Some things you don’t really know about until you’ve experienced them.
I’ve heard priests talk about the toll a string of funerals takes on them and their parishes. Each time one walks through the valley of the shadow of death, a little more darkness remains. If those who die are long-time parishioners, it is not just family members who grieve, but everyone who has walked with that person through decades of joy and sorrow. Even a new priest can’t fail to sense the sadness that settles over everyone.
So far I’ve had one funeral a month this year, and the pace doesn’t show much sign of slacking. Oddly, the last rector had a string of funerals his first year – people who hang on until there’s a pastor in place to shepherd them to the next life? I don’t know. Only one of the three so far could have been predicted, although another is the denouement of a long struggle with cancer.
“Those who sowed with tears will reap with songs of joy.” I first encountered this psalm verse in the motet by Johann Hermann Schein, "Die mit Tränen saen", a piece near and dear to my heart. Only later did I realize that Johannes Brahms had also set it in Ein deutsches Requiem, a work my mother wanted sung at her funeral. (It wasn’t.) It’s an incredible promise God makes, that tears will be turned into joy.
“Restore our fortunes, O Lord, like the watercourses of the Negev.” Give us something to drink instead of bowls of tears. And the Lord says, “I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert… I give water in the wilderness, rivers in the desert, to give drink to my chosen people whom I formed for myself so that they might declare my praise.” In the darkness of grief, it can be especially hard to see that we are created to praise God.
To praise God, but also to rise with Christ. As Jesus approaches his last Passover, he has dinner with his friend Lazarus, whom he had earlier brought back from the dead. Lazarus did not experience the true resurrection; that was yet to come. When Mary anoints Jesus and he speaks of his own death, that promise of new life lingers in the background. Like Mary, Lazarus, and Paul, we who are walking through the wilderness want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection, forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead. What does lie ahead, in less than three weeks, is the day when we can once again say Christ is risen! I can hardly wait.
Lent 5: Isaiah 43:16-21; Psalm 126; Philippians 3:4b-14; John 12:1-8.
Monday, March 15, 2010
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I share your love for the Schein motet. I have never sung or conducted it, but there is a copy in my files. I would like to say "Someday," but it is pretty unlikely that I will be in a situation where it would be possible.
For faithfulness in this clerical duty, I commend to you the example of Martin Rinckart (1586-1649), Pastor of Eilenburg. His city was a place where many refugees came during the Thirty Years' War, and in the midst of serving these people and their many needs he wrote Nun danket alle Gott sometime around 1630 for his family to sing as a table grace.
Things got much worse, with famine and pestilence from the overcrowding. By 1637 at the height of the pestilence, all of the other clergy had died or fled from the city, leaving Rinckart alone. He conducted the burial office for as many as forty or fifty people per day, including his wife, refusing to allow the people to simply be buried in trenches without ceremony.
Rinckart was born the same year as Schein and both were active in Leipzig, though their times did not quite overlap; Rinckart was a boy chorister at the Thomaskirche and later the cantor of the Nikolaikirche, but took up his pastorate at Eilenburg in 1611. Schein became the Thomaskantor in 1616. Still, I suppose it is not beyond all bounds of possibility that Rinckart might have heard Schein's motet. Certainly he was familiar with the best in sacred music of his day. I suspect that memories of these things helped him through the dark days.
"O may this bounteous God
through all our life be near us!
with ever-joyful hearts
and blessed peace to cheer us;
and keep us in his grace,
and guide us when perplexed,
and free us from all ills
in this world and the next."
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