This is the sermon I preached at this afternoon’s Good Friday Tre Ore service at Holy Communion. I preached on the Sixth Word of the Seven Last Words of Jesus.
From the 19th chapter of the gospel of John: “When Jesus had received the wine, He said ‘It is finished.’ And bowing His head, He gave up His Spirit.”
One of our most fundamental hungers as human beings is to feel a sense of completeness – fulfillment – of tying things together – and finding meaning – finding closure – finding resolution. And I think this is increasingly true the longer that one lives. When you are young, closer to the outset of one’s life, you usually have a sense that there is plenty of time to figure things out – to make things right. And I also think many of us as young people have a somewhat naive belief that life always makes a certain amount of sense – that if you live a good life, good things will come to you. And especially if our early life is relatively untouched by tragedy, it is very easy to view life and the world in this rather simplistic way.
But the longer we live, the more we realize that we are broken people- living in a broken world – and that our own brokenness is beyond our own ability to repair or reconstruct. We can try – and we probably should try – to heal our own brokenness. And if you visit any bookstore, you will be confronted by hundreds if not thousands of self-help books offering a wide range of answers and remedies to life’s brokenness, however we may experience it.
And for many of us- and certainly for me- we live much of our lives in the hopes of making connections and re-connections … knitting together strands that have been torn by time and distance and indifference …. looking for meaning and looking for evidence that we matter – that we have mattered to others – that our life has mattered – that what we have done has made some kind of difference in this world.
Maybe it’s because I’m approaching my 60th birthday – definitely with most of my life behind me rather than ahead of me – that I find myself looking at so many of life’s event through this particular prism of looking for meaning. And it might also be because my mom died just over 30 years ago, when she was just 58 years old – and I am now 59. And so in some ways, each and every day of life feels like a gift in a way that it never quite did before.
At any rate, it seems like life has offered up all kinds of opportunities for me – since our last Good Friday – for me to tie loose ends together, to bring things full circle, to find completeness, to finish something left incomplete. Some of those instances have been relatively trivial, although they felt very meaningful in the moment. I’m thinking most recently of a little bar and grill called the Yard Arm, which just closed its doors. My wife and I were there on the last day it was open for business- and my wife Kathy was there the very first day it opened 37 years earlier. So it felt tremendously meaningful to us – in fact, in some ways more meaningful to me than to her – to complete that circle. But what completing that circle actually meant or accomplished, I can’t really say. Maybe it was just a moment when we could think about a place that had meant a lot to us, the many special occasions we had celebrated there, and the way in which those places and opportunities that connect us with others are something to increasingly cherish as life goes on.
There have been other opportunities that still more substantial in the last year, such as my 40th high school reunion back in Atlantic, IA or the 50th anniversary of Good Shepherd Lutheran in Decorah as well as several very important and poignant funerals, including the funeral of our own Henrietta Welch. One of the most recent events was earlier this spring when I had the chance to return for the first time in a long time to my dad’s first parish, First Lutheran Church in the tiny town of Colton, South Dakota. The occasion was the funeral of my mom’s best friend, a vibrant and loving woman named Joyce Farr. It was Joyce more than anyone else who recognized my gift for music – and it was Joyce to taught me my very first vocal solos that I would sing for various church group meetings. I would have been 3 and a half or 4 years old at the time- and was so short that I would actually stand up on top of the piano bench, right next to Joyce, as she accompanied me. And there I would sing “Jesus Loves Me” or whatever the song might be.
I do not even know how to put into words how meaningful it was to be back at First Lutheran Church after so many years- to be asked to sing for Joyce’s funeral and to lift up my 59-year-old voice in that sanctuary where I had first sung the liturgy at the top of my 4-year-old lungs standing in those pews that are now very battered and worn. It was glorious to be back – and a profound privilege – and to top it all off, I was reunited with my very first piano teacher for the first time in more than a half century … a dream come true.
And yet, what turned out to be the greatest joy for me had really nothing to do with me – but with my father, who was also able to come back for the funeral and offer up a beautiful eulogy of Joyce’s life. But what I actually remember most vividly was afterwards at the reception when several different men- by now in their late 60’s or early 70’s- made a point of coming up to my dad to thank him for the powerful influence and inspiration that he had been for them back in the days as teenagers trying to find their way. Their life of faith which they have lived ever since was very much rooted in my father’s guidance and inspiration. On some level, he had always known that he had been an important influence on some of those young people, but only when each of them -one after another- took the time to walk up to him and thank him that he finally began to truly understand.
One of the things that made that such a powerful moment for me was that I didn’t even see it coming. And he didn’t see it coming. And it really underscored the fact that so much of our lives that we think we are wise enough to make sense of, we actually can’t. We don’t see our lives the way our Heavenly Father does. And it is our Heavenly Father, our Creator God, who is in a position to draw all of the circles closed, to tie up the loose ends, to bring us to ultimate completeness.
Maybe that’s what theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer meant when he said “there is meaning in every journey that is unknown to the traveler.”
