“If I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also.” (John 14:3)
For the past few weeks, a number of my comrades in the First City Troop have been called up to active duty service in their capacity as National Guardsmen. They are wearing camouflage, as they would, and also masks; but I doubt they are carrying weapons with them. The work they have been called upon to do is called, without military euphemism, a “mortuary affairs support mission.” They are assisting medical examiners in the five counties around Philadelphia with the transportation of dead bodies.
By the end of today there will be more than 80,000 people in this nation who have died from the coronavirus; closing in on 300,000 around the world.
The Gospel reading for today (from John 14) is often read at funerals. But we are not having funerals now, by and large. Such is the state of the world that we are having a hard time figuring out how to bury our dead with dignity and solemnity, or anything but dispatch.
Usually, when we have funerals at Saint Mark’s, I try to be attentive to the remains: the body or the ashes. If there is a body, we use the old rites to receive the body into the church when it arrives, even if no one is there but me and the Verger and the funeral director. And we always accompany the body every step of the way, outside to the hearse, where we pray, and sprinkle holy water, and cense the casket one last time, before the door is closed and the hearse pulls away.
If there are ashes, we cover the container with a silken pall, whether the box is made of mahogany or plastic. We carry them carefully, respectfully, deliberately, and reverently, no matter whose ashes they are, or where their final resting place might be.
I tend to think that the role of the clergy in these final rites is to be an usher for the dead, or at least for their bodies, as we guide them to their final resting places.
But in these strange times, we clergy are generally unable to perform that solemn role. And so the National Guard is doing it instead.
For reasons that I only partly comprehend, we are struggling to honestly acknowledge the national and global tragedy that is taking so many lives. Even with 30 million Americans unemployed in just the last six weeks, we are annoyed a the inconvenience of being able to get a haircut. (But I am already off course. One aspect of the tragedy at a time.)
It is, frankly, astonishing that we have become so good at keeping death at arm’s-length that even in the midst of a plague most of us are doing everything we can to keep death out of sight.
But at her best, the church knows better, especially when we are reminded by St. John that Jesus told his disciples “if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also.”
Like so many, I have a fondness for the King James Version of John 14: “in my Father’s house are many mansions.” I have usually fantasized that the many mansions of God’s heavenly house must be intended to accommodate the many tastes, interests, social networks, families, affinities, associations, and quirks of the dead... that it was a poetic way of saying that God’s house, like God’s love, is commodious, that everyone finds a comfortable home in the heavenly regions.
But now I wonder if that fantasy is a little too simplistic. Maybe, in at least one of the mansions of God’s house, or maybe at a gatehouse nearby, or in a heavenly undercroft there is a dedicated space outfitted for the use of a corps of angels assigned to a mortuary affairs support mission.
These angels are probably not under the command of St. Michael, whose troops are certainly armored, or of St. Gabriel, whose swift-wingéd charges are on communications duty. Maybe the mortuary support detail is under the leadership of Uriel or Raphael.
I doubt they wear camouflage - no need for it. I imagine that they carry out a sophisticated series of reversals involved in the resurrection of the dead: reverse cremation, reverse decomposition, reverse embalming, etc.
The angels in the mortuary affairs support detail must have specialist skills to remove the scarred tissues from the lungs of those who’ve died from Covid-19, to restore the function of congested hearts, to provide transfusions of whatever new blood will fill our veins in the mansions of God’s house, never to be spilled again.
Is it there in the mortuary affairs support department where Christ’s promise to do whatever we ask is finally fulfilled? Where therapies are applied to every lasting injury that we begged Jesus to heal; where memos are sent to address the cruelties we’ve visited upon one another, and establish new understandings; where the scars of the sins that we’ve been forgiven for in this life, but have never really let go of, finally begin to fade?
I know there are lives still to be saved in this pandemic, there is the economy to salvage, and we all need haircuts. But there are also the dead to consider - a ministry that is normally the church’s, and yet, like everything else, we are prevented from undertaking it as we should.
Thank God there are angels on mortuary affairs support missions. Some of them are wearing camouflage.
Notes for a sermon by Fr. Sean Mullen
10 May 2020
Saint Mark’s Church, Locust Street, Philadelphia
1st Lt. Scott Dobson, officer in charge of Task Force Saber with part of the fatality search and recovery team, pictured at the 23rd Street Armory of the First Troop Philadelphia City Cavalry.