stepping into a long river, flowing forward from us into the future. Far out in front of us, at a distance, we see the river as it bends toward God’s promises.
Reinhold Niebuhr says it well, in a quotation we should probably commit to memory. He says, “Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love.”
Hope, faith, and love: these are the essence of prayer. We experience hope, faith, and love when we pray in the midst of our struggle. We practice hope, faith, and love when we pray at the bedsides of those who are dying, and when we commend them to God after they die. And so Niebuhr is right: I won’t see but a fraction of what I hope for in my lifetime; almost nothing I value makes sense, including my mother’s bright but shortened life; and I cannot accomplish anything alone; and so my prayers – and yours – they orient us toward God’s view of things, God’s flowing river, God’s beckoning yet ever distant future, God’s hope, God’s faith, God’s love.
I have spoken of this before (and even been teased about it), but it bears repeating that this community has drawn alongside many deathbeds over the past year. With the death of our brother in Christ Jim Culver this past Wednesday, I count twenty souls whose lives have been (or are about to be) celebrated since late July 2021. But I like keeping lists, and so I also count six souls baptized in that time, and three more coming up in two weeks — smaller numbers but cheerful news nonetheless. And this is how it goes, in Christian community. “The generations rise and fall before you,” goes an old prayer. “Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of the faithful ones,” goes another prayer – this time from Psalm 116.
We pray in the midst of struggle.
We pray at the bedside of death.
We pray in the baptismal river of life.
And so, like our foremother Sarah and our forefather Abraham, in our prayers we “desire a better country,” and even from this distance we can see it. We can see not only a happy heaven in that great gettin’ up morning, but we can see a better country here, too: here on earth. When we pray, God trains our eyes on the river rushing forward into the future, where illness is healed and the dead are raised; but we also see that river rushing around our feet, flowing down from past ages into the here and now. My dead mother lives on that other shore where God’s river flows beside the Tree of Life, but she also lives here, in my heart, in my mind, in my daily labor, on my daily running paths. You have met her. We here at Grace Church grieve twenty souls, and we grieve much, much more: we grieve all the losses and transitions, all the disruptions of the pandemic, all the wounds inflicted on the face of this living planet, in the seas and across the skies. But we just keep praying, praying for insight and peace, praying for healing and rescue, praying for mission and rest, praying for life.
Prayer is how we let go of our fear, secure in the knowledge that we are tucked into God’s flock. Prayer is how we keep our lamps lit, waiting but also working with joyful expectation of God’s revelation of glory, stealing even now over the horizon, glittering like diamonds on the River of Life.
And so, let us pray, and let our best and most solemn prayer be a prayer of thanksgiving. As our Gospel hymn sings so well –
Thankful hearts raise to God; thankful hearts raise to God,
for God stays close beside you, in all things works with you;
thankful hearts raise to God.
***
Preached on the Ninth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 14C), August 7, 2022, at Grace Episcopal Church, Bainbridge Island, Washington.
Isaiah 1:1, 10-20
Psalm 50:1-8, 23-24
Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16
Luke 12:32-40