I feel like this encounter in Colton, South Dakota was a potent reminder for me – and for my father – that is a lot about our journey on earth that we have not fully grasped or understood. It is a reminder that we often do not know ourselves the full meaning of our lives, the true importance of what we have done, or what kind of imprint we have left on others. And chances are that if we were too preoccupied by such matters, we probably wouldn’t leave much of an imprint or impression on others if we were too caught up on how much money we earned or how many trophies were on our shelves or other kinds of worldly honors, there probably would not be the time to love and care and connect the way that we have been called. Only long after the fact, and only by God’s grace, are we occasionally given a glimpse of what it means to have those circles closed and see the meaning of where our life of grace has brought us.
When I first learned that I was going to preach on the word “It is Finished,” I was pretty certain that all I would talk about was something rather melodramatic that occurred to me back on March 30th. There is at least one person in the room who was there to witness my first attempt at performing a monumental work for voice and piano called Die Winterreise, which means “Winter Journey” …. 24 art songs to be sung without interruption. That is what I attempted. Ultimately, I failed. At the start of the 23rd song- I made it that far!- I began to feel faint. I managed to make my way to one of the side pews, fully intending to sing the last two song seated. A few moments later, I fainted- and fell to the floor, out cold. It was a terrifying moment for everybody there, and especially for my voice students who were there, who feared that I had suffered a massive heart attack. Fortunately, it was a case of dehydration and protein deficiency – caused in large part by my carelessly skipping two meals that day- and the tests they did at the ER showed that everything was pretty much fine for a 59-year-old. But it was certainly scary moment.
The reason it felt like a story to share on the word “It is Finished” is that when I regained consciousness and the EMT’s were getting me up on the gurney to take me out to the waiting ambulance, I saw that most of the audience was still there – and just the sight of them helped me decide then and there that I did not want the last sound they heard from me to be the ‘thud’ as I hit the floor. So I asked the head EMT if it would be possible for me to sing the last song of the cycle before they took me away. As you can well imagine, he was not excited by the idea – at all – but I persisted. And there must have been something about my insistence as well as my pathetic state that softened his resolve, and he relented. And so, I sang the 24th and final song of the cycle from that gurney. Only well after the fact did the rich irony of the moment occur to me.
The song in question, “Der Leiermann,” with music by Schubert and poetry by Wilhelm Muller, is a very striking but incredibly bleak song. It depicts the sad scene of a lonely old man standing in the middle of a park on a very cold wintery day, playing his hurdy-gurdy – and absolutely no one is paying the least attention to him. No one is listening – and the little plate sitting beside him on which someone could place coins was completely empty. Only the dogs that nipped at his heels paid the slightest attention to him. Otherwise, he plays on and on and on – but is completely ignored. It’s a deeply moving and poignant song, and I very much wanted to sing it.
Only later did I realize that the real beauty of that moment was not about my grim determination to sing from a gurney – but rather that I was singing that song for people who loved me, were concerned for my well-being, and were listening to me as if nothing else was more important than the song I was singing. I was singing that song for – and because of – the people who loved me. And it makes me realize that this is what matters most… those connections … the people we love and who love us … and the difference that we have made in each other’s lives …. loving them with the love that we have first received from Christ.
[A moment in my father’s early ministry teaches the very same lesson. It was the summer of 1960, not long after I was born, when my father was 28 years old and had just begun working at First Lutheran in Colton- his first stint as a parish minister. Just a few weeks after his arrival, that congregation and the community beyond was rocked by the tragic news that a middle aged farmer had committed suicide, leaving behind him a heartbroken wife and children … and shocked and bewildered friends and neighbors. Almost 60 years later, my father still vividly remembers the dread that he felt as he made his way to the pulpit to deliver the sermon for that difficult funeral. What could he possibly say that could make sense of something so utterly senseless? But when he stepped into that pulpit and looked out at the congregation, he saw only love and concern on their faces – concern for him, for my dad, this young person, this brand new minister, thrust into such a crushing challenge. They were concerned for my dad- and in that moment, my dad realized that they were in this together, and that with the grace of God, they would find a way through this together.]*
That is what it’s all about. That is the circle that needs to be unbroken. That is what makes it all makes sense.
“When Jesus received the wine, He said ‘It is finished’ – and bowing His head, He gave up His spirit.”
I am no theologian, but my understanding is that the Greek word used in John’s gospel for ‘finished’ is Tetelestrai ….. a highly unusual word for the New Testament because it combines two different tenses in one word. (Apparently, tenses matter a lot in Greek.) This word not only means ‘it is finished’ in the moment …. right now. It actually means ‘it is finished and will continue to be finished.’ This is what God promises to us – not just the limited view of something finished that we can see with our earthly eyes… but a grander vision of finishing that goes on and on and on – for as long as we live and even beyond the end of our earthly life. That is the kind of completeness that we experience at the foot of Calvary’s Cross.
Amen.
*This is a story I intended to tell – but left it out because of time.