Life’s Given Bookends: First, a Cradle; Finally, the Casket!
Merlin’s Intro: I have been blessed recently not only having ready access to the past years KMC Sunday AM services, but also other significant events, such as recent funerals, indeed, celebrations of these final transitions. I found listening to them Exquisitely Enlightening, Encouraging, Evidentially Elevating my spirit…
At any rate, Eugene Peterson’s book, Run With The Horses, is a favorite of mine and in the updated version since Eugene’s death in 2018, it now includes his son Eric’s Commemorative Preface: A Homily for the Celebration of the Resurrection of Eugene Peterson Nov 3, 2018, in the First Presbyterian Church in Kalispell, MT. Eric’s words below were a highlight for me having only found them the Thursday before Good Friday. Eric’s words resonate deeply within me! Enjoy! No doubt our friend Eugene invested well!
Praise God from whom all blessings flow.
I’ve been thinking a lot about containers these days.
It brought to mind an ancient proverb that tells the story of a young girl whose morning chore it was to walk to the river and fetch water for her household. Suspended from a pole across her shoulders were two water pots that supplied her family’s daily needs. One of the pots was perfect, but the other one was cracked, and by the time they made the return trip home each day, the second pot was only half full.
After some time, the little cracked pot, ashamed that she wasn’t able to function at full capacity, expressed her embarrassment and sense of failure to the girl.
“Why do you keep using me when all I do is leak?” she asked. “Why don’t you replace me with a new pot?”
Smiling, the girl gently responded, “Have you seen the beautiful flowers that grow along the path between the house and the river? And have you noticed that they only grow on your side of the path as we walk home together? That’s because every spring I plant seeds on only your side, knowing that you will water them as we walk home together. I’ve been picking those flowers for years and filling our home with fragrance and beauty. I couldn’t do it without you. What you thought was a flaw is actually a gift to us all.”
In ways that continue to astound me, God consistently chooses to accomplish divine purposes through the agency of human imperfection. Through the weaknesses and shortcomings of the clay pots—which are our lives—uncommonly beautiful things emerge.
Praise God from whom all blessings flow.
The message of God’s love, this magnificent story of creation, salvation, and liberation, has been entrusted to the unadorned clay pots of our ordinary lives (II Cor. 4). In other words, the container of good news is the broken body of Christ. We’re a bunch of crack pots. We leak. This is by design. So that the blessings might flow.
One of the most important things Eugene taught us is that everything about the life of faith is livable. If you can’t translate an idea into an experience, it’s not gospel. Abstractions are enemies of the Way of Truth and Life (Key, & so true! mle).
Which is why I’m so very grateful to have grown up with a man whose life was so well integrated and congruent, such that the dad who served up mashed potatoes on Saturday night was the very same pastor who served up the word of God on Sunday morning. He was someone who embodied the message he proclaimed. His body was a sacred temple. A habitation for the holy. A container of the Spirit of God.
I know this to be true because the evidence is irrefutable, inasmuch as he manifested the fruits of the Spirit.
He was a container for love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.
He was a flawed and cracked container of these gifts, never hoarding, always leaking. What a holy vessel he was. Praise God from whom all blessings flow.
Moreover, I think of his many books as durable containers of the words he wrote for us. Inspired words full of truth and grace. Words that we will treasure for many years.
But for right now I wish to draw your attention to two particular containers that are here. They are common enough as containers go. What is unusual is that they are in the same room at the same time.
A cradle. And a casket.
The one is a container of life. The other is a container of death.
One is open to the world; the other, closed, having finished this world.
The one holds promise and hope and future. Anticipation. The other holds completion: it is finished.
The one represents a glorious beginning; the other, a glorious end.
A cradle and a casket: these are the containers that bookend our lives.
When Eugene delivered this cradle, freshly crafted from his basement workshop in Maryland to New Jersey, where his first grandchild was born, I exclaimed to him how beautiful it was. As we were carrying it into the apartment together he confessed that it had a flaw, and he had to shim it. I knew all about shims because he had taught me, at an early age, about them. “Every carpenter,” he said, “needs to know how to use shims.”
