"Being Human" | Liz Harlan-Ferlo | November 3, 2024

Seventeen years ago, I bought a house on a quiet street near a MAX line and a New Seasons. It was a neighborhood just north of the one I'd hoped for, and a compromise (excuse me) between me and my realtor. I wanted something quaint and with character, and she wanted me in something post-1950 because she sensed, correctly, I knew nothing about home repair.

The house buying process, for many of you who have been in that process, has many factors that you can try to control, but there are still a lot of unknowns.

You may hold out for a particular ZIP code or an architectural style or a number of bedrooms, but you can never predict who your neighbors will be.

Across the street from me lives a man and his adult son who is in recovery. We mostly just wave at each other as he backs one of his three enormous white trucks in and out of his driveway, sometimes with his boat angled at 45° as he pulls in.

He got along so poorly with the woman who lived next door to him that they had to seek professional mediation. A large fence was built.

My direct neighbors to the north have been a series of young couples, one of whom had a white bulldog that could ride a skateboard in the backyard.

My direct neighbors to the south, though, have lived in their house longer than I have in mine. He is a retired electrician, his jokes are off-color, and his stories are sometimes a bit too long.

And also, he knocks on my back door when he has extra strawberries from a flat that he's bought or jars of tuna he smokes and cans himself.

When I ask him to borrow a tool or recommend a repairman, he says quietly, "Let me see what you got there," and end up fixing the problem himself.

He insisted on giving me the gas grill that the previous owners left behind, and I have never had to refill that tank.

He stores his lawnmower in my garage and has fixed or replaced any part that breaks down, and when I had a fire pit, there was a never-ending stack of wood.

Now he leaves garage sale finds on the porch for my kids.

His wife is the youngest of a sprawling Irish Catholic family. For the last five years, her mother Mary lived with them, and she did around-the-clock care.

When Mary died this summer at 96, my husband and I were invited to attend the rosary, the wake, and the funeral. The wake would be held in the house. Now my neighbor's house was built before mine. It has a sloping red roof, and it also has a very small vestibule that creates a sharp corner into the living room, and there's another turn like this into the kitchen from the back door – and those are the only ways to enter the house.

When the undertaker brought the coffin over after the rosary for the wake, there was no way to get it around either of those corners.

After a bit of standing around next to the hearse parked in their driveway right next to the family van in our driveway, they climbed onto the porch, pulled up the sash, and with someone in the living room, they slid the coffin right through the front window.

Later that night at the wake, it was me who could barely get in the door, the place was so jammed. People were packed in every small room and in the backyard. Costco meats and cheese, cupcakes, bread, and in the backyard, a bar selection to put any tavern in Portland to shame.

In the living room where we sat eating and chatting, Mary lay in her coffin in the same spot where she had so recently sat in a recliner. Her hands were folded neatly around a rosary, and the left shoulder of her cardigan was graced with a Mickey Mouse ears pin and an enameled shamrock.

Before each person left the wake, they came to her coffin and spent a moment with her, maybe whispering a word or two, and the party continued all around her.

Now both my father and my husband were raised Italian Catholic, and thank goodness, because they showed me at their families' funerals how to behave around a coffin, how to act when it your turn to say farewells, or when it's carried down the aisle in the church and remains there for the duration of the service and is carried out again.

Now we Protestants, on the other hand, do things differently.

Now this has been quite a year for Trinity memorials. We have buried some of the most beloved leaders in our parish's history.

This year, the clergy performed 34 funerals, but in this church this year, there has no not been a single coffin. A tasteful urn, perhaps, but no coffin.

There is no body to be seen; we prefer the tomb closed.

The morning after Mary's wake, I went to her funeral. It was held at the Catholic Church where she had been married 50 years ago. The church had been renovated since then and someone had decided to install an enormous baptismal font suitable for full immersion. It took up almost the whole width of the aisle behind the last pew where I sat.

When the service began, the undertaker and the pall bearers gathered around the coffin at the back of the church. The priest prayed over it, he draped the funeral pall over the lid, but then four pall bearers on each side all had to squeeze around the enormous hexagonal font, trying to slide between that pool of a font and the coffin itself. I confess I giggled a little bit– only in my head– at the sight of everyone trying to keep so solemn as they battled the dueling architecture. As the funeral director, professionally unflappable, couldn't quite hide his tension that they might not squeeze through.

There is so much absurdity in being human, even in death.

And it's just so in today's Story of Lazarus.

Here comes Lazarus out of his tomb. Like all the cartoon mummies we've been seeing this past week, he stumbles out blinking, still in his wrappings. It's bizarre and it's terrifying and it's amazing. It's Resurrection. It's not just Lazarus's spirit that Jesus cares for this story about Lazarus. It's about his body.

The gospel says, "Jesus again, greatly disturbed, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone was lying against it. And Jesus said, "Take away the stone."

Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, "Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead four days."

Or as what is arguably my favorite line in the entire Bible, the King James version says: "Lord, by this time he stinketh."

I can't imagine that smell, and I have lived a lucky life that I have almost never encountered it. But there is a smell I know well that might be similar. It unnerves me. And it is a very human smell.

It's the smell of the assembled folks here for the Wednesday lunch, many of whom don't have access to the kind of regular hygiene that I do.

The smell expands across Kempton Hall.

It mingles with the cooking and the steam and the shriek of the dishwasher, and it wafts up the stairs all the way to my office.

It is inescapable.

That we might prefer the sweet incense that we will light tonight at the Evensong altar, that Wednesday smell, that too is the perfume of Christ.

Today, when we welcome new members into this faith, we do it embodied.

We pour water on skin. We anoint with oil. We baptize as an affirmation of our incarnate selves, made in the image of the Divine One, and knowing that without God, we are only mortal.

Of the water in the font, we say, "In it, we are buried with Christ in his death. By it we share in his resurrection."

Now we may think that the smells of the tomb or the coffin and the smells of unwashed bodies are a world apart from the sweet babies that we will christen today, but parents of babies are deeply acquainted with human smells, both the sweet and the not-so-sweet.

They have an up-close and personal relationship with the body of another person in the way that most of us only do with our own.

They are attentive to every millimeter of that baby's body, perhaps in the same way that God is to each of us.

So James, Thaddeus, and Finn, today we baptize you with water and the Holy Spirit. We baptize you into this great family of saints, filled with poetic scripture, with transcendent music and art, with terrible violence, and with deep devotion.

Come live with us in the Christian mystery, where our bodies are for a brief time wedged between the and the pool of living water.

And don't forget to love your neighbors.

Amen