I’ve been looking at a painting by Norman Rockwell which was featured on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post, September 25, 1954. It is titled Breaking Home Ties. It shows a fresh faced, expectant young man waiting for the train to take him to college. He has on a new suit. His tie and socks match. He is only slightly hesitant – mostly he is a young man ready to take on the world. He is sitting on the running-board of what seems to be an old Model A truck with two others – his dad and his dog. While he looks eagerly down the tracks for the train, they have their eyes averted. He seems bigger than they are, clearly too big for the nest. They are both trying to hold on – boxing him in, leaning in to him. The Dad is holding the boy’s hat. The collie has rested his head on the boy’s knee. Mother is present in the neatly tied bag lunch the boy cradles in his lap. As usual, Rockwell has captured it all in a single frame and three faces.

The boy’s face I know, I remember it. The dog’s I know, it is mine now – the face of not knowing really what is about to happen other than that the world is about to change. That dad’s face, though, that I don’t know yet. But I will. He is a farmer, and he’s dressed for work, and though he is clearly intending to go back to work when the train leaves, that face reveals that his mind won’t be on his work for a long, long time. It is a face bracing for a loss that can not be expressed by a farmer, or even a poet.

God knows that face, the Bible says so. God IS that father in Luke 16, who looks down the road, waiting for the day his son will come home from the far country. His great delight (Isaiah 43.5-7) will be when he says to the North, the South, the East and the West: Bring my sons from afar, and my daughters from the ends of the earth. In fact, children-coming- home is a recurrent theme in Isaiah. Jesus says that the entire death-burial-resurrection event happens so that he can bring us home to the Father’s house “that where I am, there you may be also” (John 14.1-3). God knows that face, but with God things are different. With God, children can come home, and it can be like it was before they left. There is no being too big for God’s nest, no growing out of our need for Him – His provision, His protection, His parenting.

We are Tevye waiting for the train to take Hodel to Siberia, knowing that our only recourse is to “leave it in His hands.”

God has those hands. They are held out to us, always. We can make home ties with Him that need never be altered or broken.

A few years ago I had gone to this place where I volunteer as a pastoral counselor and they asked me to talk to the new kid who had come in. He was as inked, pierced and Goth as any kid I’d ever seen. They told me he claimed to be wiccan and a Satanist. He sat there trying to look as menacing as his frail, five foot frame would allow him to be. After I said hello, and heard his little boy’s voice, any threat of his being menacing evaporated. I knew in an instant what an hour’s conversation would confirm – he was a scared little guy from a broken home, who had been terribly bullied, probably abused, and was trying to find some source of power in order to feel safe. The worst thing I could be was shocked, and the second worst thing I could be was amused. I had to take him on his own terms. He told me he was wiccan and a Satanist. I replied that I had talked to enough wiccans to know that they hate being called Satanists, and that I doubted he could be both at the same time. He said that he had been wiccan and that now he was a Satanist. I asked if he belonged to any particular Satanic church, and he said no, he had been practicing on his own. I asked what he did to practice Satanism. He became really animated as he replied: “I try to connect with the dead in order to control their powers of darkness. I want to use that power to gain a cloak of invisibility, to control minds, and to time travel.” And so I asked, “Are you having any success with that?”

Maybe you think that was a sucker punch, but I wanted him to know that although I took him seriously, I seriously rejected his choice of faiths. Although we stayed friendly, and I still pray for him, I don’t think I helped him much. There is stuff I don’t know about, perhaps no one does, and until he is in a safe place he’ll be the kid he is now.

If he had been truly menacing he would have looked me square in the eye and say: “And your Christianity, being more like Jesus, are you having any success with that?”

What would I have said? “Not Much”? By one way of reckoning that would be an accurate answer. Being good seems to get harder as I get older, and those words of Paul, The good that I would do I don’t do, but the evil I don’t want to do is the very thing I do (Romans 7.19) seem increasingly spot on. The apostle Paul says this, not during those days of his blindness and repentance in Damascus, but years later, after missionary journeys had been taken, and epistles had been written. He would also write: It is a trustworthy statement that Christ came into the world to save sinners and I am the worst of all (I Timothy 1.15). Notice he says am the worst, not was the worst. He didn’t ever get beyond the daily struggle with sin.

Nor did he get beyond the reach of God’s grace. For this reason I found mercy, in order that in me, as the worst, Jesus Christ might demonstrate his perfect patience, as an example for those who would believe in Him for eternal life (I Timothy 1.16).

Nor do I. There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus (Romans 8.1).

Where sin increases grace abounds all the more (Romans 5.20). The measure of Christian success is salvation. Salvation is by grace alone. Grace given to the repentant Christian is immediate and absolute (I John 2.1-3). And so any of us born-of-blood children, flawed but holding on tight to Jesus, can confidently answer:

From the most ancient times people on every continent have tried to stay connected with their dead through burial rituals, and placing personal items in burial sites. Over the years I’ve often seen us do the same, seen someone place a watch, a book, a rose, a photo, a note beside a loved one, in a pocket, into the hands of their departed as a token of goodbye. I have done it myself.

 The Whitlelight Casket Company of Dallas, Texas has introduced a new line of merchandise called “art caskets” that allow consumers to “express their personality for all eternity,” in caskets “as unforgettable as the lives they commemorate.” The most popular is a casket whose satin interior is designed to look like the eighteenth green. Other popular models include: “The Beach,” “New York Skyline,” and “The Flag of Ireland.”

