With Joy Unbounding on a Homeward Shore

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Romans 7:14-25

Here is the closing sermon from the gathering of Iowa Preachers Project last week, preached by my friend Ken Sundet Jones.

Grace to you and peace, my friends, from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

In the letter he sent to the believers in Rome, St. Paul provided this window into the degradation that sat festering in the depths of his being. This was no mere thorn in his flesh (which itself is nothing to discount). This was an opening of a grave that let the Romans (and us by extension) see into the exhumed corpse that his encounter with Christ on that road to Damascus prevented from quietly being buried. Wherever else Paul wandered in the diatribe on faith he was sending off to the empire’s center of power, death was the companion to his every word. Judgment had been laid on him with the words, “Saul, why are you persecuting me?” He couldn’t escape the truth of it: “There’s a power riding me like an ass, keeping me from the good and yanking me into the bad. Who will rescue me from this body of death? Won’t somebody please grab the reins and give me some relief?”

Paul’s frank self-assessment provided a memento mori moment, a stark weather report of the Romans’ own current conditions that made the gospel forecast all the sweeter. The phrase memento mori, which most simply translated means “remember death,” has had a centuries-long presence in the church’s witness. Mostly it was a goad, a dire warning to get your poop in a group morally and spiritually to avoid eternity in hell.

These past few months the idea of memento mori has kept cropping up for me in politics, in theater, in movies, and in music. Last spring, when Ryan and his wife Amanda and I were in New York for Mockingbird’s conference at Calvary-St. George’s Church (that’s John’s congregation), we saw the musical Dead Outlaw. It was my first memento mori moment. In the show, the outlaw Elmer McCurdy, who is damaged by family trauma, lives a dissolute life. At the end of Act 1, a posse chasing him after a botched 1911 train robbery guns him down. The second act is set up when no one claims Elmer’s body. A mortician fills it with a strong preservative to keep it until his family fetches it. Eventually it becomes a curiosity. Elmer’s body is sold to a carnival that puts it in an open coffin, stands the thing on end, and charges admission to their freak show. People stand in line to see the dead outlaw.

Well before Elmer’s demise and subsequent ignominy, the show’s narrator lets us in on the truth of the outlaw’s existence when he sings,

You’re dead / Your mama’s dead! / Your daddy’s dead! / Your brother’s dead! / And so are you! Abe Lincoln’s dead! / Frank James, dead! / Your mama’s dead! / And so are you, and so are you, woo!

While Elmer McCurdy wanted to live, to claim his space, to be seen, the truth of the matter is that all he ever did was run from death, denying its hold on him, and hoping for normal. It was an endless, ongoing death, ever being watched but never seeing his true tormentor, death, like in Ryan’s sermon last night.

Of course, we in the church have known the lingering sticky nature of death as long as we’ve known memento mori. The Gregorian chant Media vita in morte sumus (In the midst of life we are in death) was sung in times of trouble, and Martin Luther did a German translation. It was justly seen as providing hope in desperate times: “In the midst of life we are in death / of whom may we seek for succour, / but of thee, O Lord, / who for our sins / art justly displeased? / Holy god, / Holy mighty, / Holy and merciful Saviour, / deliver us not into bitter death.” Ernest Becker knew something about this when he published his groundbreaking and Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Denial of Death, where he asserted that the primary motivator for human action is our fear of death and our desire to eliminate its threat. Mine and Hans’s beloved professor Gerhard O. Forde saw Becker’s work as a secular explanation of what he knew of the church’s teaching on sin, original and otherwise. So, like Elmer McCurdy, the very act of running from death entwines us in it. The memento mori serves to stop us in our tracks and bids us to breathe and use those stunning powers of human ratiocination. Think. Observe. Connect the dots: You and death? Who’s zoomin’ who?

The second memento mori of my summer was the movie 28 Years Later. It’s the second sequel to 28 Days Later, in which a virus spreads across Great Britain and turns people into raging, violent zombies. It’s a milestone zombie movie, because in this one the living dead don’t lumber and stumble. They run and race after you with unquenchable energy.

True to its title, the new movie follows previous events by 28 years. In it young Spike lives offshore with his father and ailing mother in a village on the island of Lindisfarne that is protected by a causeway accessible only at low tide. Spike, who has been on his first mainland zombie hunt with his father also contends with a deeply disturbed and dwindling mother. He has heard of a doctor on the mainland, and he determines his mom’s only hope is the cure this rare physician might offer. He takes his mother by the hand and finally finds the mysterious doctor amidst an enormous monument of calcium. Like the main character in Warren Zevon’s song Excitable Boy, who “dug up the grave” of a girl he stalked “and built a cage with her bones,” the doctor has boiled the flesh of every dead infected person he’s found and built thirty-foot columns of femurs and phalanges, and a towering pile of human skulls. He tells Spike he calls it “Memento mori.” The bones give a lurid message: “Deny not the truth. Here you be. Your eye sockets will look out and see but not see. Your fibulas will adorn a post like a direction sign on M*A*S*H, pointing not to home but to the nowhere of nihilism.

