11/4/18 “An All Saints Liturgy” by Nancy Petty
Text: John 11:32-45
Death is real and heart rendering. No story of resuscitation or resurrection of the dead, from the bible or any other great piece of literature, should romanticize or simplify that truth. Death is not easy. It is sorrowful and painful. It is lonely and has a sting to it that is persistent and unending. And on this day, All Saints Sunday, when our liturgy invites us to read aloud the names of our loved ones who have died, we should not sentimentalize any facet of the claim that death has over us. Our hearts break and continue to break when someone we love dies. We need to be honest about that—death leaves us broken hearted.
If we needed a reminder of this truth, there is no better one than the story of Lazarus’ death. I know what you are thinking. You are saying to yourself, “Does she remember the story of Lazarus? Lazarus’ story has a happy ending. He doesn’t stay dead. He is raised from the dead. And that’s not our reality of death. Our loved ones don’t get raised from the dead.” And you would be right in thinking all of that. But before this is a story of being raised from the dead, it is a story of the heartrending, heart-breaking reality of death.
You can hear the pain and confusion and sting of death in the dialogue in John 11. Through her tears and exhaustion, Mary the sister of the deceased, falls at Jesus’ feet and cries what many of us have wanted to cry out, “If only you had been here, he wouldn’t have died.” If only…if only…if only! In the face of death, who hasn’t wished for something, someone, somebody, anybody to stop death from happening. But Mary is not the only one whose heart is breaking. Jesus, seeing the pain of Mary and feeling his own loss at the death of his friend, we are told, begins to weep. And in his weeping, the story says he was “greatly disturbed in spirit” and “deeply moved.”
Ginger Barfield, a former colleague of mine and who teaches New Testament and Greek writes of this passage: “For the integrity of the Greek verbs and the reality of the wounds of death, this translation [greatly disturbed and deeply moved] is too weak. The first verb has a connection to anger. It is not simply a strong feeling, but it is more of a passion and pain that comes from anger at the situation. The root of the second verb is tied to a stirring up of oneself on the insides. It can be used in a physical sense for stirring up water, disturbing the calmness of the still water. In a more personal sense, it signifies both mental and internal disturbance that is akin to almost being physically sickened and disturbed. Then in the shortest verse of the Bible, verse 35, Jesus weeps. Jesus has the same reaction that the mourners do — he weeps real tears. Jesus was angry and groaning deeply in his spirit and he was stirred up in his mind, heart, and body by Lazarus’ death. He cried aloud. [And Barfield concludes] Even the incarnate God is broken in his heart and soul by the death of his friend Lazarus. Death grieves God. So also, does death break our hearts and stir up our souls.”
On Friday, I thought of these words that described Jesus’ response to death—“greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved.” Just two days ago, with other Pullenites and with this John passage on my mind, I visited The National Memorial for Peace and Justice—a memorial to those who died at the hands of white supremacy in America. The some 4,000 men, women, and children who were lynched in our country, many of them, for no other reason than the fact that their skin was dark.
“At the center [of the memorial] is a grim cloister, a walkway with 800 weathered steel columns, all hanging from a roof. Etched on each column is the name of an American county and the people who were lynched there, most listed by name, many simply as ‘unknown.’ The columns meet you first at eye level, like the headstones that lynching victims were rarely given. But as you walk, the floor steadily descends; by the end, the columns are all dangling above, leaving you in the position of the callous spectators in old photographs of public lynchings.”
My eyes followed the winding spiral of North Carolina counties reading the names of those lynched. Vance County: Bessie Perry 03.12.1915, Josephine Perry 03.12.1915; Union County: Edmund Davis 10.17.1881, Lee Staton 03.04.1885, John Osborne 07.03.1903; Stokes County: Estes Hairston 06.20.1881, John Lindsey 06.20.1881; Scotland County: Duncan Mc:Phatter 11.17.1892; Rutherford County: Avery Allen 08.20.1906; Iredell County: Julius Davidson 12.21.1878, Charles Campbell 10.16.1883, George Johnson 09.06.1884; Haywood County: George Ratcliff 03.05.1900; Halifax County: Manna Ponton 08.20.1903; Guilford County: Eugene Hairston 08.25.1887; Granville County: John Brodie 12.01.1881, Shadrack Hester 12.01.1881, Alonzo Smith 09.02.1888, Henry Tanner 09.02.1888, John Tanner 09.02.1888, William Burnett 11.15.1892; Gaston County: Erwin McCullough 04.01.1884, John Sigmund 09.06.1889, Robert Melker 04.13.1941; Franklin County: Walter Tyler 08.20.1919, Powell Green 12.27.1919,Govan Ward 07.30.1935; Davidson County: Alfred Long 06.06.1886; Cleveland County: John Carson 12.02.1888; Wake County: George Taylor 11.05.1918.
