For Wilshire Baptist Church
Making decisions about grave markers during Holy Week is one of those interesting coincidences that life dials up every now and then. The week is already thick with darkness and pathos as we walk symbolically toward the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, but ladle on top of that the mortality of your own flesh and blood, and it all becomes very . . . real.
The meeting at Restland wasn’t unexpected. It wasn’t’ rushed like that day 52 years ago this week when my parents had to make the same decision for my sister. This meeting was planned by my mother and me and was overdue after the death of my father in July. Thanks to decisions my parents made when my sister died, they already had their resting places next to hers. All that was left was deciding how to mark the location: separate markers, a single marker with both their names? And then what type of adornments to put on the marker. In case you don’t know, the choices are endless — from phrases about marriage and family ties to etchings of crosses, wedding rings, military insignia, masonic emblems and even gun-toting hunters with their favorite hounds.
Interestingly, as we were sitting in the small conference room at Restland discussing these things, my phone was buzzing in my pocket with a three-way text conversation between LeAnn and her longtime friend Steve, who returned from a trip to the Holy Land not long ago. LeAnn’s mother is teaching her adult Sunday school class on Easter Sunday and she’s wondering what the burial tomb of Jesus looks like. So, LeAnn asked Steve if he has pictures to share from his trip, and he does, but there’s a caveat. As Steve explained, “We actually were shown two different spots where the tomb might have been. There are compelling cases to be made for both.”
Imagine that: The precise location of the most famous burial site of all time is not pinpointed and authenticated. We’ve been talking about that site since the very first Easter morning – and we’ve been walking toward that site symbolically all through Lent like we do every year – and yet we don’t know for sure where we are going.
Except we do, don’t we? And do we really need to know the exact location of a grave that was empty just three days after it was occupied? And if Christ’s grave is empty, won’t ours be empty too as he promised? So why do we sit in windowless rooms with funeral directors and make decisions and sign contracts for markers that will identify our empty graves?
We do it because for now we are only human; we are clinging to the only life we know. I’ve learned just recently that some years ago my father changed my sister’s marker to include the full date of her birth and death and not just the years. I never got a chance to ask him about it, but my guess is he wanted to remember the exact dates when he experienced the most wonderful joy of her birth and the most unimaginable grief of her loss. But I also know that his unbreakable faith told him that second date placed her safely where he is now.
We didn’t finalize the design of the marker for my parents at Restland this week. Mom has the last word on that, and I know it will be simple and tasteful. The main thing was to get the grave marked because Dad’s body is already there and Mom’s will be some day too. But as she told the man when we stood up to leave, “It won’t be anytime soon. I have at least four years of projects I want to finish first.”
Easter is about rolling the stones of doubt away. It starts with that stone that sealed the tomb in Jerusalem and continues with all the stones we erect in memory of the people we love. We can carve names and numbers and other symbols reminding us of who they were and all of that, but we need to remember that the graves we mark are empty.