I have scrutinized this cradle over the years, and I still can’t find the flaw. He wasn’t just a master word-worker; he was a master woodworker.
And among the things he left us, in the craft of words and wood, is this exquisite piece of work that our family will treasure for generations. Many of Eugene’s grandchildren and grandnephews and grandnieces were held in this little container, and their names are all inscribed inside.
This all came back to mind as I was building his casket a couple of weeks ago. The miter joints weren’t lining up exactly right, and I had to use some shims to tighten them up. I had never built a casket before, and so I set out doing what many of us have learned to do: I went to YouTube. And in the process, I came across a coffin maker named Marcus Daly, who doesn’t just build wooden boxes but contemplates the human condition. I very much like the way he reflects on his work. Here is what he says:
“I think one of the most important aspects of the coffin is that it can be carried. And I think we’re meant to carry each other. And I think carrying someone you love, committing them, is very important for us when we deal with death. We want to know that we have played a part and that we have shouldered our burden. So, if we make it too convenient, then we’re depriving ourselves of a chance to get stronger so that we can carry on.“
At various points in their lives, Eugene carried six of his grandchildren, both physically and emotionally. He was a strong, steadying presence in their lives, as he was for so many of us. He carried them up mountains. He carried them through school. He carried them through heartache.
Today those six grandchildren carry him. And at the end of the day they will be stronger for it. Today, the rest of us watch while the heavy lifting is accomplished through their fierce love, as they carry him to his final resting place. But if we’ve been paying attention, we will also know that as Eugene has been wielding the words of his craft over the years, we too have become more fit, strengthened, readied for citizenship in the kingdom of God.
This casket-container is now holding the body-container that was Eugene Peterson. I say was, because by the mystery of the resurrection, to which the baptized are heirs, his body has been exchanged for something much, much more durable. Perishability, as St. Paul once famously said it, has taken on imperishability. Mortality has been swapped for immortality. The temporary traded for the eternal.
Now, it’s the casket and the cradle!
But these are just temporary containers. Pretty much like everything is. There is only one thing that isn’t.
We don’t know much about what heaven is like. The preferred biblical metaphor is that of a city, suggesting that it is inhabitable. It’s populated. But the particularities that St. John describes make it clear that it is unlike any city we’ve known on earth. For starters, it is a city without limits, unconstrained by zip codes or boundary lines, unencumbered by fences, not obstructed by walls. In other words, it’s a container for the hosts of heaven without being confining. It is a place or—perhaps better said—it’s a reality in which the limitations of our present mortality give way to the full expressions of that which we now know only in part—namely, perfect love, unmitigated joy, deep and eternal peace.
It’s quite a design, as city planning goes: there is no temple in this New Jerusalem—no church container of any kind—because it’s no longer necessary, the presence of God being so pervasive, holding everything and everyone together.
There is a river running through the city, suggesting that the blessings flood freely.
And there is a tree, whose leaves, we are told, are for the healing of the nations. And my how this world needs those leaves right now.
All of which is to say that what we sort of know as we look through a glass darkly is that heaven is a glorious container for all the saints.
Where life is free to flow unbounded, unencumbered.
Where blessings—no longer contained—rush like whitewater.
Where there are no more tears, no more pain, no more death. And because the former things have passed away, and because it is a city built by the Master Carpenter, there are also no more shims.
It’s a most perfect, everlasting container, for all the saints.
Praise God from whom all blessings flow.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.
First Presbyterian Church, Kalispell, Montana
November 3, 2018
— Run with the Horses: The Quest for Life at Its Best by Eugene H. Peterson (1932-2018). A pastor, scholar, author and poet. He wrote more than 30 books, including his widely acclaimed paraphrase of the Bible, The Message: The Bible in Contemporary Language.
merlin again: You agree too that this is a high impact document? Those 4 words; containers, cracked pots, cradles & caskets, are now etched positively forever in my mind for my good and His Glory. I’m just blessed to have been the facilitator! Thanks for joining us! Got something good you want to share with the audience? Contact me.