The need to be reminded of death is also at stake in Warren Zanes’ book Deliver Me from Nowhere, which is about to be released as a movie and recounts Bruce Springsteen’s inner turmoil following long-sought success with the E-Street Band. Springsteen’s childhood life was as a shuttlecock batted between his cruel and rigid father and his grandmother who doted on him as a replacement for her own daughter killed by a vehicle while blithely riding her bike in the neighborhood. Springsteen, the urgent rocker has an inner coil wound tight and a way of substituting a raucous three-hour show and screaming fans for actual relationships. Now after the success of his album The River and a top-ten single with “Hungry Heart,” the Bruuuuuce of the crowds’ screams becomes a solitary Bruce hunkered down in an orange shag-carpeted back bedroom of a New Jersey ranch house. He acquires a four-track recording machine and proceeds to write.

What comes of it is not what was expected, the massive hit of Born in the USA with its seven singles and his well-formed posteriori on the cover. No, what happened in that back bedroom with home recording equipment was a burst of songs about the underbelly of American life, a sort of litany to the death of the American dream. The album Nebraska is bleak stuff, stark as anything, and not just because it opens with the title song about the real-life Charles Starkweather who killed his way across a swath of the Great Plains in the 1950s with a 14-year-old baton-twirling girl as his accomplice. The song cycle completely refuses to romanticize what is American under Reagan’s tricked-down economics. And in it Springsteen connects to the death inside him, the hopelessness, the lonely inner being that put the lie to the doting fans, it all comes tumbling out as a backward confession of his inability to do the good he wanted.

Soon after recording what he thought were demos but that were released as-is, Springsteen drove across the country with a friend in a 70s muscle car, landed in a new house by himself in the Hollywood Hills and promptly fell apart. He encountered the noonday demon that those of us who’ve lived through a major depressive episode can tell you is a living death. Nebraska, the book about its making, and now the movie are the subtlest memento mori. It declares relentlessly that the surface you see is not the true story.

My last memento mori has no subtlety whatsoever. After the so-called “big beautiful bill,” my senator Joni Ernst experienced the wrath of voters in a town hall who pointed out the deaths they said would come with the bill’s cuts to Medicaid. Her now notorious response was, “Well, we all are going to die.” Kind of a mic-drop memento mori moment with no awareness of how it was heard. Suffice it to say that Senator Ernst chose not to run for reelection.

What are we to make of mementos mori? From St. Paul to Joni Ernst, the reminder is always a challenge to the modern creed that the end, the telos, of life is life itself. And if that’s what life’s about, then you’d better get busy with your scramble to grab more of it. But Paul’s stark confession, the dead outlaw, the monument of bones, and the stark weather of America in Nebraska all bring us to the verge of the grave

The most important question is Paul’s howl of dereliction, “Who will save me from this body of death?” The question indicates this truth: Every sermon is a funeral sermon. Every sermon looks into the grave. Every sermon stands facing west but yearning for the sun to rise in the east. Unlike the other mementos mori, Paul knows the grave and doesn’t leave you in the wallow of failure, fallibility, depression and death. He gives you the answer that he goes on to play in Romans with the same polyphonic virtuosity as J.S. Bach. The answer is the sovereign God, the being who plays the ultimate infinite game, who pours himself out into a body to play a finite game for end-of-the-rope people, for sad cases and human dumpster fires, for Greek and Jew, and of course for you, O preachers, who open your own maws with Whitman’s “Yawp!” while living your solitary lives in the gut-rending contradiction of saint and sinner.

As we send you on your way, what Paul gives is the only thing that will suffice: to call on God to keep providing you with a fleece, to wrap you in Christ the lamb of God, to have him be the sacrifice, a burnt offering on a cairn next to the one you’ve erected of your own accomplishments and abilities that will all come to naught. When Springsteen’s murderer in “Nebraska” is asked why he’d done what he’d done, he answers, “Well, sir, I guess there’s just a meanness in this world.” True that, but Paul declares to you that there’s more. He knows he’s under the power of sin, but he insists for you, here today, and more important, back home, the greater power of him crucified and risen, Mary’s boy and Pilate’s victim (to use Jason’s beloved construction). He already has everything under his feet and is using your fleeting days and your ephemeral pulpiteering, your flaws and foibles to make his kingdom.

And so we bless you. We lay hands on you who know the depths of your own sin and need no memento mori. Instead we depart with a first-order promise that gives what it declares: you, yes you, are called and claimed and made into the speechifying presence of God. I hear that where God is, God is wholly there. Open your maws, let loose with more than a mere yawp of wisdom or advice. Instead sing the song of Christ’s self. Be blessed. Be confident. For you, O mortals, are made holy to do this work. The Word will not return empty, but will replace the bleak, the hopeless, the stark, and the Starkweather, with joy unbounding on a homeward shore. Amen.

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