More than 100 African-Americans were lynched in North Carolina from 1877 to 1950. Men, women, children hung for crimes such as “carrying a photograph of a white woman.”
Jesus’ words rang in my ears as I studied those 800 weathered steel columns etched with names of people who someone loved—somebody’s mama, somebody’s daddy, somebody’s sister and brother, uncle, aunt, grandma, cousin, friend. Greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved felt too weak as I learned more of the truth about the history of the brutal death’s African-Americans endured at the hands of white supremacy, here in this country, the land of the free. I stood among those 800 columns thinking, “How did I not know? Why have I not wept before now? Why has my spirit not been disturbed and deeply moved and angered before now at these deaths.”
Sarah Bowen, another Pullenite on the trip, answered that question in a blog she wrote Friday evening after our visit to the memorial. Sarah writes:
I grew up 30 miles from Gettysburg. I camped near Gettysburg with Girl Scouts and went to the battlefield with my parents. We were taught that the good side had won, of course, because we lived in the North. But we spent a lot of time covering the Civil War in the 8th grade, and our teacher told us that it was about state’s rights, not slavery. We didn’t question it.
In high school, I went to Atlanta for a big youth meeting with my Lutheran church. We did not go see Martin Luther King’s home or the church where he grew up (and later pastored with his father). We did go to the Coke museum.
In college, I had a summer internship in Huntsville, Alabama. We took a few weekend trips while we were there. We went to Ruby Falls, an underground waterfall in Tennessee. (This is the first and last cave I ever visited—it turns out that I’m not a cave person.) We went to Atlanta for the weekend and walked around in the Olympic village. We did not go to Montgomery, Selma, or Birmingham, all major sites in the Civil Rights Movement. We never even considered it.
I am deeply ashamed about all of this. In school, I learned almost nothing about slavery, the Jim Crow era, or the Civil Rights movement (and the backlash against it). We went to the Holocaust museum in high school, and I am glad that we did, but I wish we would have also talked about the atrocities taking place in our own country.
I am 55 years old, and like Sarah, I didn’t know to grieve the unjust deaths of some 4,000 innocent people who were lynched in this country some for no other crime than that their skin was dark. I didn’t know that my home county, Cleveland County, lynched John Carson in December of 1888. No monument stands in the city square in downtown Shelby memorializing or remembering his life and acknowledging the horrific injustice done to him.
So today, on All Saints Day, I call his name and date of death—John Carson 12.02.1888—and I pray that my spirit may be greatly disturbed and that my soul may be deeply moved with anger to stir the still existing calm waters of white supremacy here in America. Today, on this All Saints Day, I call the name of George Taylor who was lynched here in Wake County on 11.05.1918. In November of 1918, Pullen Memorial Baptist Church was preparing to celebrate its 34th year as a church committed to social justice. I have wondered in these last 24 hours what, if any, response did our church have to the death by lynching of George Taylor.
Our liturgy on this All Saints Sunday must include a confession of America’s white supremacy that is responsible for the lynchings of some 4,000 women, men, and children who, in most cases, died because of the color of their skin. Our liturgy on this All Saints Sunday must greatly disturb our spirits and deeply move our souls to acknowledge the new forms of lynching that are still being done to African-American women, men, and children. Our liturgy on this All Saints Sunday must move us to weep not only for the deaths of our loved ones, but for the deaths of countless unnamed black, transgendered, LGBTQIA, and “othered” sisters and brothers, mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers, uncles and aunts who have died at the hands of racism, bigotry, and prejudice.
Death is real. No story should ever seek to sentimentalize or simplify that truth. The only comfort we find in this truth is found in the story of Lazarus: that even the incarnate God is broken in his heart and soul at the death of each child of God. At the lynching tree, at the hospice house, in the middle of the street and in synagogues and mosques, and by the bedside of our dear loved ones, God is there weeping with us. And this is why, in all my doubts about God and religion and faith, I keep choosing to be a witness for God’s love and grace.