My favorite was a flashy, 1950’s model with as much chrome as a 1957 Bel Air. It features a portrait of Elvis, a large postage stamp, and the words “Return to Sender” painted across the lid. Now that’s an “art” casket.

Of course, people with the resources to do so have always sought to immortalize themselves with panache. The oldest and only surviving of the 7 wonders of the ancient world, the Pyramid of Cheops, is just such an endeavor. The most beautiful edifice I (or anyone else) has ever seen, the Taj Mahal, is another. The Taj Mahal is different in that Sha Jahan built it to commemorate his beloved wife, not himself. He was so devoted to his wife, Mumtaz, that he would not be parted from her, even in battle. When she died young, in childbirth, he spent the rest of his life and all his resources trying to hold onto her by building perhaps the most beautiful thing humans have created.

This is a more universal impulse than building a pyramid, or being buried with Elvis. From the most ancient times people on every continent have tried to stay connected with their dead through burial rituals, and placing personal items in burial sites. Over the years I’ve often seen us do the same, seen someone place a watch, a book, a rose, a photo, a note beside a loved one, in a pocket, into the hands of their departed as a token of goodbye. I have done it myself.

Not that we believe these items will actually be used, or even needed. We just need a way to stay connected. We feel better having something tangible and symbolic with the one we have lost. We seem to need these gestures more and more - especially when the loss is a national tragedy. We seem to spontaneously erect memorials: at a chain-link fence in Oklahoma City, in a parking lot in Littleton, Colorado, at ground zero in New York.

When Jesus died, those who loved and believed in him were crushed beyond all imagination. They were not allowed to have a memorial service, place special items at his tomb, meditate at his grave-sight or even finish embalming him. They could not because he did not stay dead. His tomb is empty. He is risen. There is no ground zero for us to visit - no geographical place where we know is remains are kept.

There is a way we connect with that death. We do not watch him die, but die with him. We do not place a token of ourselves in the tomb with him, but our very selves. We do not behold, in awe, the sunburst of his resurrection, but raise with him. That happens when we are baptized.

We have been buried with him through baptism into death, in order that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the father, so we too might walk in newness of life. Romans 6.4

Baptism. This is how we connect, and stay connected to the risen Lord.

He realizes how fragile his predicament is, there at the end of a very thin line, more than a quarter of a mile below the surface of the Atlantic. The slightest crack in the fused quartz window and the great pressure of that depth would shoot water drops through him like bullets. He writes that the realization the portal was bearing a pressure of 650 lbs per square inch caused him to “breathe a little more gently in front of my window and wipe the glass with a softer touch.”

I had to call upon all my imagination to realize that instant, unthinkably instant, death would result from the least fracture of glass or collapse of metal. There was no possible chance of being drowned, for the first few drops would have shot through flesh and bone like steel bullets. William Beebe, from Adventuring with Beebe, p.81.

 

I’ve been reading a collection of nature writing by William Beebe, who, at the beginning of the last century documented many of the remaining unexplored habitats on the planet. He pioneered the use of the bathysphere, and in the quote above describes a thought that occurred to him at the ocean depth of 1426 feet, then a record. He realizes how fragile his predicament is, there at the end of a very thin line, more than a quarter of a mile below the surface of the Atlantic. The slightest crack in the fused quartz window and the great pressure of that depth would shoot water drops through him like bullets. He writes that the realization the portal was bearing a pressure of 650 lbs per square inch caused him to “breathe a little more gently in front of my window and wipe the glass with a softer touch.”

Curiously, he was reminded of the fragility of his own life by observing the resilience of another. Out his window he saw a jelly fish swim by. Held in the hand, above the surface of the water, a jellyfish is what its name says it is – jelly. But here, at this depth it survives pressures that would easily crush a human. This is the paradox life presents. Life is resilient and life is fragile. Life is God’s creation, God’s gift – and so life finds a way. The world in which humans and jelly fish live is the world humans have been mismanaging for millennia, a world affected by the death humans introduced – and so life is fragile.

One doesn’t have to be dangling at the end of line at the bottom of Mariana’s Trench to know life is fragile. The morning paper, the evening news, or a trip to the emergency room of any hospital would suffice. Each of those sources daily provides reminders that life is resilient as well. For every story of a life taken abruptly by a drunk driver there is another of an elderly person or a newborn surviving against unbelievable odds. Life can be fragile. Life can be resilient. Life is uncertain.

Love, however, is certain.

Last week as I was leaving the house to come to work, I was stopped in my tracks by a large garden spider who had constructed her web right across my front steps. It was an architectural marvel, and I hated to break it, but I had to get to work. I removed her to the grassy common area, and broke the web away. Later I found one of the anchor threads on the knee of my pants. It was nearly impossible to remove, and when removed was surprisingly strong. This reminded me of Johnathan Edward’s sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” He concludes with the image of God dangling the sinner over the pit of hell like a spider on the end of a thread. I wondered at that, because Edwards was a great student of the Word, and of spiders, spending hours studying both.

Spider’s web line is not an example of weakness but of strength. God’s feeling for sinners isn’t gleeful and cruel (“What pleasure do I take in the death of the wicked rather than that he should repent and live” Ezekiel 18.23). Love is not fragile; it is the greatest of the three eternal things (I Corinthians 13.13). It is a thread strong, and robust. God’s love defies every challenge. It is the cord that can not be broken.

 

For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any created thing shall be able to separate us from the Love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. Romans 8.38-39.