Isaiah 25:6-9

On this mountain the LORD of hosts will make for all peoples
a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines,
 of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear.

And he will destroy on this mountain
the shroud that is cast over all peoples,
the sheet that is spread over all nations;
he will swallow up death forever.

Then the Lord GOD will wipe away the tears from all faces,
and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth,
for the LORD has spoken.

It will be said on that day,
Lo, this is our God; we have waited for him, so that he might save us.
This is the LORD for whom we have waited;
let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation.

John 11:21-27

Martha said to Jesus, "Lord, if you had been here, my brother, Lazarus, would not have died. But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him." Jesus said to her, "Your brother will rise again." Martha said to him, "I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day." Jesus said to her, "I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?" She said to him, "Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world."

In his book The Language of Life, Bill Moyers interviews poet Naomi Nye about her understanding of poetry. “Poetry” she says, “is a conversation with the world, a conversation with words on the page in which you allow those words to speak back to you, and a conversation with yourself, (a kind of talk) that is a very slow, deliberate, delighted kind of talk…‘Life is so short we must move very slowly.’ …Poems help us to do that by allowing us to savor a single image, a single phrase.”

Nye, of course, is not the first poet to say something like this. Theodore Roethke, a poet who lived here in our beloved Northwest, said it this way: “Art is the means we have of undoing the damage of haste.”

Today we’re remembering, celebrating and mourning Father Ralph Carskadden, a man whose theological, liturgical, artistic and personal life were all about the approach expressed by these two poets. Life is so short we must move very slowly; our time together so brief that we must savor it. And, I believe, Ralph would add, God is so present that we are called to undo the damage of the haste we are so easily caught up in.

Of this haste, we know much.

We know the haste of overstuffed schedules, of back-to-back meetings, of hurried and harried meals. We know the haste of liturgies that must be out by a certain time and of Sunday mornings so crowded we don’t have time for God or for each other. And in and through all these things, we know the habitual haste of our minds and our hearts, as we race through our experiences, giving them the least amount of mental and emotional energy we can so that we can be ready to move on to the next thing.

But there are other kinds of haste as well—haste like the kind we see in our Gospel for today—the panicked, feverish haste that can come with grief and loss. This is the kind of haste that in our Gospel spurs Martha to go out to meet Jesus as he nears Bethany where his friend Lazarus, her brother Lazarus, lies dead. This is the kind of haste that prompts her to greet Jesus with: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother, Lazarus, would not have died,” words which chide him for taking so long in coming.

Yes, we understand this kind of urgency, this kind of haste.

I do not remember the first time I met Ralph, but I do remember what I heard about him from others before I met him. It was as if people were speaking of a saint (and, of course, they were!).What I mean by this is that the words people used when they spoke of him were different and a little intimidating, for they used words like “artist,” “liturgist,” “pastor,” and “activist.” They used words like “talented,” “creative,” “gracious,” and “meticulous.”

But it was not just the words that were different. It was the tone people used when they spoke of him. The only word I know for this tone is “reverential.”

As I got to know Ralph, I began to understand why. Yes, he was talented, creative, gracious, and meticulous; yes, he was artist, liturgist, pastor and activist. But all of these things, it seemed to me, were directed toward one unifying end—slowing us down and tuning us in to the reality of the incarnation, helping us see and receive the gracious, dignifying presence of a God who in Christ Jesus has taken on our flesh and who is, therefore, encountered through the very body we can lose track of in our haste:

• Through the beauty and mystery of an embodied liturgy, one that looks and sounds and smells good, one that has silence in it

• Through the joy of shared meals and conversations

• Through art of every kind that witness to the truth of human experience

• Through touching the earth and its creatures

• And finally, through real engagement with those who are most unlike ourselves.

But these categories of embodied Christian practice are not enough when it comes to Ralph and what his life was all about. It’s the particulars that matter. And so let cite some particulars that I hope will illustrate what I’m talking about.

• Who but Ralph would at the age of six stop and fix on a particular breed of dog—a Scottie—draw a near-perfect illustration of one, and then over a 25 year period live in companionship with and relish three of this same breed--Johnny Walker Black, his beloved Jacob and then Miss Dundee?

