Saint Luke 6:21-31
The quote has been attributed to several people some famous, some infamous, and some nobody has ever heard of. Some internet sources trace it all the way back to ancient Egypt. I first saw it on a friend’s Facebook page, and I have been sharing it around ever since.
"They say you die twice. Once when you stop breathing and the second, a bit later on, when somebody mentions your name for the last time." So, the wise friend concluded the way to keep somebody’s memory alive is to keep saying their name.
I think that’s why people carve the name of their loved ones on tombstones so that even strangers walking through a graveyard will look at the headstone and say their name. Some of those names we read will be famous, some infamous, and other’s known only to us. We might look at the marker and say something like “Boy! He was young.” Or “Gee! She lived to a ripe old age.” If the cemetery dates back to the nineteenth century, as our does, with a row of markers devoted to the children of the same family one can only wonder how hard that must have been on the family but, still they bought a marker to in the hopes that somebody wandering around some cemetery somewhere would stop for a second, notice all the names in the family, and perhaps say them out loud.
I’m not making this up, but in Maryhill Cemetery in Niles there is a substantial monument that is inscribed only with the word “Mom” in big, bold, script letters. At first the funeral director friend and I speculated that it might have been a floor model like the refrigerators that are available at Abt Electronic for a significantly reduced price.
I thought it some more and pictured the woman’s eight children sitting together at the monument office and being asked by the salesperson what their mother’s name was. I pictured them all looking at each other with blank stares until one of them finally spoke up and said, “You know, all any of us called her was mom.” And so “Mom” it was and “Mom” was probably tribute enough.
Every culture has different ways of remembering their loved ones.
There’s All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day. Halloween and Día de los Muertos. There’s the Gaelic festival of Samhain, in which the dead are guided home by lights left in the windows.
In Barbara Kingsolver's novel, Animal Dreams, there is a wonderful scene describing how the citizens of a town called Grace observed the Day of the Dead: lavishly decorating the cemetery, nothing solemn, but much laughter, running, and many flowers.
Some graves had shrines with niches peopled by saints; others had the initials of loved ones spelled out on the mound in white stones. The unifying principle was that the simplest thing was done with the greatest care. It was a comfort to see this attention lavished on the dead. In these families you would never stop being loved.1
That is what we are doing today. We are naming names, lighting candles, placing pictures, and tolling bells so that our blessed dead will never stop being loved. We’ll keep their memories alive by “saying their names.” Their names will never be spoken of for the last time.
We are also clinging to Jesus’ promise: “Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh.”2 That’s what St. Luke remembered Jesus saying once. Only, for this day, we might prefer Matthew’s account: “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.3 We can hold on to both those promises.
For Jesus’ first listeners they were even more profound then they are for us.
We do not have to work very hard to imagine the lives of 1st century Palestinian Jews as very susceptible to poverty, hunger, and loss. Nor do we have to work very hard to imagine the lives of many of our 21st century sisters and brothers.”
In a strange twist of fate many of Jesus’ listeners then, many of his listeners now, lived in fear of a government that was supposed to protect them. Many of Jesus’ listeners then, many now, eked out a modest day to day existence living, as we might say, from paycheck to paycheck, while others lived in the lap of luxury. Not so much different than our day when eight families have more money than 3.5 million people combined.
While most of us delight in the “blessed” part of Jesus’ first sermon sometimes we need to be taken aback by the “Woes.”
As my good friend Sarah Hendricks, emeritus professor at Luther Seminary wrote:
There is, then, a kind of divide between the blessed and the woeful. It is, however, precisely NOT the divide that our world would create between winners and losers, successful and unsuccessful, elites and non-elites. The blessed are those who have caught at least a glimpse of God’s future and trust that it is for them. The blessed may be poor or needy, even weeping in life by the standards we humans have in our very bones, but they are blessed in both trust in God and in God’s future, in their hope of justice. The woeful are those who have forgotten that the “fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” The woeful are those who say “yes” to the title question of an old song, “Is that all there is?”4
In the end those who live their lives at the expense of and with a distain for others may just discover that the words of another not so old song may prove to be true — “No one mourns the wicked. No one cries...” or “lays a lily on their grave. Goodness knows ... The wicked's lives are lonely ... the wicked die alone. It just shows when you're wicked ...You're left only on your own.”
And it is not long before people stop mentioning them for the last time. It is not long before people stop saying their names.
So we’re going to say the names of members of that great untold number of saints who were known to us — our relatives, our friends, our beloveds who came into our lives and, in ways large and small, made them richer, fuller than the world would have been without them.
They were saints to us and so were going to keep saying their names. We’ll say them now. We’ll say them forever. We’ll say them until people are remembering to say our names to keep our memories alive.
The names of your loved ones. Keep saying them and I promise you in the words of an old Irish proverb: “The day will come when their memory, their name, brings a smile to your lips before it brings a tear to your eye.”
Shed a tear, smile, but say their names as a testimony that they will never stop being loved.
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1. Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams (New York, New York: HarperCollins, 2018).
2. St. Luke 6:21. (NRSVue) [NRSV=The New Revised Standard Edition Updated Edition]
3. St. Matthew 5:4. (NRSV)
4. Sarah Henrich, “Commentary on Luke 6:20-31,” Working Preacher, November 11, 2020, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/all-saints-day-2/commentary-on-luke-620-31-2.
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