• Who but Ralph would go to a small multi-racial, multi-cultural congregation here in Seattle and would savor and cherish its buildings and its people by personally creating and installing artwork there as well as faithfully and creatively adapting Prayer Book liturgies and music to meet the needs of the congregation, including full adult-immersion baptisms by horse trough and an Easter Vigil in which ten congregational members each told his or her own personal version of the ten Old Testament readings?

• Who but Ralph would out of his experience at St. Clement’s become one of the founding members of the Dismantling Racism Team here in the Diocese, a team that tirelessly trained us all to slow down and see, to listen to, and to appreciate those unlike ourselves?

• Who but Ralph would, when asked to serve as Priest-in-Charge at St. Mark’s Cathedral between Robert Taylor’s leave-taking and Rebecca McClain’s arrival, who but Ralph would initiate a Cathedral-wide weaving project that patiently and painstakingly brought together the diverse strands of the St. Mark’s community and lovingly wove them into new beautiful liturgical textiles that graced both altar and altar servers?

• Who but Ralph would quietly and beautifully paint a bee on the new St. Paul’s Paschal Candle in 2009 both in order to compliment me (the Greek word for “honeybee” is “Melissa”) and to persuade me to add back the portion of the Exsultet about the bees whose work creates the wax that in turn creates the candle, the same portion of the Exsultet that I as rector had omitted the year before?

• Who but Ralph would host, with his partner Steven, Easter and Christmas feasts that for guests was like stumbling into a place where time no longer obtained, into the heavenly banquet described in our passage from Isaiah, with rich, meticulously prepared food, tables adorned with flowers and candles, individual gifts for each invited guest, and both prayer and song in the presence of radiant Russian icons?

• Who but Ralph would and could create a garden that rivaled Eden before the Fall—one replete with tulips, daisies, lilies, delphinium, phlox, tulips, daffodils, rhododendron, azaleas, roses, sun flowers dogwood, bamboo, and clematis. And there in the middle of all of this: places for human beings to stop and sit and talk and eat.

• And, finally, who but Ralph, over one month after his death, could still make us want to go out and find Jesus, to call out to him and chide him, saying: “Lord, if you had been here, our brother, Ralph, would not have died.”?

Life is so short we must move very slowly; our time together so brief that we must savor it. God is so present that we are called to undo the damage of the haste we are so easily caught up in.

It seems to me that Jesus was saying something like this to Martha as she yearned with great urgency for some word, some action from Jesus that would reassure her that her brother would not be lost to her forever. While she tries to hold onto what she has been taught, that her brother Lazarus will rise again at the resurrection on the last day, Jesus tells her (and us) something bold and unbelievable , “I am the Resurrection and the Life” he says to her as she hopes for resurrected life in some other place and at some other time. “I am the Resurrection and the Life” he says to her: “Stop and look at me and at your life here and now. The gracious, renewing and dignifying presence of God is right in front of you.”

You must have noticed this morning that along with Ralph’s ashes, three icons were carried in procession and placed here in our space. In talking about the three and where they would be placed, on more than one occasion, someone referred to one of them, the icon of the resurrection, as “the icon of the day.” About a week ago I was talking to Janet Campbell about this liturgy and asked her what she might hope to hear in the homily. She quite rightly said: “Something that witnesses to the resurrection.”

But try as I might, this was not the primary image that came to me as I thought both about this liturgy and about our brother Ralph on this day that we remember him, we miss him and we affirm our unbroken communion with him in God.

No, it was not the image of the resurrection, though I don’t know how I could live without it on this day—that image of Christ rising from the dead and as he does so, grasping the hands of Adam and Eve, pulling them and us forth from our tombs.

It was also not the icon of the Transfiguration that I thought of, the icon depicting Ralph’s favorite Feast Day, in which Peter, James and John look upon the transfigured Christ and fall upon the ground in fear.

It was not the icon of the Transfiguration either that I thought of as the icon of the day today.

It was instead the icon of our Lady of Vladimir. For me, she was and is the icon of the day. For in this icon it is as if time has stopped as we watch Mary tenderly holding her child Jesus up to her face as he places his arm around his mother’s neck. It is as if time has stopped as we look into the eyes of the now defenseless God who has dared to take on our flesh with all its pleasures, its delights and its frailties. It is as if time has stopped as we look into the eyes of the woman who, in assenting to the angel, is the means of God’s own becoming flesh among the lowly and our own bodily joy and delight in everyday life—if we will only take the time to see it.

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